January 2026: Letter from the Director
Ancient Wines & Upcoming Conferences
Happy New Year! Students are back on a foggy campus for the winter quarter, and we are pleased to share upcoming conferences and programs centered around food and beverage research and innovation at UC Davis.
Our first two programs of the year, Savor: Coffee Unfiltered, Thinking Outside the Cup, and Sips and Bites: The Chemistry of Distinctive Wines, sold out quickly! We will share the Savor program video in our next newsletter.
We’d also like to announce Sips and Bites: Ancient World Wines - Stories, Traditions and Timeless Terroirs on February 24, led by Arpa Boghozian, a Ph.D. candidate in the Horticulture and Agronomy graduate group at UC Davis. Attendees will learn about the world's oldest winemaking regions by tasting wines from Armenia, Greece, Georgia, and Lebanon, and exploring their historical and cultural contexts. The event will sell out quickly, so please register today.
Sips and Bites guests will have the option to join a private tour of the installation Weights & Measures by Sahar Khoury at the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art. The tour highlights Khoury's use of shared cultural touchstones — such as bread and song — to explore memory, connection and systems of value across cultures. The museum will also host a free public event, Grains of Connection: Art, Food and Conversation, on February 28.
Our partners and collaborators have a wonderful array of upcoming conferences. Next week, the Global Tea Initiative hosts its 11th Annual Colloquium, themed The Art of Tea in Culture and Science. Registration is free.
On February 9-10, the HUB for Sensory and Consumer Science will host its 2nd Annual Conference with two days of programs, speakers and a tribute to distinguished professor Hildegarde Heymann.
In May, Harvard Data Science Initiative and the Departments of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Viticulture and Enology at UC Davis will host Vine to Mind. It is a four-day symposium focused on the impact of data, science, and AI in the wine industry.
Finally, I’d like to congratulate Professor Selina Wang for her appointment as faculty director of the UC Davis Olive Center. She served as research director at the Olive Center from 2011-2022, leading the center’s research efforts in olive oil quality, purity, and standardization, managing research collaborations, and developing several extension courses. We are excited for her return and the next phase of the UC Davis Olive Center.
I hope to see you at one of the many upcoming learning opportunities and cheers to a wonderful 2026!
Sincerely,
Ned Spang
Director, Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science
Associate Professor, Department of Food Science and Technology