The Barossa Council has hired a legal team to review the South Australian Government’s planned protection zone. A reworked interim development plan amendment and two new bills have been introduced to State Parliament. The plan aims to protect wine regions near Adelaide from urban sprawl. Louis Monteduro from the Barossa Council says its main concern is how much control the Government will have over the approval of future development, reports ABC News.

WA wineries would be able to sell more wine at farmers’ markets, have an off-site shopfront and share cellar door facilities under a push by the peak wine body to change the State’s liquor laws. The WA Wine Industry Association wants the State Government to change 20-year-old rules governing how small to medium producers can sell wine, as part of a review of the Liquor Control Act. Association general manager Aymee Mastaglia said many of WA’s 382 wine producers found it difficult to sell through bottle shops, so were reliant on cellar door sales, reports the West Australian.

Wine regions across South Australia are trumpeting one of the best vintages for many years. Renowned SA winemaker Robert O’Callaghan describes it as one of the three best vintages in his 42 years in the Barossa Valley. Mr O’Callaghan said the outstanding quality vintage would lead to improved wine sales and higher prices for premium Barossa wines. McLaren Vale has also recorded one of its best vintages in the past 20 years with Serafino Wines chief winemaker Charles Whish likening it to conditions between 1994 and 1996, reports Adelaide Now.

The volume of Australian wine exports fell by 7 per cent in the 12 months to March to 705 million litres valued at $1.9 billion, new figures from Wine Australia show. The average value of both bottled and bulk wine exports increased. However, an increase in the share of bulk wine exports in the mix resulted in the overall average value declining by 1 per cent to $2.65 per litre. Wine Australia said the overall slide in export volumes was driven by a decline in bottled wine exports offsetting an increase in bulk wine exports, reports the Sydney Morning Herald.

Haphazard ripening has been a dominant feature of this year’s vintage at Allan Scott Wines in Marlborough. Allan Scott Wines winemaker Bruce Abbott was surprised to find the pinot and chardonnay grapes on its vineyards were the last varieties to ripen. “It’s usually the other way around, but it’s just been all over the place this year,” he said. Mr Abbott attributed the unusual ripening pattern to bad weather in December and for much of summer, followed by a run of good weather after Easter, reports The Press.

Plummeting temperatures meant activated frost alarms and helicopters placed on standby around Marlborough overnight on Wednesday. Climate Consulting climatologist Stu Powell said a slight frost would have been felt in the Wairau Valley and at Fairhall, which recorded the lowest temperature in the region, -0.2degC. He expected many vineyards would be wanting frost alerts until at least the first week of May this year, due to the late grape harvest, reports The Marlborough Express.

This year’s national grape harvest is running two or three weeks later than usual but hopes are high that quality will not be compromised, reports the Bay of Plenty Times. Winegrowers’ chief executive Philip Gregan says that despite the harvest being two or three weeks behind there are signs that the grapes were of good quality. “The vintage is late in many parts of the country but that does not mean we’re not going to have a good one,” Gregan says. “It’s important not to confuse lateness with poor quality.”

Ongoing spray drift complaints throughout South Australia have led to farmers being urged to use very coarse and extremely coarse droplets in summer spraying of translocated herbicides. Mid North consultant Mick Faulkner said that while there appeared to be some improvement in broadacre spraying practices over the past summer, damage had again occurred in the Clare and Barossa Valleys and the Riverland, reports the Stock Journal. “This occurred despite the threat of losing valuable chemicals and increased spraying buffer zones,” he said.

Frustrated with people’s attitude to Queensland wines, the owner of Sirromet has bought five hotels in the past 10 months and the only wine available to customers would be the winery’s own. Sirromet Wines founder Terry Morris and business partner Dean Merrell have taken advantage of the depressed property market to buy up hotels at rock bottom prices, with two hotels bought in the past week, reports the Brisbane Times.

Hand-made, hand-crafted and artisan are more often trendy marketing come-on words to help sell cheeses, chocolates, wines and the like rather than accurate descriptors of how the things are actually made. But at Julieanne and Neil Snare’s 3ha Winstead vineyard at Bagdad, the wines are truly hand-made. There are no pumps, no large hoses snaking between stainless steel tanks, no cooling coils, nothing automatic and no buttons to press. Instead there are an awful lot of big buckets, reports The Mercury.