Season 3, Episode 3 | Interesting and Unexpected Wine Outcomes from Nutrient Trials (in English)

00:00.00 Patty Skinkis

This is the High Res Vineyard Nutrition Podcast Series, devoted to helping the grape and wine industry understand more about how to monitor and manage vineyard health through grapevine nutrition research. I am your host, Dr. Patty Skinkis, Professor and Viticulture Extension Specialist at Oregon State University.

00:21.00 Patty Skinkis

Plant nutrition is important for grapevine health and vineyard longevity. In our industry survey that we conducted back in 2021, we found that most participants nationwide recognized the importance of vineyard nutrient management for fruit and/or wine quality. However, we know that quality is not easily described, and we have a hard time quantifying the direct role that nutrition has on fruit and wine quality. It takes research to understand that linkage. We wanted to quantify measurable parameters that fall in the category of quality through the HiRes Vineyard Nutrition Project, and we rely on two enologists on the team.

In season one, we heard from Dr. Amanda Stewart from Virginia Tech and her graduate student Megan Mershon in season two, both who talked about Yeast Assimilable Nitrogen (YAN) on studies they are doing—mostly in the eastern United States. But on the West Coast, we solicited the expertise of Dr. Jim Harbertson, our project Co-PI [co-principal investigator], to talk about some of the vineyard nutrient trials he's been involved with. However, his focus is on more than just YAN. Jim Harbertson is an associate professor at Washington State University's Wine Science Center located in Richland, Washington (eastern Washington). He is well known for his expertise in phenolic chemistry of wines, and he has conducted many years of research on phenolic chemistry as it pertains to grape growing and ripening phases through to winemaking and wine aging processes. He's most interested in research on tannins and interactions with polymeric pigments and astringency, and we have him here today to talk about what he's focusing on specifically from the nutrient trials.

0:02.07 Jim Harbertson

I would say the main research areas we've been trying to do are already described. Primarily we are the side of the team that makes the wines for the various nutrition trials whether that be in Oregon or Washington. There are various nutrients that they are altering in the vineyard. We make the wine, we do the chemistry, and then we do the sensory. We try to connect the chemistry that we do to the sensory, and that way we can draw a nice straight line between those various attributes. Sometimes you can't really connect the things, but a lot of times you can. I would say the main area that has been the most interesting aspect of this is that some of the things we thought were going to be important didn't turn out to be important. Other things that we didn't expect to be as important have turned out to be important. That has been very interesting and revealing to me as this project has taken on a new life.

0:03.12 Patty Skinkis

So, to step back a little bit, let's clarify for the listener what projects you're involved with. We've heard from Marcus Keller on this podcast a couple of times and people from his lab like Pierre [Davadant] and Natalyia [Shcherbatyuk] and some of the work they've done. Can you talk about some of the baseline of their projects as an introduction to the work that followed through from some of those?

00:03.38 Jim Harbertson

My connection to it is that they’re a vineyard trial in terms of nitrogen additions that Marcus Keller was doing with Pierre and Natalyia over in eastern Washington. Then down in Oregon there was a trial where they were adding nitrogen to Chardonnay. The trial in Washington with the Chardonnay was with potassium additions as opposed to nitrogen additions. The nitrogen additions trial in Washington with Pierre and Marcus was with Syrah, so we had a red grape in one scenario which has its own set of eccentricities, and then we had the same thing but with a white grape but with different additions of nutrients in the vineyards for those trials. Our job essentially is to make the wine from those trials for them. We get the fruit in, we take as many measurements as we can, and my goodness we do a lot of samples for them! They require large volumes of samples from us when we crush the fruit for them and then make the wine. It's a good team effort in that regard. They get those samples, and they send them off for [analysis of] other things. And then we do a whole battery of tests during the winemaking process to make sure that everything goes right.

00:04.53 Patty Skinkis

So what size were the fermentations?

00:04.56 Jim Harbertson

Well, we are doing research scale, so this is small scale. The red wine is about two hundred liters tops per lot of wine, and the white wine is maybe one 150 liters per lot as well. So not large production of these trials. There's well more than enough wine for doing the sensory analysis; we can get 2 to 3 cases of wine, and that means that's way more than enough wine than we need to for these trials. They are also done on a large enough scale where the results are more meaningful. By seeing results from little scales where they make wine in little coffee pots and those ones you get kind of weird, especially when you're trying to understand extraction of phenolics from skins and seeds in red wine making. You can't really compare a coffee pot kind of thing versus a more large-scale fermentation which is about the size of a barrel. So, ours are about the size of a barrel and they have reasonable results in trying to understand what's happening in terms of extraction of things during winemaking.

