Major research to develop new variants of NZ Sauvignon Blanc
Work has begun on a seven-year $18.7 million research programme that aims to make New Zealand’s wine industry more resilient and sustainable by developing new variants of Sauvignon Blanc.
It is the first national grapevine improvement programme in the country and the wine industry’s largest ever research project.
Bragato Research Institute (BRI) has partnered with the government on the Sauvignon Blanc Grapevine Improvement Programme, which includes investment from the government through the Ministry for Primary Industries, New Zealand Winegrowers (NZW), and more than 20 wine sector companies.
Sauvignon Blanc provides 87% of the export revenue of New Zealand’s $1.9 billion wine industry. BRI says that as most of New Zealand’s Sauvignon Blanc vines are of the same variant, a new pest, disease or environmental change that affects one Sauvignon Blanc vine could affect every one of them.
Its goal is to make the wine industry more resilient by identifying traits such as drought and frost resistance, and more sustainable by seeking natural resistance to pests and diseases.
BRI says it has designed an accelerated research programme that will apply the latest genome sequencing technology, after using established tissue culture techniques. This will allow it to create up to 20,000 entirely new variants of contemporary New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, and then screen them to identify plants that exhibit the most useful traits selected by the wine industry.
The programme has been specifically designed make use of grapevine’s natural ability to increase its own diversity. BTI says no foreign introduction of DNA or gene editing is involved, so the vines will be GMO-free. It hopes to have new variants available to growers at the end of the seven years.
BRI CEO, Jeffrey Clarke, says it is an innovative programme that will build sustainability for New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. “Growing a huge number of vines – each very subtly different – will allow us to select traits to accommodate a changing environment, capture market opportunities, and fend off biosecurity threats.”
BRI says the programme seeks to develop new grapevines with traits such as improved yield, more tolerance of fungal attack, frost, high temperatures and drought, and which either maintain the characteristic Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc wine flavour and aroma, or offer new opportunities to expand sales of novel Sauvignon Blanc styles.
To deliver the programme, BRI is working closely with Plant & Food Research as a major partner.
W: bri.co.nz
