World-Renowned Vintner Gives $3.3 Million to UC Davis Library

Warren Winiarski, grape grower, winemaker, land preservationist and philanthropist, has committed $3.3 million to help us build the world’s most comprehensive collection on wine writers. We are honored and grateful to have his support.

Winiarski’s gift in support of the UC Davis Library’s wine writer collections was inspired by his belief that “writers helped develop the wine industry itself and influenced the aesthetics of wine.”

He explains:

Wine writers didn’t write just about the regions or types of wine. They gave winemakers the tools they needed to make wines better…. They helped advance the conversation and inspired us to render grapes with more subtlety, refinement and knowledge. That takes a vocabulary. You have to be able to take the senses of taste and smell, and the structural elements of wine, and reduce those elements into words. Wine writers did that for us.

—Warren Winiarski