Oregon Public Broadcasting

It’s crush time in wine country around the Northwest. That’s when wine grapes are harvested and trucked into wineries to be pressed.

In Prosser, Washington, one winery is making a vintage that few people will taste. In fact, most of it will be poured down the drain.

It’s all in the name of science. Correspondent Anna King explains.

Jim Harbertson, hangs out in the new winery at Washington State University’s research center in Prosser. The fermenting tanks are small because Harbertson will test many different ways of making wine.

Jim Harbertson knows a lot about the chemistry of wine. He even sports a T-shirt printed with the periodic table of elements.

Jim Harbertson: "I’m kind against the high PH, high alcohol wine movement. I’m more the old school kind of thinking, the low PH, very high acid...."

We’re in Harbertson’s winery. It’s a new $500,000 research building built by Washington State University in Prosser.

It’s kind of like an elf’s winery. Everything is tiny. The normally huge fermenting tanks are only about 4-feet-tall.

The facility is meant to answer questions for the Northwest wine industry. Harbertson will test new growing techniques and new varieties of grapes.

Harbertson says he’s not taking the romance out of wine, he’s just trying to figure out what makes it better.

Jim Harbertson: "The thing that is probably missed on most people is it’s about point one percent of mass of the fruit in the wine that we actually sniff, smell and appreciate. The rest of it’s water, alcohol and sometimes sugar. So these are the pieces of equipment that can actually get at that point one percent. That’s why we do this and most places can’t do this work but we can."

Under Washington State law, Harbertson’s wine can’t be distributed. So when the experiments are done, it gets poured down the drain.

This year’s cool spring and summer could make for an interesting vintage. Northwest winemakers like Harbertson say the fruit has some good flavors, but it’s much too soon to tell how the wine will turn out.