Wine connoisseurs with a penchant for identifying flavor profiles and novices who want to learn basic wine-tasting terminology can do so at the 2012 WPSU Wine Festival on Sunday, Sept. 16, at the Penn Stater Conference Center Hotel on the University Park campus.

It is a time-honored tradition for winery workers to grow a beard during the grape-harvest season. Zach Evanitsky, who graduated from the College of Agricultural Sciences this spring with a degree in food science, followed this practice while interning with Mazza Vineyards, near Lake Erie in North East, Pa. "It was a lot of hard work," Evanitsky said about the internship, "but it was worth it in the end. It was the perfect combination of hands-on and technical experience."

To support the state's growing winemaking industry, Penn State Extension has hired Denise Gardner, a sensory scientist for Vinquiry Enartis in Windsor, Calif., to become the new extension enologist for Pennsylvania, effective May 2.

A warm Indian summer may have saved Pennsylvania's grape crop this year after hurricane season left vineyard owners questioning the fate of their harvests, according to a wine and grape expert with Penn State Cooperative Extension.

Will the type of fat you eat today predict your risk of osteoporosis in the future? Using borage oil and shortening, Sarah Gress (biology) set out to answer this question. Borage oil, extracted from a blue star-shaped flower, is believed to have a positive effect on the aging body. High in gamma linolenic acid, an essential fatty acid, it is thought to improve the health of bones. In the femoral neck, the typical location of hip fractures in elderly women, Gress found, borage oil did have a protective effect, as compared to shortening.