Wu Zhendong sees himself as something of a wine buff. The 25-year-old lawyer from China’s western city of Chengdu is a member of his local wine club, likes to drink Chateauneuf-du-Pape – and now, like many of his peers, buys most of his wine online. Wu reflects a major shift in China’s $14.2 billion wine market, where increasingly price-savvy shoppers are driving a boom in online trade, upending the fast-growing market that has long been dominated by large-scale importers.

Western Australian agribusinesses are exploring e-commerce as a method of selling their products into China. While it can be a slow and challenging process, e-commerce is showing signs of success for some sectors. The first order of an Australia Post pilot program to send wine direct to consumers in China will be shipped next month Six months ago, the program between Australia Post and five Western Australian wineries was launched to sell wine on the popular Chinese-owned website 1688.com.

The past three months have been disastrous for the Champagne vineyards because of the awful weather. This will be a make or break week in the grape growers fight against mildew.
Between mid-April and early May there were a succession of heavy frosts. The growers in the Côte des Bar were the most severely affected. In Les Riceys 200 grape growers had 75% of their vines destroyed. The buds were burnt by a surprise winter frost. They are going to have to use their reserve wines and grapes from undamaged vines to make this year’s Champagne if they want to compensate their losses.

The New Zealand Wine Growers vineyard register 2015-18 arrived in Mark Henderson’s inbox recently. While he’s neither a statistician nor a mathematician, he enjoyed having a burrow into the facts and figures within as it gives a real ‘state of the play’ of our local industry. The plantings of all varieties are mapped out by region, and ranked nationally for both the current and previous year, with forecasts for the two years ahead. You can see where things stand, and spot any developing trends.

As the 2016 harvest draws to a close in New Zealand, growers are reporting an excellent vintage with yields up 34% compared to last year’s smaller than average harvest.
“The rebound in production from the 2016 Vintage will be another boost to the export ambitions of our sector. The 2016 Vintage will definitely keep us on track to achieve our goal of $2 billion of wine exports by 2020,” said Philip Gregan, New Zealand Winegrowers CEO.

Jeff Byrne came to Australia in 1995 with a backpack, a love of Caribbean rum and, bizarrely, a love of surfing. Bizarrely because in his homeland of Canada – he’s from Halifax, Nova Scotia – temperatures can regularly plummet to between minus 10 and minus 30 Celsius. Average snowfall is more than 150cm a year. Fast forward 21 years and he’s one of the Hunter Valley’s bright young winemakers, in charge of not one, but three labels … Audrey Wilkinson, Poole’s Rock and Cockfighter’s Ghost.

REDUCING the Wine Equalisation Tax rebate will have a “catastrophic” impact on jobs in the local industry, says the boss behind one of WA’s oldest wineries. The Turnbull Government announced in its Budget that the WET rebate cap would be cut from $500,000 to $350,000 from July next year and further decrease to $290,000 in 2018. The changes are expected to boost government coffers by $300 million in revenue in the next four years, but Sandalford Winery chief executive Grant Brinklow said would also hurt WA’s largely boutique wine industry.

TAFE SA is introducing a new scholarship to support South Australian women looking for careers in wine. TAFE SA Wine & Spirit Education Trust (WSET) and French Wine Scholar Gill Gordon-Smith says she had been inspired by the inaugural Australian Women in Wine Awards in 2015 to show support to other women keen to develop their career in the industry.
McLaren Vale Winemaker and Australian Women in Wine Awards advisory committee member Corrina Wright said the amazing work that women are doing in wine should be more widely recognised.

Alex Beckett, a born and bred Hunter Valley wine enthusiast, has been awarded the prestigious 2016 Sydney Royal Wine Scholarship. Beckett, a fourth year Viticulture and Oenology student at the University of Adelaide, will receive $5000 towards his tertiary studies, as well as the opportunity to steward at the 2016 KPMG Sydney Royal Wine Show, in July.
“I was very lucky to have grown up in the Hunter, which has created opportunities from my first cellar door job through to this amazing scholarship opportunity,” Beckett said.

The overall wine industry consensus is that global climate change is real, but in the vineyard, the results are neither uniform nor clearcut, nor can they strictly be attributed to the climate. Denis Dubourdieu, winemaker and Professor of Oenology at the University of Bordeaux reports the French climate definitely warmed between 2000 and 2010 and, despite variations from year to year, France has produced a number of great vintages within that decade. Meanwhile, in Australia, Brian Croser says by adapting to it, warming has been an overall plus for Tapanappa Wines.