0:06.02 Patty Skinkis

You mentioned earlier that you had some expectations of what you thought you might see with respect to either nitrogen or potassium in the different cultivars. Can you talk a little bit about what you expected to see and maybe then you could lead into what you found or didn't find?

0:06.19 Jim Harbertson

Sure, so Pierre who's already spoke about some of this already [Season 2, Episode 10]. The ideas behind the nitrogen trial with the red grapes was that the phenylpropanoid pathway, the pathway that makes the tannins and the anthocyanins and the flavanols and all the things they give wine both bitterness, astringency and antioxidant capacity and all those kinds of aspects, would be altered by the addition of nitrogen in the field. The data that supported that idea came from lettuce and other kinds of crops. The initial step in that phenylpropanoid pathway is from amino acids, which is why nitrogen gets connected because that's the amino group on the amino acids. It was an idea that you would have less of the phenolics in the wine because of adding nitrogen in the vineyard. The expectation was that “okay well, we were going to see maybe less nitrogen, or less phenolics in the fruit and the wine as a result of adding nitrogen.” We saw that, but we also saw a lot of other things happen that we didn't expect.

So, one of the other things that we have seen from the addition of nitrogen was, as everybody expects, there's going to be more nitrogen for the yeast. You've heard about that with the discussion about Yeast Available Nitrogen in the form of arginine and glutamate and glutamic acid that normally the yeast can utilize to make proteins, do synthesis, and do their job during the fermentation. What we didn't anticipate was that there is another class of compounds that have nitrogen in them that also seems to have a big uptake when we've added the nitrogen to the fruit, and that is protein. We saw a decline in tannins as we anticipated, we didn't see a decline in anthocyanin, and we didn't see a decline in any of the other classes of phenolics that we anticipated to see. We were sort of surprised. We were like, “Oh well, that's not what we expected to see.” We expected to see this bigger interference. Instead, we saw there's more protein there. Protein is well known for its ability to bind tannins and in fact, that's where the definition of the word tannin comes from, its ability to tan. Like leather hides (animal hides) and turn them into leather. It also does the same thing in your mouth when you're drinking red wine. It tans your salivary proteins which precipitates them out. Basically, that's the biochemical effect that causes that roughening and drying in your mouth because you're de-lubricating your saliva by taking the proteins that normally would help wet the surfaces and keep those things slick for you while you're drinking the wine. It [protein] is essentially fining the wine. I mean, in wine we call it fining. We take proteins from various sources, whether they be from waste products from other industries that are very reasonably priced and then add them to wine to take out excess tannins. We can make the wine less astringent thus fined it--make it finer, make it nicer, make it easier for the consumers to appreciate it. What we're discovering is that by adding the nitrogen to the vineyard we seem to be growing more of the fining agent in the plant itself, which is then pre-fining the wine before we start making it and that is not what we expected at all. We did not anticipate that, but it seems to make a lot of sense in many ways and we kind of just go, “Wow! Why didn't we expect that, that's rather silly of us.” But at the same time, we at least have been able to watch it, see it, and capture that data and measure the proteins and things of that nature.

0:10:06 Patty Skinkis

So, did you see this in in both cultivars, as there were nitrogen studies done both in Syrah and Chardonnay?

0:10:13 Jim Harbertson

This is a good question. With the white wines, because you tend to put them direct to press, you don't crush the fruit and then juice it for a while. Normally you do a very gentle cycle in the press. Where protein ends up being an issue for white wine is typically in instability issues when the wine gets warmed up, or something like that, and the proteins might precipitate out. Many wineries will typically heat stabilize their wine by measuring how much protein is going to be coming out of solution when it is hot and then pre-fining the wine before they even get it with a clay or something like that. They'll remove that protein from the wine. We haven't really had any protein instability issues with the Chardonnay. I'm not entirely certain whether, with the Chardonnay, we just didn't juice it hard--we didn't deliberately try to get all the material out of there--or Chardonnay just doesn't really respond that easily to this sort of thing. So, in grapes we tend to think of them as a monolith-- it's Vitis vinifera--they're all the same thing. Throughout my career I have learned that is not the case. They [grape cultivars] all are different from each other like cartoon characters or characters in a book. They all have their own personalities, their own quirks, and they all react differently.

