Winemaking courses in Pekre represent an important form of education during the period between the two wars and right after the Second World War. Designed for to those young people waiting to take over family farms, the lectures and practical courses provided them with information on professional viticulture, winemaking and fruit-growing .Thus, they were able to promote development on their farms and boost their profitability. Free courses represented a bridge between regular education, which was at that time expensive and thus unavailable to many farmers in the difficult period between the two wars, and autodidacticism. They also represent the hard work of the authorities who realized that agricultural progress is impossible without expert knowledge. Practical training was of great importance since students spent an entire season learning and working at an estate. The process is described in great detail in the notes of a student, taking the course from March to December 1929. Winemaking courses in Pekre from 1927 to 1946 are thus also a symbolic link between the mission of the school founded during the first half of the 19th th century by Archduke John von Habsburg and today’s Faculty of Agriculture and Life Sciences with its University Centre for Viticulture and at the Meranovo estate. The paper discusses the development of agricultural education, which has come a long way from its basic, practical form to a university degree program of the Faculty for Agriculture and Life Sciences of the University of Maribor.

Key words: viticulture, pomology, vine nursery, education, history, Pekre