As visitors outnumber residents in the California wine industry’s spiritual home, is Napa cooking its golden goose? What is a winery; a place to make wine, or an event center to host tastings? In grappling with that question, Napa Valley is also struggling with a bigger one – what is a paradise? Napa currently has more cars driving into and out of the county every day than it has residents. It has the nation’s first agricultural preservation law, but it grants variances to that law several times a year that allow people like Philippe Melka to build closer to the road than the law supposedly allows.

Morley Hewitt has loved ”every minute” of his involvement with the Central Otago wine industry. Hewitt is managing director of VinPro, a company which had its origins as a humble mobile bottling plant. Over the past 20 years, it has grown to be one of the larger employers in Cromwell and now does the bottling for the majority of Central Otago wine producers. ”It’s a great business – it’s the romance, food, wine … It’s all there. I’m very proud of the Central Otago industry.”

Marlborough’s gross domestic product has increased by $213 million, thanks to the region’s thriving wine industry. The latest figures from Statistics New Zealand show the region’s GDP increased from $2.069 billion to $2.282b in the year ending March 2014 – the third-highest increase in the country.
Wine Marlborough general manager Marcus Pickens said the figures showed the region benefited when the wine sector performed well and showed profitable growth.

The Australian Grape and Wine Authority (AGWA) are seeking applicants for non-executive directors to join their board for a part-time term of up to three years. As the current term for each of AGWA’s seven non-executive directors nears its end, a spokesperson for the industry body said they are interested in hearing from applicants who come from a variety of career backgrounds. Supporting the national wine sector by investing in research and development, growing global demand and protecting the reputation of Australian wine, AGWA is funded by grapegrowers, winemakers and wine exporters as well as the Australian Government.

Grapegrowers and winemakers in the Canberra district are hailing a bumper 2015 season, following what have been described by many as the best growing conditions in years. This year grape quality and crop volumes are excellent, according to premium Shiraz grapegrower Brian Binning from Yass.
The harvest can be a lottery, but Binning said things were shaping up well for one of the best years on record. “It’s very good harvest – the best we’ve had since we grafted our vines over to Shiraz,” he said.

Melbourne used to be one of the Great Wine Capitals of the World: the network – club if you like – of wine-centric cities, established in 1996 by the Bordeaux Chamber of Commerce. Its members now include Bilbao (for Rioja in Spain), Cape Town (for the Cape Winelands of South Africa), Mainz (for the Rheinhessen), Porto (for the Douro in Portugal), San Francisco (for the Napa Valley in the US), Valparaiso (for the Casablanca Valley in Chile), Mendoza (Argentina), and the aforementioned Bordeaux.

A Western Australian grape grower has been able to get a second crop of fruit, after a hail storm wiped out most of his vineyard. “The hail itself is what I class as severe. All the green foliage was fully defoliated,” said Rod Hallett of Alkoomi Wines in Frankland River, 320 kilometres south-east of Perth. After some quick thinking and heavy pruning Hallett said he was thrilled to see some crop return, after 90 per cent of his vineyard was essentially wiped out.

Maintaining competitiveness in the retail environment will be on the agenda in Adelaide, at WineTech 2015 in July. Hosting two seminars on July 14, Wine Communicators of Australia (WCA) plan to focus on some of the options and opportunities available to wine businesses. As well as looking at what can be learned from the experiences and responses of other sectors of the food, beverage and agriculture industries, WCA will explore the growth of online retail sites and the unrelenting slashed prices that come with it.

(Bloomberg) — Argentine grape growers for low quality, bulk wines must improve standards, create new products or switch to other fruits and vegetables to return to profitability, Mendoza Governor Francisco Perez said. A drop in consumption of box wine and over production of the grapes has kept the price paid to producers unchanged for the past three to four years amid inflation above 20 percent, the governor said in an interview in his office in Mendoza after hosting the annual harvest festival.

Furious seems a fair way to describe the mood at a creditors’ meeting of the latest wine investment firm to bite the dust. Around 600 investors have been left in the lurch by the collapse of APW Asset Management Ltd, formerly known as Australian Portfolio Wines. Except that it might not have collapsed at all. What was supposed to have been the creditors’ meeting descended into farce when sole director Chima Maduabuchukwu – Madu for short – declared that he had not appointed a -liquidator after all.