0:11:36 Jim Harbertson

Chardonnay was selected due to the share of people using it. People all grow Chardonnay around the country, and it's a popular variety. Another variety that might have been selected that might give you more kinds of sensitivity to protein stability things would be Sauvignon Blanc. It is really well known for having issues with making heat instability proteins and people having to deal with that. In hindsight, maybe we should have selected a different variety. I think from an economic importance standpoint Chardonnay was the right grape to pick from that perspective. That can be used for future research.

Now, the issue with the proteins in the red wines, that's not a well-studied area for Vitis vinifera. Where it's more well studied is in French American hybrids on the east coast [USA] where the varieties tend to make a lot of those proteins because they are higher in disease resistance [cultivars]. The types of proteins that you tend to get in those grape juices are to do with fighting off disease, anti-insect, and other types of pathogens. So, they tend to be specific to that kind of thing, and they're basically upregulated all the time. They're always present there in that fruit. So, even if you don't have a disease, you get those proteins. Folks over on the East Coast, like Dr. Sacks at Cornell University, published some nice papers showing there's a pretty good relationship between the proteins that are made in these French American hybrids because of them being disease resistant, and the reduction in tannin which is being fined out before the wine is really being made. Our hypothesis right now is we're seeing a lot more of this protein in Syrah. Now, I'm going to stop there and say I don't know if I can really say it happens in all the other ones [cultivars], because I just have never found the wine grapes to ever behave in a way that makes complete sense, or easily understandable.

0:13:50 Patty Skinkis

Yeah, well, that's very interesting-- the relationship with the proteins, and I know very well what you're talking about the protein issue the hybrids have. From my days working in the Midwest on grapes, it was a real concern. You could see it in the winemaking process, even in the whites, you'd get a lot of those proteins.

So, with the potassium trials, what were you expecting there?

0:14:11 Jim Harbertson

So, what we know about potassium and wine grapes is that there's a natural titration of acids that occurs during ripening when you have potassium in the soil. So, essentially you trade out some of the portion of the acid that makes it sour and makes it more acidic with the potassium which is not acidic. And so, when grapes ripen, they become less acidic because of the potassium exchange with the protons from the acids in the grape. My expectation was--you add more potassium, well, you're going to make the fruit less acidic, right? To an extent that is true with what we've seen in the data that we've collected with Marcus Keller, but there seems to be like there's a point where it has both diminishing returns and goes in the other direction. I think there's a bit of a mystery there, precisely what's happening, and this may have to deal with the translocation from the soil to the vine. These are mysteries beyond my reckoning to be honest with you. These are when I'm like, “Well okay, well we can't see it in the wine… that likely means it didn't get into the fruit.” And so, I think that's then straightforward. The other effects from the potassium trial tend to also do with ripening. It changes the accumulation of sugar into the fruit, and you tend to get a little bit more alcohol in wines when you do that. Alcoho, we've learned over the years, is the driving force behind most of wine flavor, perception, taste and astringency affects pretty much everything. More alcohol has a dramatic effect on the rest of the sensory aspects of the wine. So, it's really about that sourness and the alcohol change that's really driving the changes in those wines.

0:16:05 Patty Skinkis

With the potassium, I think it would be good to clarify here that for all these trials, the vineyard part was selecting vineyards that had a deficiency, so we were adding nitrogen or potassium in. I know at least for the Oregon situation it was a potassium deficient site, and same with the Washington vineyard, it was deficient in potassium. So perhaps it's because they needed that potassium, and it went elsewhere, and it didn't have a negative impact on the fruit chemistry which was good. You said you looked at all these other parameters. Did you look at phenolics when it came to the potassium trial or not really because you weren't expecting any phenolic impact there?

0:16:53 Jim Harbertson

Well, this is Chardonnay, so there's very little phenolics in white wine in general, and because of the way you make the white wine, you deliberately avoid extracting most of them. Bitterness is what typically emerges with the low molecular weight phenolics you might get out of a grape seed with low alcohol concentrations or something of that nature, but you don't tend to see a lot of phenolics, and it's deliberately done that way because that's the way people like to drink white wine. So yeah, we didn't really look after the phenolics too much in the Chardonnay. I wouldn't have anticipated that there would be a lot of shifts in that regard.

