The funding was announced by deputy premier Jeremy Rockliff at the Wine Tasmania annual conference in Hobart on Tuesday.

“Tasmania’s wine and food is a key motivation for many people to visit Tasmania and our tourism numbers are booming as a result,” Mr Rockliff said.

The project is a three-year collaborative project that will look to improve grape quality and productivity in vineyards. The project will investigate drivers such as pruning, fertiliser and irrigation on yield variability.

The $570,000 project will be assisted with a $381,000 funding grant from the state government’s Cultivating Prosperity Research and Development collaboration fund.

The state government funding will be matched by $188,000 raised by the industry and various stakeholders.

Mr Rockliff said the project funding was “just another example” of how the state government was backing the primary industries sector to grow jobs and the economy in Tasmania.

“Just a few months ago the Conde Nast Traveller USA nominated Tasmania as the number one region in the world to find the best wines and this was followed up with Tasmania being recognised as number three in the Top 10 cool climate wine regions by Drinks Business UK,” he said.

The project is just one of a number of ways Wine Tasmania is pursuing its vision to treble wine production in the state by 2020.

Wine Tasmania is aiming to improve wine production from 500,000 cases a year to 1.5 million cases per year.

“One of the identified obstacles to securing this targeted growth is year-to-year variability of wine grape yield which has been the driver of this collaborative project,” Mr Rockliff said.

Wine Tasmania’s annual conference Ferment was held in Hobart at the C3 Centre on June 6 and 7.