What do you get when you add wine dregs to a wetland? Clean water. It sounds like a recycler's fantasy but UC Davis graduate student Heather Shepherd thinks that artificial wetlands could be the solution to a wine-making problem. Thousands of gallons of water contaminated with wine sediments are produced at wineries and cannot be put into fresh water without extensive treatment. Shepherd is using a large-scale constructed wetland planted with cattails, bulrushes and arrowhead plants to simulate natural water flow conditions and purify the winery wastewater. The winery effluent is prefiltered through sand, then flows beneath the surface of the constructed wetland, a large steel tank filled with gravel and plants. The processed water that flows out of the tank could be re-used as irrigation water. "The project is unique in that it uses a natural system to clean wastewater, at the same time creating a wetland," says UC Davis hydrology professor Jan Hopmans. According to Shepherd, this type of water treatment would be easy to set up and maintain for a small winery and has the added benefit of being a low-cost, low-energy natural system.