So, you mentioned that the deficiencies in nitrogen in the trial in Washington. All the vineyards that I've ever encountered in Washington are deficient in nitrogen. It's normal for us to have very, very low nitrogen in the vineyards. We've often suspected one of the reasons that the wine grapes in Washington have such amazing color and amazing tannin, high concentrations of both, is the fact that we have such low nitrogen in our soils. Back to that central idea is nitrogen--if you add it, does it interfere with that biosynthesis of them and do you get it? I think the adding of it was the opposite idea. I think for many of us winemakers in Washington were like, “Well, we can just add the nitrogen in the winery.” We don't really go after it in the vineyard.

0:18:23 Patty Skinkis

I think that's a general thought that we see here too, and that reducing nitrogen will reduce canopy size for better control, and whether it's water stress too. You get that positive phenolic response. So, that has me thinking about the Syrah with the nitrogen trial. Did you see an impact on anthocyanin?

0:18:47 Jim Harbertson

Yeah, that we didn’t, and that again was part of that surprise we were kind of like, “Huh!” That may be more of a vintage effect? Some of the biosynthesis of the anthocyanins is driven more by environmental factors than having some of the building blocks. Although there may have been fewer building blocks, the ability overall through the system to make those compounds was just mostly impacted by the environment, the cool nights or it was very hot. I mean these are the kind of things where we do these trials for multiple years because every vintage is different and when you have those heat spikes or cool areas is different. But, we still haven't really seen much of an effect on anthocyanins in the vineyard. I know that Pierre has mentioned that he's seen some small effects in potted plants where you can restrict everything, but in the wild of the world where there's more nutrients and things around, it's harder to get control over those things.

0:19:48 Patty Skinkis

Yeah, I just interviewed Marcus [Keller], and he was surprised how adding nitrogen didn't do as much (see Season 3, Episode 1), and I'm thinking what are the limits? You know a lot of times we do field research; we try to find the limits and doing very high nitrogen adds scare growers in general because we don't want over vigor. I wonder, at least in your situation in eastern Washington, if more [nitrogen] was needed?

0:20:15 Jim Harbertson

Yeah, I think you're right. I mean the soil that we have here has such low water holding capacity anyways and so it [nitrogen] may just leave. The idea that you may be trying to be more efficient by acknowledging that you can only add so much and at a certain point there are diminishing returns in terms of what you can get from that soil type.

0:20:38 Patty Skinkis

That's right and just low organic matter. I know he [Markus Keller] said he has spoon-fed in small increments over time with fertigation which helps with that kind of soil.

0:20:51 Jim Harbertson

Well, the other part of his trial that's fascinating about why it wouldn't affect the anthocyanin biosynthesis is he added the nitrogen on the leaves with urea. That kind of bypasses the soil and all the complexities of bacteria and just movement through ground type--just getting it through and moving it around. Even then, we still didn't really see a reduction in the anthocyanin. So, I think that kind of suggests that maybe there’s more nitrogen that is necessary to really see that big impact. Or maybe we just have such awesome fruit in Washington that it doesn't matter, and we can hang on that all day.

0:21:32 Patty Skinkis

Yeah, or you can with reason that a grower isn't going to hurt their anthocyanins by adding reasonable amounts of nitrogen.

0:21:41 Jim Harbertson

Precisely. Yeah, and even still we really weren't adding enough nitrogen to the fruit to make it so that you wouldn't have to add nitrogen in the winery. That just tells you how far down we start with nitrogen, we start at such low concentrations of both ammonia and amino acids in our fruit that is just ridiculously low.

0:22:04 Patty Skinkis

Earlier, you said finding that connection from “A” to “B”-- that linear connection. We see that even in vineyards with high organic matter and soils that cycle a lot of nitrogen. We don't have high YANs either, even here in western Oregon. So, the “A” plus “B” does not equal “C.”

0:22:25 Jim Harbertson

Yeah, it is very surprising. It is like, “Well, where the heck is it going then?” I mean, there's a strong possibility here that this nitrogen could still be made into amino acids, but it actually could be made into an amino acid that's not available for essentially the metabolism by the yeast. It could be in the form of proline, which ties up that nitrogen in a five number ring and essentially the yeast doesn’t bother with it because it takes too much metabolism (energy) to go after them and try to get that nitrogen. They're lazy in that way, and they're just like,“We'll just take the nitrogen off the compounds where it's easy to steal it and so that one (proline) takes too much effort, so we're not going to bother with it.” It could be that that's where that nitrogen ends up being, and we don't see it in the form of something that our yeast can eat. That's an important thing for us to know, but it may be being made into something. We don't necessarily see it in what we want.

