BATON ROUGE - Southern University’s campus is home to its very own vineyard.

The vineyard provides students with hands-on experience growing and harvesting grapes that will one day make great wines.

"The vineyard was established in 2020 by Dr. Devaiah Kambiranda. He started off with muscadines and hybrid grapes. Now we have 34 varieties of cultivars of muscadines and we have 14 different cultivars of French hybrid and American hybrid grapes,” Enologist Joshua Reason said.

Viticulture, or the process of growing grapes, is one of the first steps on the way to making a nice bottle of wine.

At Southern’s vineyard, two types of grapes are primarily grown. Muscadines and hybrid grapes.

"They'll take a mother and father and cross-breed it, and then they would pretty much discover which plant they'd want from there and which grape they would like,” Reason said.

The growing season of the grapes is from March to September. Until then, they are prepping the vines for the growing season, where Reasons says a single vine can produce grapes for around 30 years.

"We're just watering and cleaning up, making sure that all the plants are not getting any pest damage, just making sure things are going in the right direction,” Southern student Damien Gardiner said.

The students and faculty say they’ve been meeting with farmers from around the state to learn more about how to better train the grapes.

"Growing the plant up and getting the trunk to grow first, so the first year you really focus on the trunk, and then after that you focus on the arms and when the arms are growing out, that's where the fruit is coming from,” Reason said.

Southern University student Sterling Brown said he didn’t initially plan to do this field, but he was always drawn to learning how food is grown.

"A childhood dream of mine really was to cheese and wine taste across France and Italy and I'm a big fan of grapes and once I seen Southern had the program, I was like why not try it out, and I love it,” Brown said.