Ron Rubin Funds Maynard Amerine Wine Label and Menu Collection at UC Davis

Sebastopol, CA: Ron Rubin, of the Ron Rubin Winery, has donated a major contribution to the UC Davis Foundation, a California non-profit, public benefit corporation. The purpose of the fund is to support the UC Davis Library’s continued efforts to enhance access to and public use of the historic wine labels and menus contained within the Maynard A. Amerine Collection at the UC Davis Library. This gift establishes The Ron Rubin/Maynard Amerine Wine Label and Menu Collection Fund.
 
According to Rubin, “Upon meeting Maynard Amerine, the summer before my senior year of college, I immediately enrolled in UC Davis to learn about viticulture and enology. That year at UC Davis left me with a life-long dream — to own a vineyard and winery in wine country. In 2011, 40 years later, I established the Ron Rubin Winery. Through this fund, I’m honoring the impact Maynard Amerine made on me, and joining my resources with those that Maynard Amerine himself provided to the UC Davis Library. This fund is intended to create new opportunities for research and appreciation of food and wine. I am very pleased to make this gift to further the excellence of the UC Davis Library.”
 
Amerine taught viticulture and enology at UC Davis for nearly 40 years, and the 5,000+ wine labels he collected, which date from the late 1800s through the mid-20th century, were digitized and made publicly available online by the library in 2016. This new fund will support the second phase of Maynard Amerine’s wine label collection project, enhancing the metadata associated with the online label collection and improving its discoverability and use.
 
It also provides the seed funding to create a crowdsourcing web app featuring Maynard Amerine’s extensive menu collection, allowing the public to extract valuable data from the menus and enabling the library to transform them into a searchable online database—making the collection usable by researchers and historians around the world.
 
Jean Flournoy Korinke, Director of Development at the UC Davis Library has said, “We appreciate Ron Rubin’s commitment for support and we are excited to not only complete the work on the Amerine wine labels, but also to move forward with the hundreds of menus he collected.”