0:23:21 Patty Skinkis

So, with the trials that you've done, you talked about what was surprising to you, what you expected, and you talked a little bit about the next steps. What do you think are the next natural steps? Maybe it's not within the time frame of the project, but what do you think is a reasonable next step with doing this kind of work or things you might do differently?

0:23:42 Jim Harbertson

I was having a conversation about this with my student this morning because I think this is so important when you're going through a project. Hindsight is always 20/20, right? So clearly the relationship between nitrogen and all the things that nitrogen ends up being in should have been very much on our mind when we first started this [project]. We should have been potentially looking at varieties where those become bigger issues like Sauvignon Blanc, Muscat or something else. We should have had that in mind that might become a problem. Likewise for the red wine, maybe extend it beyond just Syrah, to potentially some varieties where adding a reduction in tannins is far more problematic. So, in Syrah it makes a reasonably tannic wine to begin with at around three to four hundred milligrams per liter and that's a mid-astringency wine, if you will. But in Oregon, where Pinot noir is far more prevalent and the concentrations of tannin there can be half that and even a quarter of that, the reduction and the creation of this protein that might reduce that tannin might make that wine less commercially viable, if that's what you're going for. Or you sort of just have to pivot and the winemaker goes, “Okay, we're just going to make a different style.” This would be an area where we could go and look at both these varieties where it might be a bigger issue for them if we didn't.

If we end up with less of these phenolics being present there, I think that it might also behoove us to go down a more general route about which proteins are being made. I mean, we're starting on that now, and I think we're going to have a reasonable amount of success in terms of trying to figure out what they are. We can separate them out on gels and columns in the laboratory and we can find out what they are. We have a reasonable idea about what kinds of proteins we would anticipate being there based on all the other studies that have preceded us. So, we can apply that knowledge and sort of assume or make some connections to what we would expect there to be. But on the 3rd year of a 4-year project, it's like, “Oh man! We got to that part of the race pretty late in the game, but we're there and we're going to do as much as we can so that we can get good conclusions for this particular trial.”

I think adding to that, the broader implications of all this about, kind of recommendations we would make to vineyard managers and wineries--about the use of these nutritional aids whether they be in the winery or the vineyard is something that has been big on our mind about what should we tell people. Should we be making recommendations to suggest, “Well, you know, should you be adding the nitrogen in the vineyard or should you be adding the nitrogen in the winery?” I think right now from a conservative standpoint that we would say, maybe you should avoid adding nitrogen with red grapes if we think that there might be some issues that you're creating for your wine. For the white wine, we don't have any clear-cut evidence that it's really making any protein instability issues or any things of that nature so we would say, “Okay sure, maybe you could be adding nitrogen into the vineyard for your Chardonnay projects or your Chardonnay wine.” But we don't know about some of these other more sensitive varieties like the Sauvignon Blanc and the Muscats and things of that nature that tend to be more prone to those kinds of problems.

0:27:21 Patty Skinkis

Sure, I know that a big goal has been these recommendations. When you tell researchers recommendations, and me being the outreach person who's really saying, “Hey guys! what are we going to tell the world about this project?” I think recommendations are just showcasing our results and not saying, “Here's what we need you to do.” There's always going to be people who want the easy button and they're going to want to say, “What is it that we need?” But for most growers and winemakers, I think they already look to these projects to say “Okay, yep that measures up with what we see in general.” In general, I'd say they're not as scared to add nitrogen to white wine grapes; you want to restrict it more for reds. This kind of adds more information to that end, and I know there’s a multifaceted project, and I don't think we're going to have clear—specifics—but I think we also know that we need to get more information from the industry, you know, “What is it that you want from us?” Maybe it's just to see the results of the study, and that’s it.

0:28:30 Jim Harbertson

Well yeah, fair enough. I think the other part of the recommendation is you never know precisely what people are going to do with it. So, I could envision a winery that says, “You know what? Our wines are always too tannic. Is there a way that we can handle that in the vineyard?” We'd say “Okay, yeah, water more maybe.” But then you change the berry size and all the other things. Maybe they don't want to change that. All they had to do was add a little bit more nitrogen and maybe they could fine out some of that tannin before they made the wine. That might be enough for them to be happier with those wines and sort of take care of part of that problem already in the vineyard as opposed to the winery, right? And it's always easier to deal with things so that the fruit comes in a way that you don't have to manage it as much. You don't have to spend as much time fussing around with it in the winery. It can be kind of ready and set for you in the vineyard. So, that is the flip side of the nitrogen you could say “Okay, we want less of it.” We can then use it to that end. And I think you're right, I mean maybe giving just the broad details about it that the people use that information in the way that they see fit for their needs, right?

