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WSU
Opens Research Winery in
Prosser
October 2, 2008
Washington State University now features the
largest experimental, non-commercial winemaking
facility in the Pacific Northwest.
The research winery, which is located at the
WSU Irrigated Agriculture Research and Extension
Center in Prosser, has a production capacity of
about 5,000 gallons. The new facility was
designed
by
enologists James Harbertson and Kerry Ringer,
scientists in the WSU Department of Food
Science. The facility will be used to conduct
research in support of the region’s rapidly
growing wine industry.
“We designed the winery for small-lot,
research-scale production,” said Harbertson. The
winery will produce multiple small lots of wines
under controlled and reproducible conditions,
said Harbertson and Ringer.
“We spent about six months designing the
facility,” said Ringer. “We wanted to make sure
that we had the capability to conduct the
research the industry needs, so that meant
ordering a lot of custom-made equipment.”
The experimental winery includes 73 stainless
steel fermentation tanks that are temperature
controllable. The tanks range from 26- to
260-gallon capacity. Temperature in the tanks is
monitored and controlled by a Web-based system
called TankNET.
With the new winemaking facility, Harbertson
said, “there are lots of questions we can now
address. But our main issues are pretty much all
practical. How does one piece of equipment
affect the winemaking process compared with
another? And how do viticultural practices
affect grape quality and, in turn, wine
quality?”
The scientists wasted no time in getting
winemaking research projects under way. WSU
viticulturist Markus Keller and his team
harvested chardonnay grapes from a research
vineyard early in the morning of Oct. 1. Within
a few hours, the first batch of grapes were
pressed and left to settle over night. The next
morning, yeast was added and a new series of
winemaking experiments was under way.

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WSU to Partner with
Walter Clore Wine and Culinary Center
Washington State University will join forces
with those leading the creation of the Walter
Clore Wine and Culinary Center at Prosser to
highlight the breadth, depth and quality of all
aspects of Washington agriculture.
Dan Bernardo, dean of the WSU College of
Agricultural, Human, and Natural Resource
Sciences, announced formalization of the
partnership here today at the annual meeting of
the Washington Association of Wine Grape
Growers.
“Washington desperately needs an icon that
can represent the diversity and quality of its
agricultural enterprise,” Bernardo said. “The
science behind the food is a critical,
compelling story to tell. With the completion of
the Clore Center, we will have a world-class
stage, in eastern Washington, on which to
present our heritage as well as the evolving
research that will improve our future.”
Bernardo said WSU is “very excited to join
with the Clore Center’s Board of Directors and
the entire state’s food, wine, agriculture and
tourism industries in making this visionary
project a reality. The center is a natural
extension of the foundational work Dr. Walter
Clore did to help found the Washington wine
industry, and it provides many opportunities to
highlight the science and education behind the
entire agriculture and food system within the
state.”
The late Walter Clore, who was a WSU faculty
member for nearly 40 years, was named the
“Father of the Washington Wine Industry” by an
act of the Washington State Legislature in 2001,
in recognition of his efforts proving that
premium wine grapes could be grown in Washington
state. Members of the viticulture and enology
community from across the state began plans in
2002 to develop a center named for him to
highlight the burgeoning Washington wine
industry.
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Wine-Country News Bytes
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Do
More Expensive
Wines Taste Better?
Evidence from a Large Sample of Blind Tastings
Robin Goldstein, Johan Almenberg, Anna Dreber,
John W. Emerson,
Alexis Herschkowitsch and Jacob Katz
Journal of Wine Economics, Vol. 3, No. 1,
Pages 1-9
Individuals who are unaware of the price do not
derive more enjoyment from more expensive wine.
In a sample of more than 6,000 blind tastings,
we find that the correlation between price and
overall rating is small and negative, suggesting
that individuals on average enjoy more expensive
wines slightly less. For individuals with
wine training, however, we find indications of a
non-negative relationship between price and
enjoyment. Our results are robust to the
inclusion of individual fixed effects, and are
not driven by outliers: when omitting the top
and bottom deciles of the price distribution,
our qualitative results are strengthened, and
the statistical significance is improved
further. These findings suggest that non-expert
wine consumers should not anticipate greater
enjoyment of the intrinsic qualities of a wine
simply because it is expensive or is appreciated
by experts.
The 5th issue of
the "Journal of Wine Economics" (www.wine-economics.org)
will be released in a few days.
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