Iconic Hunter Valley winemaker, Andrew Thomas of Thomas Wines, has opened a dedicated cellar door, just ahead of his 30th consecutive Hunter Valley vintage. Consumers can for the first time, taste and purchase the full range of Thomas Wines, including the popular Kiss Shiraz and Braemore Semillon, direct from the source at the cellar door, located within the Tuscany Wine Estate complex on the corner of Hermitage Road and Mistletoe Lane, Pokolbin.

Italian variety Fiano may be the “closest to being McLaren Vale’s white” one producer as postulated. Speaking to a group on a recent Wine Australia trip, Corrina Wright of Oliver’s Taranga suggested that the future for the Italian variety in McLaren Vale was very strong indeed, along with other Mediterranean grapes such as Vermentino.

The South Australian Wine Industry Association will follow through on a submission to the Fair Work Commission to change the modern award rate for casual employees working in the wine sector. The SA Wine Industry Association wants to halve the minimum engagement time casual employees are entitled to work, from four to two hours.

The Len Evans Tutorial Qantas Dux for 2015 is Adam Cotterell from Melbourne. Cotterell is the Retail Sales and Events Manager at City Wine Shop Melbourne which is obviously a training ground for the LET with a previous Dux and two scholars coming from City Wine Shop. As Dux of the 2015 course, Cotterell has now been guaranteed judging positions at two of Australia’s most premier wine shows, the Sydney Royal Wine Show and the National Wine Show in Canberra.

The Wine Microbiology and Microbial Biotechnology Laboratory at The University of Adelaide has developed a customized solution offering fully automated sampling for yeast fermentations. Based on a Freedom EVO 200 platform, this system frees researchers from the need to manually aliquot samples day and night for up to three weeks.

El Nino as a hot dry phenomenon seems meaningless to Queensland farmers who have survived more than three years of drought. Now as Jenny Underwood hears warnings to ‘be prepared for El Nino this summer’, she feels her skin crawl. “There are areas of western and northern Queensland that have had very little rain for the past three to four years,” Jenny Underwood said. “To suddenly be told, ‘Be prepared it’s going to get drier and hotter, we’re going to call it El Nino.’

Wine Vision 2015 will challenge ‘old thinking’ with its focus on innovation, new routes to market and sustainability with commercial rewards, organisers said. The third Wine Vision, held in Bilbao from December 9, hopes to challenge traditional thinking in the wine industry by showcasing high-growth new market entrants and by exploring innovative approaches to producing wine, selling it, creating powerful brands and extending consumer markets.

Why direct-to-consumer sales are so important to wineries if many of the smaller, family-owned wineries are to survive: They need to sell a large percentage of their wine directly to the consumer either at the winery or through wine clubs. There is no other way. Over the last 25-30 years there has been a great consolidation of wine distributors coinciding with a tremendous expansion in the number of wineries. In fact there are only two remaining giant, national distributors and a small number of regional ones.

I have been in the wine industry for 13 years, which is not a lot of time, relatively speaking, but enough to notice the lack of marketing and branding in this sector. Coming from multinational marketing and communications departments where I worked on developing fast-moving consumer goods brands that most of us consume every day, I find it in bizarre contrast that in the wine industry, the main business focus is not on building brands, but building walls.

French connoisseurs sold the Chinese pomp and prestige, until they started manufacturing it themselves. In 1996, Chinese premier Li Peng surprised his audience at the National People’s Congress by toasting the Ninth Five-Year Plan with red wine: “Drinking fruit wines is helpful to our health, does not waste grain, and is good for social ethics,” he announced. For China’s rapidly growing underclass, this gesture signalled a commitment to rein in the fraud and waste epitomized by party banquets