Adelaide University gives free online wine course

The University of Adelaide is offering a free online course in wine for industry professionals.

The course, World of Wine: From Grape to Glass, was launched last month on the university’s AdelaideX platform, according to Australian news agency The Lead.

So far this year, the course has 10,000 enrollments. Last year, the inaugural course achieved a total of 40,000 students from 160 countries. The free course lasts six weeks, and requires two to three hours of study each week.

Speaking to The Lead, University of Adelaide associate professor of oenology Kerry Wilkinson said: “We thought our target audience last year was going to be the average wine consumer and we totally missed that there are a lot of people who work in the industry, whether it’s in administrative roles or cellar door, so we ended up with a lot of people who were working in the industry but didn’t have any formal qualifications.”

Wilkinson added that many of those who enrolled were food technologists, wine marketers and sommeliers.