Ray Beckwith research a game changer for wine industry from South Australia with pH find / Penfolds work

Penfolds renowned wine maker Max Schubert (centre) with wine chemists, including Ray Beckwith (at right) and inset.

South Australian wine chemist Ray Beckwith’s work was vital to improving wine quality – most prominently highlighting the importance of pH balance and, later, enabling Max Schubert to produce quality wines such as his Penfolds Grange.

Born in Cowell and educated at Murry Bridge High, Beckwith was dux in his second year at Roseworthy Agriculture Collegeand completed his honours diploma of agriculture in 1932.

In 1933, he won one of five paid cadetships, to operate a model winery at Roseworthy, under lecturers in the college’s future oenology course, Alan R. Hickinbotham and John L. Williams. Beckwith’s first research project proved pure cultured yeasts superior to those occurring naturally on grape skins.

He was headhunted by Thomas Hardy Wines’ Colin Haselgrove as an assistant to winemaker Roger Warren, making sparkling wines at Mile End. He then was poached by Leslie Penfold Hyland, manager of Penfold Wines at Nuriootpa, as assistant to Alf Scholz, from 1935. His first major project was a laboratory for yeast research and a large vessel to cultivate yeast. He settled on was A1 strain from Portugal. He proved that avoiding excess temperature during fermentation was crucial in reducing bacterial spoilage.

In 1936, Beckwith did research at the laboratory of A. Killen MacBeth, Angas professor of chemistry at Adelaide University, into wine acidity. In spite of the Great Depression, Macbeth was able to buy from England a Cambridge electronic pH meter, a recent expensive innovation allowing speedy accurate measure of acidity. Beckwith showed controlling acidity could limit bacterial growth in wines and reduce to near zero. Before this, much wine production was so spoiled it was fit only to be distilled. Manipulating wine pH with tartaric wine, a natural component of wine, is now part of the winemaker's arsenal,.

Beckwith’s work so impressed Leslie Penfold Hyland that his request for a similar pH meter was approved without question.  Beckwith married in 1936 and settled in Nuriootpa and eventually only commuted when needed to work at Penfolds’ Magill winery where Max Schubert, until 1938 working as a stable hand, began his winemaking, assisting the blender Albert Edward Vesey.

Aside from big savings for Penfolds from Beckwith's innovations and methods, particularly preventive discipline, consistency and standardisation; he raised wine quality by applied science. He was arguably the first to employ paper chromatography to monitor malolactic fermentation and advocated stainless steel to replace other metals in the pumps and pipes to process and convey wine. He introduced cooling tubes to slow fermentation.

Max Schubert's wines came from incremental improvements that raised Penfolds from a producing mediocre fortified wines to reliable first-rate table wines, and Beckwith was behind him at every step.

Beckwith’s work was belated recognised with honours such life membership to the Australian wine industry, honorary life member of the American Society for Enology and Viticulture;^; doctor of the university (Duniv) from Adelaide University; 2006 Maurice O’Shea Award from McWilliam's Wines; and 2008 Order of Australia.