New Zealand Winegrowers fund their research activities via the collection of levies on grape and wine production from the whole of the New Zealand wine industry. New Zealand Winegrowers was established in March 2002 by the New Zealand Grape Growers Council Inc. and the Wine Institute of New Zealand Inc. by Memorandum of Understanding to further the development of the New Zealand grape and wine industry. New Zealand Winegrowers represent all the country’s grape growers and wine companies. The New Zealand industry exports wine with a value of over $1 billion annually and around $500 million in the domestic market.

The primary function of the research team is developing and running the large science based research programme on behalf of the Wine Industry that encompasses a number of specific projects that are contracted to outside research providers. These can be stand alone projects or projects that co-fund into larger government funded research programmes (e.g. The Sauvignon Blanc Programme).

A major component of what we do, and a very important function of New Zealand Winegrowers, is to disseminate the information, knowledge and results of the research programme to the New Zealand wine industry. To this end there are a number of ways that this is accomplished:

1. Popular articles. The research programme has dedicated pages at the end of the New Zealand Winegrower Magazine in a section called the “Research Supplement”. The prime purpose of these articles is to introduce new projects that NZW has funded outlining their progress, some key outcomes of the proposed research and to give, for non-technical readers, an easily understandable summary of the key results of a project.

2. New Zealand Winegrowers Grape Days. These are held annually in June in both the North and South Islands and serve as a seminar series outlining the latest results from the research programme covering both grape and wine research. The seminars are aimed at a level where topics are introduced in a general technical level and then there are presentations that have a higher degree of technical stretch and drill down into the details of the research.

3. Romeo Bragato Annual Conference. This is the Wine Industries main conference and is held annually in late August for three days. As part of the overall programme, key aspects of the research programme are presented and discussed in seminar and workshop formats.

4. Fact Sheets. New Zealand Winegrowers produces Fact Sheets on specific topics where appropriate. Fact Sheets serve as a succinct distillation of a large amount of information that can be easily read by the industry. These may take the form of instructions on how to complete a specific task or maybe a summary of results from an area of research. Most fact sheets are printed and disseminated to members of New Zealand Winegrowers and they are also available to download from the NZW website.

5. Field Days and Seminars. New Zealand Winegrowers runs seminars and field days directly or in-directly through member regional associations throughout the year. These are normally advertised widely through the NZW newsletter and local regional associations.

6. Research Reports. These serve as the base document for the information that projects developed. They are usually quite large and detailed, comprehensive and detailed and therefore not easily read by non-technical people. There is usually one yearly report per year of the project and a final report at the end of the project if it is multi-year funded.

7. Scientific Publications. These are produced by the scientists within the research programme and although the research contained in the paper may be funded from the NZW levies, the writing of the papers are not generally part of the contracted services. Where possible we will include papers or links to the papers on the web site, however due to copyright laws we are often unable to make these available.