Marlborough Wine Research Centre to expand.

MEDIA RELEASE:
24 September 2007

Marlborough Wine Research Centre to expand.

After twenty months of planning, detailed design and final building consent
The builders are on site at the Wine Research Centre in Blenheim. The official opening is early 2008.

The centre has grown to the point where additional specialist facilities are needed to meet the expansion in sauvignon blanc and pinot noir research.
Research winemaker Kerrie Stronge has been patiently waiting for this day so that she can set up in a purpose designed small wine making cellar and laboratory. Up to now portable cool rooms and temporary fermentation chambers have been used.

The new facility will be used to make small volumes of research wine with grapes sourced from numerous trial grape blocks and new variety trials in Marlborough and other New Zealand wine regions.

Marlborough Research Centre Trust executive officer Gerald Hope is coordinating the project and confirmed that the facility is long over due. “The demand is pressing for Kerrie as a specialist wine maker to make leading edge wines in a consistent way so that new desirable flavour attributes can be identified. This is essential for the next generation of wine styles to emerge”

Kerrie confirmed that the way forward for Marlborough and New Zealand was to push the technical and creative boundaries for grapes grown today and for new varieties that are being trialled. “I really enjoy the research challenges this type of winemaking demands as it utilises my training and years of experience working for leading wine companies”
We take grapes from selected trial blocks, turn them into small batches of wine of about 20 litres where they will be finally bottled and subjected to critical sensory evaluation”

Marlborough Wine Research Centre was one of the first regional projects in New Zealand to be granted $2 million by the Ministry of Economic Development to construct a Centre of Excellence for research and education in support of the New Zealand wine industry. The complex was officially opened by the Hon Jim Anderton in March 2004.

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