Move over chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc, Queensland winemakers say alternative wine varieties are on the way. Leanne Puglisi-Gangemi’s family has been making wine in Ballandeen on Queensland’s Granite Belt since the 1960s. She says despite the cliches and stereotypes surrounding Queensland wine, “things in the industry are more positive than ever”. Leanne says Granite Belt growers embraced alternate grape varieties several years ago, and the gamble has started to pay off.

More than 200 people attended the PIRSA Research Station in the Barossa on Wednesday, as grape growers and technical viticulturists gathered from across the Barossa and from Victoria, McLaren Vale, Clare Valley and The Riverland for the 2015 Barossa Pruning Expo. The visitors proved a cut above the local entrants in the pruning competition with Peter Clark, from the Taltarni Vineyards in Victoria’s Pyrenees taking out the Individual Rod &Spur; James Brooksby won the Individual Spur and the Annie’s Lane crew of Keith Zubrinich, Stephen McKenzie and James Brooksby won the Team Competition. It was a big day for Brooksby who took home the Wolf Blass Shield for the best combined result across the two pruning disciplines.

Peter Gago, the winemaker of Australia’s most prestigious wine Penfold’s Grange, supports a volumetric tax on wine which would see the price of bulk and cheaper rise in contrast to a fall at the premium end of the market. At the launch of a $10 million redevelopment at Treasury Wine Estates’ ancestral home of Grange at Magill Estate today, Mr Gago said the future of the wine industry was at the premium end of the market.

Montréal police arrested 12 individuals—many in the wine industry—last month in what authorities are calling “one of the most [significant] tax-evasion schemes referring to alcohol contraband in Quebec.” Authorities allege that 20 different labels being sold by the First Nations Winery were actually just Italian bulk wine doctored with different flavor adulterants, and now several Canadian winemakers and other prominent industry members are behind bars. Some 23,500 gallons of wine—the equivalent of 9,900 cases—were seized in warehouses and private residences over the course of 32 raids, the culmination of a sting operation dubbed “Project Malbec.”

If each new vintage is like a newborn baby, then Nick Nobilo has a lot of children to keep track of. The 71-year-old, who today is appointed an officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, has 54 behind him after leaving school at 17 to join the family business. That business was House of Nobilo, set up in 1944 by his father, Nikola Nobilo – a man credited with guiding New Zealand palates away from sherry and port to the delicate taste of table wine. Winemaking, it seems, is in the blood – Nobilo’s brothers Steve and Mark were also heavily involved in developing the business.

China is now the Australian wine industry’s third largest overseas market by value, with exports worth $242 million last year. But increasingly the premium wine being served at the banquet tables of the rising Chinese middle classes is not imported – but made in China. China now has the second largest amount of land given over to wine growing in the world, and foreign winemakers are gaining a piece of the action.

Quality, not quantity, might be the byword for wine producers and exporters this season. Chris Stroud, of New Zealand Wine Growers, said the 2015 vintage was expected to be down about 25 per cent on 2014, a record year, but there was little cause for concern. Wine Growers chief executive Philip Gregan said, in March, that the warm, dry summer of 2015 was perfect for ripening grapes, and the prospects were for a high quality vintage. Although the the 2015 vintage would be significantly smaller than last year, sales in the year ahead will be supported by stocks from 2014.

Nurturing China’s growing wine consumption is more about introducing a new food culture than selling a quality drop, according to a senior winemaker. Katnook Estate’s Wayne Stehbens has been selling wine into China for 15 years and said the biggest challenge was finding a time and place for it to be enjoyed. “Their idea of eating food is more a function of their life, rather than a social occasion,” he said. “If you go to a restaurant you order the meal, the meal is put on the table and it’s eaten very quickly; there’s hardly time to even enjoy a bottle of wine.”

Mastermind Consulting, a Sydney-based marketing consultancy that specialises in digital and social media, has today released a comprehensive white paper titled The State of the Australian and New Zealand Wine Industry on Facebook. This is the first known paper of its kind, focusing specifically on the Australian and New Zealand wine industries to provide general trends and insights for wineries to consider as part of their broader marketing plan.

The University of Adelaide will host a free lecture to help grapegrowers and winemakers deal with the devastating consequences of smoke taint next week. Part of the university’s ‘Research Tuesdays’ initiative, the ‘smoke in the barrel’ seminar will discuss how science is helping grape and wine producers overcome the effects of bushfire smoke taint. In recent years, the destructive impact of bushfires has been felt worldwide, and their frequency and ferocity is only expected to increase with climate change.