After undertaking an Honours Diploma of Agriculture at Roseworthy Agriculture College in South Australia, Arthur Ray Beckwith took up a twelve month cadetship there with his oenology lecturers Alan Hickinbotham and John Williams (1932). His first project was to investigate the use of pure cultured yeasts instead of the traditional yeasts which occur naturally on grape skin. He soon discovered that the cultured yeasts performed better.

Upon completion of his cadetship, Beckwith joined Thomas Hardy as an assistant to Roger Warren at the Mile End winery. There he worked mostly on sparkling wines. The following year, Leslie Penfold Hyland (then director of Penfold's Magill winery) was so impressed with Beckwith's research results that he personally requested Beckwith work for him. On 2 January 1935 Ray commenced at the company's Nuriootpa winery and remained there until he retired in 1973. His first job was to establish a new laboratory exclusively for his yeast research and a large-scale yeast propagation tank. These initial studies revealed that overheating in the fermentation process was one of the major causes of bacterial growth and subsequent wine spoilage.

The following year (1936) Ray Beckwith was given access to Professor Macbeth's laboratory at the University of Adelaide where undertook his studies on acids and wine pH. This lead to the breakthrough realization that pH could be used to control bacterial growth in wines and therefore minimise spoilage. At that time, around 25% of all wine production in Australia was regularly discarded due to bacterial spoilage so this was a major finding and has helped get spoilage down to virtually zero.

With these results behind him, Ray Beckwith returned to Penfolds and convinced them to purchase the very expensive but very accurate Morton glass electrode. Over the years he continued his research and introduced the use of tartaric acid to lower pH, which was a critical step in the development of Penfold's Grange and many of its other wines.