A lawyer specialising in the wine industry says family-run vineyards need to have clear succession plans in place, in order for the industry to remain strong into the future. Wine lawyer Will Taylor said as vignerons aged, businesses needed to prepare for generational change in the industry.
He said there were conflict-avoiding and business-development reasons for having a proper succession plan in place.
“I see the disasters in my job when people don’t plan for succession,” he said.

CHAMPAGNE connoisseur Peta Baverstock is pitting her knowledge against some of the nation’s best as a finalist in the Vin de Champagne Awards in Sydney, reports The Advertiser.
The Robe winemaker and cellar door manager was the only South Australian named among the top six professionals in the country to face the judging panel and undergo a blind tasting at the prestigious award event next month.

In Max Allen’s latest wine column for The Australian, he reported on a recent tasting from the winemakers of Victoria’s Macedon Ranges. It was a good opportunity to catch up with the goings-on in this high, sprawling region north of Melbourne, to see what’s working well in its vineyards, planted variously on the slopes of old volcanoes, in forest-fringed gullies and on boulder-strewn granite plateaus.

Perennial wine winner Villa Maria again demonstrated its dominance by taking out the top prizes at the first of the 2016 awards. A Villa Maria Chardonnay and a Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot were the champion white and red at the Romeo Bragato Wine Awards. The Villa Maria Single Vineyard Ihumatao Chardonnay 2014 won the overall trophy as well as its category and the white wine section.

Central Otago winegrowers Roger and Jean Gibson are elated that a wine from their Lowburn Ferry vineyard has ranked Number One in high profile Decanter magazine in the UK. The in-depth tasting of more than 170 Pinot Noirs from across New Zealand in Decanter’s September 2016 issue was carried out by a panel of three prominent UK industry wine judges. Lowburn Ferry Home Block Pinot Noir 2014 scored 96 points out of a possible 100, giving it ‘outstanding’ status in the tasting.
In the covering feature article reviewing the tasting, New Zealand is described as being “the best Pinot-producing country outside of France”.

“California Celebrity Vineyards” raises intriguing questions about how we vino buffs should relate to celebrity-tagged wines. Are any of them actually really good? Do they deliver value for the dollar? How involved with the winemaking should we expect celebrities to be? (Quick answer: Mostly, not very!) If you’re inclined to give the back of your hand to the whole business of celebrity wine, you’ll probably agree with veteran California winemaker Stuart Smith, who says, “my first thought is that celebrities getting into wine is God’s way of telling them that they have too much money”.

The CEO of Australian Vintage Limited, Neil McGuigan, has called on the Government to continue its reforms to the Wine Equalisation Tax (WET) Rebate and remove it from bulk wine immediately.
As part of his Budget in May, Treasurer Scott Morrison announced some changes to the WET Rebate, including a tightening of the eligibility criteria and a stepped reduction in the rebate cap.
However McGuigan has told The Shout, that while he supports the rebate for boutique producers it should be taken away from bulk wine straight away.

One of New Zealand’s largest wine companies is selling its Hawke’s Bay winery and vineyards and moving production to Marlborough. Yealands Estate Wines has put the Crossroads operations on the market, including three vineyards, the winery and the cellar door. However, the Crossroads brand, business and existing stock in bottles, barrels, and tanks, are not part of the sale. This decision comes just one year after Peter Yealands sold the majority of his company to Marlborough Lines.

Making wine may be one of the most romantic and evocative of all professions, but the reality is that it’s brutally difficult to earn a reliable living, and often subject to the whims of forces beyond anyone’s control. Even producers that have been crafting excellent wine for several generations aren’t immune: One or two bad harvests in a row, an ill-timed hail storm, an earthquake that topples stocks of barrels filled with aging wine—all of these can wreak havoc on even the most economically fastidious wine producer.

What does terroir mean in an age of big data and social media, a world awash in information yet still unable to agree on the distinguishing role of place in winemaking? When scientists from a variety of disciplines gathered in Oregon last month for the XI International Terroir Congress, the question was a hot topic. Between dozens of papers that reported results from projects around the globe that seek a better understanding of the conditions under which grapes grow and wines are made, several papers dug into the thorny issue of what we talk about when we talk about terroir.