Over the past 18 months, Wine Australia’s approach to the way we invest your levies has changed to better address the evolving challenges faced by the sector.
Wine Australia has always strived to get the maximum value from the research levies that you pay each vintage to address the most critical issues through targeted investments into key research programs with research organisations around Australia.
However, feedback we received from grapegrowers and winemakers indicated that we needed to adjust the principles guiding these investments and emphasised a need for a more collaborative approach as the challenges facing our sector continue to evolve at a rapid pace.
We are seeking to diversify our sources of co-investment, and enable greater collaboration, while overhauling the way that we develop, fund and deliver research – increasing the focus from researcher-led to sector-led.
We want to ensure that our investments directly address the most critical issues and, by involving our sector in the decision-making process, we can better understand needs and deliver research outcomes that have a real and lasting impact.
Collaboration for long-term sustainability
One program that has undergone this shift using multi-stage co-design has been the CSIRO grapevine breeding and germplasm program.
The Australian grape and wine sector is privileged to have a unique asset in the skills of the CSIRO grapevine breeding team. Since 1992, Wine Australia and CSIRO have worked together to develop innovative Australian grapevine solutions that reduce the cost and impact of major diseases, are suitable to our changing climate, responsive to changing consumer preferences and that increase sustainability. However, historically the uptake of these new cultivars has been low.
Wine Australia and CSIRO embarked on a joint project to use open innovation and co-design processes with the Australian grape and wine sector to better understand its grapevine breeding and germplasm needs and pain points, and identify solutions to address key challenges.
The purpose of this process was to ensure that investments can not only develop varieties and rootstocks to meet priority needs of the sector, but also establish effective pathways to support the adoption of this new planting material.
Wine Australia and CSIRO engaged consultants The Growth Drivers, and embarked on a series of interviews and workshops, over six months, with 30 sector experts, including independent grape growers, wineries , representatives, vine nurseries, sector bodies and international counterparts.
Future vision shaped with the sector
The benefit of speaking to many experts with varied perspectives is that it provided an opportunity to deeply understand the sector’s needs. And as a result, we were able to establish a future vision for grapevine breeding in Australia.
This vision incorporates stronger ongoing feedback loops as well as benefits along the value chain – from the ground to glass. It has also established goals for the three components of the breeding program – gene-edited clones, new varieties and rootstocks – out to 2032. This vision is summarised as a ‘plan on a page’, which can be downloaded here.