Wrapped tightly in sleeping bags to keep them from freezing in frigid conditions, Australian winemaker Sirromet’s bottles slowly make their way across the vast Mongolian landscape on the back of a yak.
The wine’s journey from Queensland, about 9,500 kilometres (5,900 miles) as the crow flies, to isolated parts of the sparsely-populated Asian nation is one example of the growing appeal of vintages from ‘down under’.

Ross Tan and Nick van Leeuwen of Australian Natural have spent most of their first year in business relentlessly promoting their organic and biodynamic wines in China. Here is a quick and dirty earthy interview about their organic wines and their views of the market.

Treasury Wine Estates chief executive Mike Clarke is annoyed that one of his main brands, Rosemount, has been an underperformer for so long at a time when most of the other brands in his stable are performing strongly.
Rosemount, which came into the firm’s stable in 2001 when BRW Rich Lister Bob Oatley sold it for a whopping $1.4 billion after building it up as a private company over three decades, is one of the 15 “priority” brands that Mr Clarke has stepped up investment behind since taking over as Treasury chief executive in March 2014.

Glen Howard wants to grow grapes until he dies but fears the industry might croak before he does.
The 63-year-old has tended vines on his picturesque Pokolbin property in the Hunter Valley since he was a teenager, despite the business running at a loss for the better part of the past decade, as a downturn in wine demand has led to a glut in grapes.

In the immediate aftermath of last August’s earthquake in Napa, photographs quickly circulated of shattered wine racks, toppled barrels and what looked like an endless river of spilled red wine. Many worried that the 6.0-magnitude quake would render irreversible damage to Napa Valley’s wine industry.
One year later, the local wine community as a whole is as healthy as ever.

Spring frosts reduced yields on both islands, but a warm, dry summer helped quality.
MaryAnn Worobiec, reporting for Wine Spectator, reports on the 2015 vintage in New Zealand.
Overall, vintners are pleased with the quality of the 2015 vintage, but there is going to be less wine to go around.

Bubbly brought fame and fortune to Champagne, and now, since being named a Unesco world heritage site in July, the region hopes more tourists will make it a holiday destination. Same for Burgundy, whose vineyards are already a big draw – it, too, is now on Unesco’s roll of honour. The double good news marks a major gain for France, which is trying hard to make wine a pillar of its tourist economy.

The owner of New Zealand-based Forrest Wines explains why low-alcohol New World vintages are ‘kicking ass’.
John Forrest says “there’s a huge market for products [that let] you still enjoy the fat, sugar and alcohol, but with less negative health implications. We have dropped the alcohol content in our wines from 14 per cent to 9 per cent, which means 40 per cent less alcohol and 40 per cent fewer calories”.

Australian taxpayers are giving their Kiwi cousins a whopping $70,000 a day to help them make wine.
The Federal Government has raised questions about the viability of the scheme and has established a panel of wine industry luminaries to decide the fate of the wine equalisation tax (WET) by the end of the year.

Each year global wine production creates an estimated 13 million tonnes of waste known as grape marc, or mar as the French say. It’s made up of grape skin, stems and seeds, but it doesn’t have to be waste.
Researchers from the University of Adelaide say it could become a competitive biofuel.