UC Davis to sell student wine for $80

A change in Californian state law means that wines made by UC Davis students could soon be available to buy, saving gallons of wine from being poured down the drain.

UC Davis in California

Passed last year, the Senate Bill 683 applies only to UC Davis and allows the university to sell its student-produced wine to other wineries. Previously wines made by students of the UC Davis Department of Viticulture and Enology wines were legally required to be disposed of.

The new law allows the US Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) to issue the university with a license to sell up to 20,000 gallons to local wineries to be sold by the bottle, as reported by the Sacramento Bee. 

The UC Davis Viticulture and Enology Department typically produces about 6,500 gallons of wine a year, however the bill allows it to see up to 20,000 gallons, with student-produced wines are expected to sell for US$80 a bottle.

“The hope is we will return some revenue to the university’s viticulture and enology program because it does cost the program a lot of money to produce the wine,” UC Davis Chief Campus Counsel Jacob A. Appelsmith told the paper.

“One of the reasons why we won’t market under our name is we don’t want to be distracted by the need to have a commercial motivation,” he said. “It’s really about making wine as part of our teaching mission and not having to pour it down the drain.”

The university expects the legal process for selling its wine to be completed by the end of the year.