Wine connoisseurs will get a taste of the future at a special Barossa wine tasting this month. Appropriately the tasting will be held on Thursday, 15 December during one of the State’s hottest months of the year. The tasting will feature Barossa wines from grapes grown at temperatures expected to prevail in the year 2050. At the Barossa workshop interested people will have an opportunity to taste wines produced under current climate side-by-side with wines produced from fruit grown under elevated temperature, reports the Stock Journal.

Twelve months ago Brian Schmidt was living a routine life, working Monday to Friday in Canberra and trying his hand at winemaking after hours. Since the 44-year-old was named as a winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics, things have changed. “There’s not a lot of free time, that’s for sure,” Prof Schmidt told AAP by phone from Stockholm where he will collect his Nobel prize on Saturday. Typically in early December Prof Schmidt spends his spare time in shorts and a T-shirt at his 35-hectare farm just outside Canberra, where he runs a vineyard and winery, reports the Sydney Morning Herald.

Iconic wine brand Penfolds has appointed Gary Burnand as its managing director. Brand owner Treasury Wine Estates said Burnand will be responsible for “driving Penfolds strategic direction” and will report to the group chief executive David Dearie. Burnand has more than 20 years of experience in senior marketing and strategic roles in the food, apparel and alcohol categories of Europe, Asia Pacific and the USA, reports Harpers Wine & Spirit.

Improved profits being made by wine companies will take about two years to filter through to growers, says Winegrowers New Zealand chairman Stuart Smith. The Deloitte and NZ Winegrowers’s sixth annual wine industry benchmarking survey released this week confirmed what he was hearing on the ground, Mr Smith, of Fairhall, Blenheim, said. Wine companies’ position was improving but no-one was dancing in the streets, reports The Marlborough Express.

Conrad Kirk, described as a “talent” on Hawke’s Bay’s wine scene, is the inaugural recipient of Skeltons Excellence Award for viticulture. Mr Kirk, a first year viticulture student at EIT, was presented with his award at Skeltons’ annual function for its horticultural growers in Hastings on Monday. Mr Kirk works at Morton Estate Vineyards’ Tantallon vineyard in the Ngatarara Triangle grapegrowing region. He is a first-year cadet but has successfully completed a number of year two papers, reports Hawke’s Bay Today.

This summer New Zealand is set to experience its first “Summer of Riesling”. From a one-man mission started by New York restaurateur, Paul Grieco a few years back to get more people to experience his favourite grape, the movement has now gone global. And in January Grieco, and the concept, are coming to our shores, spreading the word among the wine drinkers of New Zealand that Riesling rocks, writes Jo Burzynsca in The New Zealand Herald.

New research has found a convenient and practical use for the leftover material from winemaking that will help two sometimes fiercely competing worlds; the environment and agriculture.When fed the stems, seeds and skins that were left over from making red wine, material known as grape marc, the methane emissions from dairy cows dropped by 20 per cent. The study, conducted at the Victorian Department of Primary Industries dairy research centre, also found that the cows’ milk production increased by 5 per cent, reports The Sydney Morning Herald.

2011 was a difficult season for winegrape growers in the Riverland. Many had hopes that 2011 would mean a financial turnaround. But after about eight of years of drought, compounded by low water allocation and low commodity prices, Riverland winegrape growers were confronted by a rising dollar and a global oversupply of winegrapes. This year there are signs that prices for grapes may be on the up but there are no guarantees that this harvest will deliver what wine grapegrowers need, reports ABC News.

The Margaret River Wine Industry Association has offered thanks on the industry’s behalf to all the emergency services personnel, volunteer fire fighters and associated community groups along with government agencies who worked hard in extreme circumstances during last week’s fire emergency, reports The Augusta-Margaret River Mail. Association vice president, Stuart Watson of Woodland Wines said, “It was the collective effort of these people working as a team who saved our region.

Irrigators in the southern Murray-Darling Basin may be able to pick up some water entitlement bargains in the next 13 months, according to water trading company Waterfind. Waterfind expects prices for permanent water will plummet by 15 to 25 per cent because of the temporary removal of Commonwealth Government water buying tenders. It has made the prediction in an analysis released this week of the draft Basin Plan, reports The Land.