Vignerons in the Hunter Valley say a decade-long battle against gas company AGL has paid off, now they have secured their land against coal seam gas exploration. The New South Wales government has cancelled two petroleum exploration licences in the Hunter, covering much of Wine Country and the Upper Hunter. The licences were sold back to the government under a buy-back scheme and has reduced the coal seam gas exploration footprint in New South Wales to nine per cent.

A West Australian winemaker has been paid by consumers to convert to organic, after a successful crowdfunding campaign helped him buy a Margaret River vineyard. Ben Gould used the money raised through crowdfunding for a deposit to buy the vineyard in Yallingup Siding, where he will produce his wine organically on site. “We told our mailing list: ‘Look, here’s a big place we want to get. We need a deposit, we want to convert it organic, buy your wine from us just for this period of time and we might be able to get it’,” he said.

Global perceptions of Australian wine fall short of the high-quality reality, says Wine Australia, as it prioritises increasing appreciation of the country’s products. The organisation says the challenge affects the whole sector but particularly fine wine, and means products currently command lower prices than warranted. It hopes to tackle the problem with ‘an unwavering focus on increasing the appreciated of our distinctively Australian fine wine.’

The collapse of the Noosa Food & Wine Festival has left a storm of discontent for the many local small businesses, particularly restaurants, queuing up for their share of the $801,195.38 owed to unsecured creditors. The future of the popular festival remains uncertain after the collapse of the company that owned the event and the restaurant Berardo’s. The voluntary administration of Noosa Food & Wine Events Pty Ltd has left not only local restaurants as unsecured creditors but also employee entitlements of $134,316.00.

Champagne’s historic vineyards and wine cellars where the world’s most famous sparkling wines are produced have been listed as a world heritage site by UNESCO. In a double victory for French wine, the vineyards of Burgundy were crowned with the same prestigious distinction by the UN cultural body in the German city of Bonn. It picked out the Avenue de Champagne in Epernay, where the grand houses sit atop miles of cavernous cellars where millions of bottles of bubbly are aged.

Key players in the Yealands Wine Group sale to Marlborough Lines have responded to concerns raised over the deal, saying the buyout of one of the country’s largest wine exporters was thoroughly researched, with due diligence undertaken independently. The lines company will incur no debt as a result of the purchase, which sees the lines company take up an 80 per cent stake, and there has been no conflict of interest between individuals who have close links to both parties, those involved say.

When you go beyond the grape, you enter a strange and uncomfortable wine world. There’s a reason that most wine is made from grapes. The small, sweet berries that make our favourite beverage have the perfect balance of wine-making alchemy: plenty of sugar to convert to alcohol, sufficient acidity for balance and enough tannin to provide structure. But this has definitely not deterred would-be winemakers in regions where it is too hot or too cold to grow grapes.

You can hear laughter from helpers cleaning the remnants of a fire that tore through the 100-year-old family owned Vilagrad Winey on Rukuhia Rd on Monday. The winery is a family heirloom that has been passed down through five generations to the Nooyen family. There are no tears left to cry, there is no room for grieving, there is only hard work, and a lot of laughing. Positivity is the key to getting through a fire that could have extinguished the business.

Carlsberg UK’s on-trade wine division Crown Cellars has beefed up its Spanish and Australian wine ranges as part of its annual range review. The results are seen in its new 2015/16 portfolio which includes 21 new wines in a range of 750 products. Crown Cellars’ MW Jonathan Pedley said Australia needed more regional identity and they therefore added benchmark wines from Coonawarra and the Barossa.

A group of four people has succeeded in wiping out 99.9 per cent of a weed outbreak in the WA’s Kimberley region. They call themselves “team rubber vine”, but they are concerned funding could be diverted to “sexier” environmental causes and their good work could be undone. Project coordinator John Szymanski said it had taken several years of hard physical labour to get to this point. “The rubber vine is almost gone from the Fitzroy Valley, and we are so far ahead of it, that eradication actually is achievable,” he said.