The National Grapevine Collection project has made significant progress since its inception nearly two years ago by Wine Australia.
The National Grapevine Collection is a collaborative project involving propagation stakeholders (collection owners, vine improvement groups and nurseries), sector stakeholders, research organisations and service providers.
The project aims to deliver a national system of centrally-coordinated grapevine assets and resources that are appropriately resourced, established, maintained and protected into the future.
In short, it aims to ensure the ongoing supply of healthy and true-to-type planting material for Australian vineyards.
“In Australia we have many germplasm-related physical, organisational and intellectual assets already in place, so it’s been my role as the coordinator of the National Grapevine Germplasm Collection to bring together these moving parts and collaborate with stakeholders,” said Nick Dry, from Foundation Viticulture.
“From an initial discussion paper three years ago, we now have a collaborative plan in place, with our objectives and the strategic focus areas that will help us achieve those objectives.”
The high-level objectives are to:
- protect and preserve Australia’s grapevine genetic resources
- facilitate and promote the supply of healthy, true-to-type grapevine planting material, and
- support propagation supply chain activities that build and strengthen sector resilience.
Key to the project is its co-design with the sector to continue action towards a collaborative solution, and as such the project has put in place critical areas of governance and planning and resourcing to achieve this.
Last year, the Stakeholder Reference Group was established with its membership of grapevine collection owners, industry bodies, propagation sector representatives and research organisations.
The role of the group is to provide ongoing strategic guidance of the Collection program and ensure that activities and outputs serve the needs of key stakeholders and the grape and wine sector as a whole.
In May this year, the Program Working Group (PWG) was established, which will provide direct input into the strategic outputs and drive progress on the operational functions of the program. The PWG membership includes Steve Partridge (chair of the Vine Industry Nursery Association), Prue Henschke (chair of Australian Vine Improvement Association) and Chris Bennett (Executive Officer of South Australian Vine Improvement Association).
Already, the project has delivered some important results for the wine sector.
“For example, we have supported full virus screen of every vine in the AVIA, WAVIA and SAVIA collections and 107 priority varieties in the CSIRO collection, which is approximately 3000 vines in total.
“As a result of that testing, we discovered Red Blotch virus in Australia and supported the national response, which included wider testing and removal of infected vines. It also paves the way for re-opening of the CSIRO collection, which has been closed to industry since 2009.”
A number of research and innovation projects in support of best practice management and the development of science-based standards are also in train, including a virus sampling and diagnostics project; virus surveillance capability; vector management; the establishment of biometric standards for virus screening of vineyards and reviewing and categorising endemic grapevine viruses.
While the scope of the National Grapevine Collection program is focused on a national system for our grapevine assets, it is aligned with existing projects associated with Grapevine Trunk Disease management and genomic identification of grapevine clones, providing avenues for application of relevant research
Want to learn more? Nick recently presented a webinar with the AWRI, which can be replayed here.
Information on the program, including a one-page infographic, can be found here.