Dr Juliet Ansell: NZ Winegrowers Research Centre CEO on the new research programme designed to boost NZ wine output

The wine industry is hoping a new programme will help double production. 

The Government is investing $5.6 million over seven years into the programme, Next Generation Viticulture.

It aims to grow vines more efficiently, turning sunlight into grapes.

NZ Winegrowers Research Centre CEO Dr Juliet Ansell says it will redesign canopy management.

"It enables the vines to capture as much sunlight as they can - and encourage that sunlight to be transformed into fruit, rather than leaves or vegetative growth."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The government is partnering with New Zealand wine growers to
essentially redesign our vineyards. The goal is to get more
sunlight on the violence because more sunlight means more grapes
and that would mean higher yields, and the changes could
boost vineyard productivity by twenty two thousand dollars a hectare.
CEO of the Wine Growers Research Center, doctor Juliet Ensel,
is with us this evening. Hi, Juliet, how is this

(00:21):
going to work?

Speaker 2 (00:23):
Oh, hijack? So yeah, basically, the vineyard profitability has been
in a bit of a decline and it's many due
to increasing costs of production. And I think everything that
can be done has been done so far, it's been
at let incremental changes. But this new research program is
really a step change in productivity and it's potentially about
doubling production but not compromising on quality. And it's actually

(00:48):
coming at a really good time as well. We've got
lots of replanting. About twenty thousand hectares will be due
to be replanted in the next ten to twenty years.
So yeah, it's really exciting.

Speaker 1 (00:58):
And so in practical too, what kind of difference does
it mean on a vineyard. What changes, Yeah, no, good question.

Speaker 2 (01:06):
It's really a redesign of the canopy management. So it's
setting up the grapevine system, the training system, and the
plantings and really, as you mentioned in the intro, enabling
the vines to capture as much sunlight as they can
and encourage that sunlight to be transformed into fruits rather
than leaves or vegetative growth. So it's a new training system.

(01:27):
They'll be larger, they'll be wider and higher, they'll carry
more nodes, more shoots, and you'll grow a much larger
but less dense canopy. So getting light to the right place.

Speaker 1 (01:37):
What does it do to the taste of the wine.

Speaker 2 (01:41):
So this is absolutely one of the criteria that it
must not compromise on taste or quality of the wine.
So it's very early early days. We're just about to
start this research in Arnest, but you know, we've done
a bit of pilots work over the last year and
we're really confident that it's not going to compromise on quality.

Speaker 1 (02:01):
Fantastic. Oh sounds really interesting, Thanks, Juliet. There is doctor
Julian Ansel who is the CEO of the Brigato Institute
New Zealand Wine Growers Research Center. For more from Hither
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