A $70 million agricultural park will be built in Adelaide to supply Chinese shops with food and wine after an agreement between South Australian and Chinese governments. The industrial food park in Adelaide’s north will produce hundreds of containers of food and wine for China’s Shandong province, SA exporter Tony Royal says. “China’s expanding middle class has an insatiable appetite for high-quality wine and food. However, high tariffs and logistic barrier have constrained the opportunity for export growth,” he said on Wednesday.

Speaking at the world’s first ever WSET alumni networking event in London yesterday, Enotria chief executive Troy Christensen said there was “an unfortunate continuation of destroying value for volume” in the UK wine trade. Christensen, who was invited to speak at an inaugural gathering for Wine & Spirit Education Trust diploma graduates, accused the trade of using nothing but price to drive volumes, but expressed his optimism for the UK due to the high number of wine professionals in the market and the WSET itself.

More and more French wine drinkers are enthusiastically embracing foreign wines, as shown during a recent tour of France by New Zealand Pinot Noir producers – who also offered a critique of Burgundy for good measure, writes Andrew Jefford in his weekly column. This, I guess, is how the wine world moves forward. It starts, typically enough, with an idea – in this case, from Jérôme Faure, group head sommelier for the Constance Hotels group of Indian Ocean hotels and resorts.

An EIT foursome have achieved a first as the only students to win gold in New Zealand’s Bragato Wine Awards. Their medal-winning wine, a 2014 Syrah, was made from grapes donated by C J Pask and grown by company viticulturist Danny van Selm. One of 43 Syrahs entered in the awards, it was judged alongside commercial entries and was one of five golds in its class. “We are looking at international shows now,” Tom laughs of the group’s success.

Imagine this scenario: You’re sitting at the dark mahogany counter of a craft brewpub. Exposed bulbs are dangling from a thatched roof, aluminium pipes snaking across brick walls to red copper conditioning tanks. The building is a repurposed garage, and the doors open onto the outdoor seating area strung with fairy lights. On the handwritten 20-by-10-foot blackboard, you have more than three dozen choices, but it’s clear what you’re not going to get at a pub like this.

It was the wine Max Schubert declared as his greatest triumph. Now, more than four decades later, the legendary Penfolds 1971 Grange has topped a tasting of the world’s greatest wines of the 1970s, beating some of France’s most famous wine estates on the way. Wines worth in excess of $500,000 were sourced from around the world, at a special event commissioned by European luxury magazine publisher FINE and website tastingbook.com. Judges from nine different countries were on hand to assess and score the wines.

Online wine retailer Vinomofo has invested $250,000 in meals delivery business Nourissh, a market which co-founders and joint CEOs Justin Dry and Andre Eikmeier say is exploding overseas and becoming hugely popular in Australia. The two investors, who started Vinomofo in their garage in 2007, see the delivery meals market as a key area of growth for the future of their business.

The Sydney Symphony Orchestra announced a new agreement with Kilikanoon Wines to be the official exclusive still and sparkling wine partner of the SSO. The partnership will see Kilikanoon wines from South Australia’s Clare Valley served at the SSO Vanguard Series, Salon Series, lectures, lunches and special fundraising events for the next two years. Kilikanoon Wines has a long standing relationship with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra; Kilikanoon Proprietor and Brand Ambassador Nathan Waks is a former Co-Principal Cellist for the SSO.

CHAMP Private Equity has had a big win in the United Kingdom, walking away with a six-fold return after the sale of Accolade Wines’ 50 per cent share in the UK’s biggest drinks distributor to pubs, Matthew Clark. CHAMP’s share of the profits of the sale of Matthew Clark is about $200 million, with the other half of the business having been owned by Punch Taverns in the UK. The Matthew Clark business has been sold to another company called Conviviality Retail after a sales process, which delivered a big windfall to Accolade and its 80 per cent owner, CHAMP.

NORTH PLAINS, Ore. (AP) — Bertony Faustin didn’t set out to be Oregon’s first black winemaker. He just wanted to make good wine. But the disbelief that often comes when customers realize a black man owns the winery has worn on him. “People are always surprised. Everybody assumes that … I am not the winemaker,” said the 43-year-old, who four years ago opened Abbey Creek Winery about 20 miles northwest of Portland. “The image of the winemaker is an old white guy. To see that it’s a black man, it takes people aback.”