Accolade Wines has announced a £1m marketing campaign for its Banrock Station Light brand in a bid to champion the lighter drinking category. The campaign will include a link-up with Weight Watchers, as it focuses on its “60 calories per 125ml glass, 100% taste”, tagline which has been highlighted as a key category and consumer driver. The six month campaign launches in January and is set to reach 5m UK female ‘Routiners’, reports Harpers Wine & Spirit.

Improved profits being made by wine companies will take about two years to filter through to growers, says Winegrowers New Zealand chairman Stuart Smith. The Deloitte and NZ Winegrowers’s sixth annual wine industry benchmarking survey released this week confirmed what he was hearing on the ground, Mr Smith, of Fairhall, Blenheim, said. Wine companies’ position was improving but no-one was dancing in the streets, reports The Marlborough Express.

Iconic wine brand Penfolds has appointed Gary Burnand as its managing director. Brand owner Treasury Wine Estates said Burnand will be responsible for “driving Penfolds strategic direction” and will report to the group chief executive David Dearie. Burnand has more than 20 years of experience in senior marketing and strategic roles in the food, apparel and alcohol categories of Europe, Asia Pacific and the USA, reports Harpers Wine & Spirit.

Twelve months ago Brian Schmidt was living a routine life, working Monday to Friday in Canberra and trying his hand at winemaking after hours. Since the 44-year-old was named as a winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics, things have changed. “There’s not a lot of free time, that’s for sure,” Prof Schmidt told AAP by phone from Stockholm where he will collect his Nobel prize on Saturday. Typically in early December Prof Schmidt spends his spare time in shorts and a T-shirt at his 35-hectare farm just outside Canberra, where he runs a vineyard and winery, reports the Sydney Morning Herald.

Wine connoisseurs will get a taste of the future at a special Barossa wine tasting this month. Appropriately the tasting will be held on Thursday, 15 December during one of the State’s hottest months of the year. The tasting will feature Barossa wines from grapes grown at temperatures expected to prevail in the year 2050. At the Barossa workshop interested people will have an opportunity to taste wines produced under current climate side-by-side with wines produced from fruit grown under elevated temperature, reports the Stock Journal.

De Bortoli Wines has taken out the top gong at this year’s National Wine Show of Australia. The Yarra Valley winery won the Len Evans Memorial Trophy for the best table wine of the show, for its 2010 PHI Pinot Noir, at a gala dinner in Canberra late last month. It is the first time a Pinot has received the award in the history of the event, reports the Lilydale and Yarra Valley Leader.

De Bortoli Wines has taken out the top gong at this year’s National Wine Show of Australia. The Yarra Valley winery won the Len Evans Memorial Trophy for the best table wine of the show, for its 2010 PHI Pinot Noir, at a gala dinner in Canberra late last month. It is the first time a Pinot has received the award in the history of the event, reports the Lilydale and Yarra Valley Leader.

A small-production Australian Shiraz has earned global renown by being named the world’s best label in 2011 by the World Label Awards Association. The label of Alpha Crucis Shiraz 2008, produced by Chalk Hill Winery in McLaren Vale, was named best in Australia before taking on and beating the best from Europe, the US, India, Japan and New Zealand in the global final. The awards are recognised as the peak competition for printing and label associations around the world, reports Decanter.

A small-production Australian Shiraz has earned global renown by being named the world’s best label in 2011 by the World Label Awards Association. The label of Alpha Crucis Shiraz 2008, produced by Chalk Hill Winery in McLaren Vale, was named best in Australia before taking on and beating the best from Europe, the US, India, Japan and New Zealand in the global final. The awards are recognised as the peak competition for printing and label associations around the world, reports Decanter.

Conrad Kirk, described as a “talent” on Hawke’s Bay’s wine scene, is the inaugural recipient of Skeltons Excellence Award for viticulture. Mr Kirk, a first year viticulture student at EIT, was presented with his award at Skeltons’ annual function for its horticultural growers in Hastings on Monday. Mr Kirk works at Morton Estate Vineyards’ Tantallon vineyard in the Ngatarara Triangle grapegrowing region. He is a first-year cadet but has successfully completed a number of year two papers, reports Hawke’s Bay Today.