0:29:45 Patty Skinkis

Yep--so I can't resist. I'm going out of my linear order of thought. I must ask, so when you're looking at the protein situation and you said it's fining out the tannin… how did you figure out that they're fining out the tannin? Was it the comparison of the fruit then to the wine that you saw a lot of tannin in the fruit and then lower amount in the wine?

0:30:07 Jim Harbertson

Yeah, in fact, the first year that we did the trial with Syrah, we had maybe 100 milligrams per liter of tannin in the wine. As you described earlier, when you had your experience with the east coast, we saw large precipitates at the bottom of the tank. It was cloudy and mucky stuff. I immediately was like, “Oh! I know what's going on here!”, or at least I guessed at it anyways. We had a go at collecting juice from those fruits and we could measure the tannins that are present there and there were normal amounts in the skins and seeds and then we were like, “Well the discrepancy here clearly has to be something that's happening with this juice.” We even had some of the first sets of things sent to a proteomics lab in Pullman [WA] where we had our fruit measured for the different types of proteins that are present there and compared that to the types of proteins that were left in the wine. The tannin wiped out 99.9 percent of the protein from the fruit into the wine. There was nothing left essentially, so that tells you that what ended up at the bottom of the vessel was tannin-protein complexes.

We were like, “Well! This is interesting!” There were a few proteins that could withstand the tannin precipitate, but they mostly had to do with things that are end-of-life cycle things for the grape itself. So, when those cells start to die around the seeds and in the pulp, the whole thing starts to die. It goes through death signals and some of those enzymes related to that and they seem to be apparently resistant to being able to be precipitated by tannin, which is kind of interesting.

0:32:05 Patty Skinkis

Well, this is very interesting work, and I want to wrap up with a fun question for you. How did you find your way to an enology and enology research?

0:32: 15 Jim Harbertson

That's a fun question. So, I was an undergraduate student in biochemistry at UC Davis. I was asked, like many students are asked across campuses around the country, and in probably the world, to go and take a general education class. So, I took a class on viticulture and enology from a very famous sensory scientist, Ann Noble. She so enthralled me and wrapped me up into the whole mystery about how everything worked with wine that I ended up at the end of the semester going to her office and asking her: “Hey! you know I'd love to do some work on this, I have some skills, maybe I can help?” And she said to me, “Well, I'm a sensory scientist and you're a biochemist, so, I'm going to walk you down the hall to meet this biochemist who works in our department on wine and grapes.” And so, she introduced me to Dr. Doug Adams, and we got along well.

It took a while for me to kind of get going with projects and stuff, but Ann would then kind of serve as my mom away from home. She guided me through all kinds of educational processes of changing over from just being biochemistry to eventually getting a degree in viticulture and enology. That was sort of the whole catalyst for it. It was an awesome class where the professor just brought it to life for me, and I understood better how I could use some of the things I had taken from all kinds of biochemistry which is a lot of times very basic science in many ways and then applying it. From my perspective, at the end of the day I could drink it, and I didn't have to feel upset that maybe I was changing the world in a weird way. At the time there were a lot of concerns about genetic modification of organisms and people were very concerned about the ethics, or lack of ethics that was being utilized in the science area of biochemistry at the time. I was like, “Well this could be a lot more compelling to me in terms of a product, I can drink it, I don't have to hand my calculator in at the end of the day where someone's really going to be concerned about what I might be doing, and it was a lot more creative as well.”

I took a lot of art classes as a student at Davis. I practically minored in art when I was there, and to me wine, winemaking, sensory and microbiology were all kind of wrapped in there. It had an element that none of my other studies afforded me, which was the opportunity to be creative. I am not entirely certain how I ended up in academia to be honest with you. But it does sort of explain my predilection towards leaps and jumps in creative thought that perhaps some of my colleagues don't share.

0:35:20 Patty Skinkis

Ah, well that's a great story, and it is good to hear your background. Well, thank you so much, Jim, for sharing your information and insights on the project.

If you want to learn more about the research coming out of his lab and part of the HiRes Vineyard Nutrition Project, check out our website at https://highresvineyardnutrition.com/. If you're really enjoying this podcast, we encourage you to take a short survey that's included in the podcast details. Thank you!

This podcast is funded through the National Institute of Food and Agriculture’s (NIFA) Specialty Crop Research Initiative Coordinated Agricultural Projects (CAP) grant. Project Award Number: 2020-51181-32159.