Friday marked the first online wine festival that was hosted on e-commerce and trading platform Alibaba’s TMall, which boasted more than 100,000 wines that went up for sale.

A couple of months before he died in 2001, I interviewed veteran wine merchant Dan Murphy, then a frail 84-year-old living in a small unit in suburban Melbourne. Dan told me about his early years selling wine, first in the early 1950s from a small licensed grocery in Chapel Street, Prahran, then in the mid-60s from the much larger Prahran Arcade next door.

13 September 2016: Wineries have the rest of the week to enter this year’s Sydney International Wine Competition. Entries close on Friday 16 September, with judging samples required by 23 September.
Uniquely, the Sydney International Wine Competition judges all its finalists in combination with appropriate food to make the Top 1OO and Blue/Gold winners more relevant to consumers.
Entry for the 37th Sydney International Wine Competition is capped at 2000 wines, with just over 250 places still available for entry.

Making great wine is only part of the wine business. After ensuring the quality is as good as it can be wine producers need to sell their product and because there are so many great wines available it is getting more difficult every year to get on to wine lists or supermarket and liquor store shelves.

European private equity firm PAI Partners is running the numbers on Australia’s Accolade Wines, sources told Street Talk. As Street Talk revealed on Monday, PAI Partners is performing preliminary due diligence on the Australian wine bottler, seeking to strike as Accolade’s biggest shareholder CHAMP Private Equity considers exit options after six years with the company.

Hundreds of labels are far from the quaint, handmade products their names might suggest. In reality they are mostly the product of the marketing department at one of our two major retailers, Woolworths and Coles, which now control more than 70 per cent of what they call “off premise” wine sales but what you and I know as buying from a bottle shop.

We all see it and taste it differently but the one thing everyone needs to remember is that wine is all about pleasure. It’s just a drink, often one with an aura of mystique, and sometimes that’s a good thing, sometimes it’s not. Nick Stock reports for the Herald Sun.

A GRANITE Belt winery has dominated the Queensland Wine Awards, taking out five major accolades. Ballandean Estate Wines was named as Winery of the Year, Cellar Door of the Year and Champion Wine of Show.

One winery is seeking inspiration from the man who landscaped Hobbiton, at least three are opening new or refurbished tasting rooms and another is renovating a restaurant. It’s all part of a plan to lure tourists to New Zealand’s premier wine region.

Charles Augustus Banks IV, a noted wine investor behind such powerhouse California labels as Mayacamas and Screaming Eagle, was arrested Friday in San Antonio on charges of defrauding retired basketball star Tim Duncan. Although Banks, 48, was soon released on $1 million bail, he faces trouble on several fronts.