Student Life

On a crisp autumn morning in Davis, the scent of malt and hops drifted through the Anheuser-Busch InBev Pilot Brewery. Among the gleaming stainless steel, for the first time, all three UC Davis brewing professors stood side by side in the new brewery to celebrate a program that has shaped the modern beer world. 

When winemakers press grapes, they're after the juice. But what happens to the skins, seeds, and stems that make up nearly 30% of the harvest?

At Terra Madre Americas in Sacramento in September 2025, two UC Davis researchers revealed how this "waste" is becoming the wine industry's next frontier of innovation.

The Sensory Theater fell quiet as Ned Spang, Director of the Robert Mondavi Institute, welcomed a familiar face back to campus. Dr. Hoby Wedler, a UC Davis alumnus who has been blind since birth, returned not just as a chemist, entrepreneur, and sensory expert but as the guide for the first public tasting built entirely around UC Davis student-made wines.

Every Thursday evening during the quarter at UC Davis, undergrads, graduate students, faculty, and researchers come together with wine glasses in hand for VITIS, the wine tasting club run through the Davis Enology and Viticulture Organization (DEVO). Here, they taste wines while learning directly from the people making them.

When Michael Mondavi steps into a room, he brings decades of wine expertise and the living history of Napa Valley with him. On October 7, 2025, the "quiet icon" of California winemaking shared his history, and hard-won lessons about surviving the industry's ups and downs, with students, alumni, and faculty at the Robert Mondavi Institute's Sensory Theater.

Walk into any brewery and you'll find that after brewing beer massive amounts of "spent grain" are leftover. Every year, America's 9,000 breweries produce roughly 20 billion pounds of spent grain, enough to fill a football stadium several times over. 

When Terra Madre Americas made its North American debut in Sacramento in September 2026, the three-day festival transformed the city for a vibrant celebration of food, culture, and sustainability. 

Wine tastings, live music, celebrity chef demonstrations, and a bustling street festival brought together food producers, researchers, and consumers from across the Americas. At the center of it all, UC Davis led essential conversations about the future of our food systems.

The Robert Mondavi Institute’s sold-out Savor Series event, hosted in partnership with the UC Davis Library, brought together a panel of experts in wine chemistry, cultural history, human medicine, and nutritional metabolism to tackle one of today’s most debated questions: Is wine healthy? What emerged was a fascinating conversation where science, robust culture, and history converged around a single glass.

Nearly 800 food lovers gathered for a special conversation with James Beard Award-winning chef and Emmy-nominated host Pati Jinich. She is the culinary force behind Pati’s Mexican Table, La Frontera, and her newest series, Pati Jinich Explores Panamericana. Throughout the night, Pati captivated the audience with her bright-eyed curiosity, boisterous laugh, and infectious energy, sharing personal anecdotes that had everyone laughing while revealing her lifelong passion for cooking.

Back in high school, I had no doubt that college was the next step. However, the pressure of choosing a major was colossal! It felt like choosing the rest of my life when asked to select a major. I knew I wanted to do something creative, but I didn’t want to throw away all of my hard-earned A’s in physics, chemistry, and biology. After switching the major option about a hundred times, I finally registered under Undecided - Fine Arts for UC Davis.