Lumen Waite 100 - Flipbook - Page 36
The other
friends of Waite
WORDS › MICHÈLE NARDELLI | PICTURES › JACK FENBY
A great strength of the University of Adelaide’s Waite
campus is the like-minded organisations who’ve chosen
to nest amid the gumtrees with us – some of whom have
been our neighbours and collaborators for generations.
AWRI
industry to become as good as any in the world. They even
put money on it. Based at the Waite campus, the Australian
Wine Research Institute (AWRI) was founded in 1955 with
funding support from grape growers and wineries around
the country.
Institute for Wine Research ‘Needed’ was the headline
in the Saturday Advertiser on 15 November 1952.
While the Waite Agricultural Research Institute and the
CSIRO were pushing out some useful research on soil
types, diseases and pests, Director of the Waite Institute at
that time, Professor James A. Prescott, was adamant that a
new dedicated institute was needed for the Australian wine
industry to succeed.
Its first chief scientist, ex-Roseworthy lecturer in
Oenology, John Fornachon, shared the industry’s passion to
produce world-class traditional fortified wines, but also to
build an Australian table wine industry that could compete
internationally. Along with colleague Bryce Rankine AM,
they built the research profile of the new Institute so that it
would meet and respond to the needs of producers.
He was not alone in this view. Growers and winemakers
backed this call, which they believed would help the
With a research interest in wine spoilage, Fornachon
said his early research career at the Waite Agricultural
Research Institute afforded him only the most basic
facilities: “an incubator, microscope, a few reagents and
glassware, some bench space, and not much else”. But
a few years on, under his leadership, the new Institute
would deliver game-changing research for the industry.
This included understanding oxidation, hazes and
deposits caused by trace amounts of iron and copper, the
need for and development of better yeast strains, better
use of sulfur dioxide, and pH control, as well as research
into new grape varieties.
After more than 20 years with the AWRI, Rankine
returned to teaching. He led oenology and viticulture
education at Roseworthy from 1978, becoming one of
Australia’s longest-serving wine researchers and educators.
He authored and co-authored several books over his career,
but the title still found in many a winemaker’s bookcase
could well be the motto of the AWRI: Making Good Wine.
Today, the AWRI employs more than 130 staff supporting
the industry through responsive innovative research and
the development of a range of information and education
tools for growers and winemakers.
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