(Forbes) - Napa Valley may not exactly jump to mind as a hub for something other than wine.

But this weekend, Napa will be ground zero for an unexpected industry: cancer research.

There are two good reasons for that.

One is that the 17th annual V Foundation Wine Celebration — which is on task to raise $6 million for cancer research — kicks off on Thursday night and lasts through Sunday. An impressive lineup of Napa vintners will pour wines at events open their cellars for special dinners, and they’ll donate auction lots for Saturday night’s gala and live action.

The second reason for a non-wine focus on Napa this weekend is that the mechanics and financial structure of cancer research in the U.S. has shifted in recent years, and the V Foundation (named after its founder, North Carolina State University basketball coach Jim Valvano) is a public face of that shift.

At any one time, approximately 30 of 100 cancer research projects at institutions around the country are prepared to go to clinical trial. However, due to budgetary cutbacks at public resources like the National Institutes of Health, only three of those hundred projects on average actually receives the funding required to proceed. That leaves a vast amount of promising research unverified or, worse, unusable.

So researchers are turning to private foundations, like the V Foundation, for support. The foundation’s board of 38 people, located all over the country, reviews applications based on the merits and skillsets of the researchers. Applications are in response to the invitations sent to all major cancer facilities — Mayo, Emory, UCLA, and Johns Hopkins to name a few — and each institution submits one application in each category. Grants are awarded, sometimes linking scientists and institutions who otherwise haven’t worked together, and the research progresses.

This all takes money. Which brings us to Napa this weekend.