Turn the Page

Published in the March 2026 issue of the NGRA newsletter

As you’re well aware, 2025 was a tough year. For reasons I don’t need to recount, last year the American grape and wine industry faced its stiffest and most varied headwinds perhaps in history. Businesses sold or closed, downsized, consolidated and searched for new efficiencies. Researchers at academic institutions and government agencies (those who remained employed) struggled to find funding for their most ambitious projects as federal funding programs—like the Specialty Crop Research Initiative, which has among the largest awards for grape research—shut down. In the scientific community, 2025 became known as “the year of lost research.”

Even as a nonprofit, NGRA is not immune from the industry’s economic challenges. The downstream effects of such upheaval can be massive for a small 501(c)(3) like ours. And as an organization whose mission is to actualize game-changing research of a size and scale that no one sector or region of the industry could achieve on its own, we were suddenly hamstrung. We pivoted from plans to initiate our next round of big-tent research projects to focus on executing on our extension, education and outreach theme areas. We produced the NGRA-UC Davis Grapevine Improvement Workshop and organized the forthcoming ASEV-NGRA Vineyard Nutrition Symposium to ensure research that had been done found an audience with industry stakeholders. And we worked to lift up the viticulture and enology extension community that keeps applied science alive. We hosted quarterly webinars and planned the upcoming National Viticulture & Enology Extension Leadership Conference, April 20-22, just for them.

This year, we turned the page.

At NGRA’s First-of-Year Board Meeting on January 26, we launched our 2026 strategic roadmap, which includes expanding our funding model. Our new always-on development function is designed to not only strengthen industry support but proactively seek diversified funding and novel partnerships to support the NGRA research mission. Our goal is to grow NGRA’s annual funding to $1 million by 2028. This effort will expand engagement with federal agencies, private foundations, private industry, philanthropic partners and allied organizations to secure new investments in grape science.

Importantly, our 2026 roadmap also includes advancing three research initiatives to strengthen grape production nationwide. We’ve initiated planning for project concepts that address long-term vineyard resilience, automation and climate adaptation. Specifically, they focus on enabling robotic finish pruning (led by Terry Bates, Cornell), developing drought-tolerant rootstocks (led by Luis Diaz-Garcia, UC Davis) and understanding the impact of genetics, the environment and vine management on the expression and durability of disease-resistance traits in new, improved grape varieties (led by Maddy Oravec and Katie Gold, Cornell).

The headwinds continue, but we’re leaning in. The time is now to build the funding infrastructure and research muscle that matches the scale of the challenges our industry faces. Read more about our 2026 national research and funding strategy. And if you’re not already an NGRA member or donor, I invite you to join us as we begin this new chapter together.

Donnell Brown
President