What doesn’t the Hawke’s Bay wine region have going for it? Any asylum-seeking grape variety you care to name can settle there and thrive. The region’s top wine people are a bunch of good bastards, always an important factor. It has history – Mission Estate is the country’s oldest winery – and it has cult wines (eg Te Mata Coleraine, Esk Valley, The Terraces, and Bilancia’s La Collina). Its home base is wealthy and supportive, and only getting more so (just look at the current wave of cashed-up baby boomers moving to the Bay).

Have you ever wanted a glass of wine, but feared it might be too ladylike? Well now the solution that no one needed is here. Mancan Wine is made in California and comes in three varieties – red, white, and sparkling. Its slogan is “Shut up and drink”, which doesn’t strike us as the healthiest attitude to alcohol but then, as women, we’re not their target market.

New Zealand wine company Delegat has entered the Chinese market through a newly-opened office in Shanghai. The company behind the Oyster Bay and Barossa Valley Estate brands has established Delegat (Shanghai) Trading Co. Madeleine Ho, national sales manager, said: “We believe in order to realise the great long-term potential of the market, we need to build enduring relationships.”

UK wine drinkers should explore a wider variety of Australian wines, the winner of the 2015 winner of the Daniel Pontifex Scholarship has said. Quinby Frey, events and tasting manager for Cambridge Wine Merchants, won the scholarship earlier this year. It has enabled her to spend a week visiting the vineyards of South Australia and to travel with nine industry guests of Wine Australia to the Margaret River Gourmet Escape Festival.

Viticulturists and grapegrowers are counting their losses after a frosty end to spring caused damage to vines throughout Marlborough. A succession of frosts in the region this month saw about 40 helicopters dispatched over the Wairau Valley. Cloudy Bay viticulturist Jim White said there was damage in some of their vineyards which were not typically affected by frost, such as vineyards near Renwick. “It’s got us rethinking our frost protection plans,” he said. “We’re starting to consider the value of wind machines in places we wouldn’t normally use them.

Dianne Laurance, the owner and founder of Laurance Wines has said being named the inaugural Champion of Change at the Australian Women in Wine Awards is about her staff as much as it is about her own passion for the wine industry. The Australian Women in Wine Awards recognise the successes of women in the male dominated wine industry and rather than attend, Laurance chose to watch the awards via live streaming with her staff at her cellar.

HAVING only a one hectare (2.5 acres) vineyard has not stopped Michelle Badenhorst from dreaming big. Badenhorst, who has a background in marketing, hopes to grow the vineyard into an agritourism business that will not only produce wine but also beer and be a hospitality venue for weddings, picnics and other events.

John Duval was head winemaker at Penfolds before going solo and making wines on three continents. I grew up Morphett Vale, south of Adelaide, where we had a world-famous Suffolk sheep stud. It was mixed farming, and we coincidentally grew grapes. My father and grandfather, and generations before that, were vignerons, and Penfolds liked our Shiraz so much they took cuttings to replant some of Dr Penfold’s original vineyards at McGill.

CLAIMS that dodgy labour hire companies are making huge margins by supplying workers to farmers have been made on the opening day of a government inquiry. Mildura backpacker hostel owner John George told the Victorian Government inquiry into labour hire firms in Mildura today that some middlemen were making extraordinary profits. George, who runs two backpacker businesses in Mildura, told the hearings that he sourced work for backpackers staying with him in the local area. He said one such job was with a labour hire firm that needed workers for the Wentworth, NSW, vineyard of “one of the largest winemakers in Australia”.

Three years after its crackdown on corruption, China is beginning to behave like any other major wine market – a change that many believe is for the better. Speaking at ProWine Shanghai last week, Richard Halstead, CEO at Wine Intelligence, said that China was morphing into a more “normal” drinks market, without the distorting influence of state-funded banqueting or the “gifting” of fine wine.