Australia welcomes reduced harvest

Australia is making 'good progress' in reducing its wine glut and now needs to start rebuilding its reputation, a leading industry body says.

Following the release of the Winemakers’ Federation of Australia’s vintage report, which estimates that the size of the 2010 Australian grape harvest has fallen to 1.53m tonnes, the Federation’s chief executive Stephen Strachan told decanter.com, ‘We are pretty pleased.

‘It shows that the industry adjustment process is well underway. While the supply issues are still there, the industry focus is rebuilding confidence. We need to build our reputation internationally. We don’t want to be the country that is on promotion most often.’

This year’s crush marks a 12% decrease on 2009 and represents a 300,000 tonne reduction compared with the 2008 vintage.

Strachan said, ‘We are not adding to the surplus and that’s got to be a good thing. We need to have another reduced intake next year, then we may be able to say we have turned the corner.’

It is estimated that 8-12,000ha of vines have been removed or abandoned in Australia in the past year.

‘We still have further to go but we never thought there would be such a large reduction in one year,’ added Strachan.

Written by Rebecca Gibb

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Rebecca Gibb MW is a wine journalist and editor who has also founded Bamboozled games, ‘the world’s first wine and spirit puzzle makers’. Having spent six years living in New Zealand, she has recently returned to her native north-east England. While in New Zealand, she became a Master of Wine, graduating top of her class and winning the Madame Bollinger medal for excellence in tasting. A former winner of both the UK’s young wine writer of the year and the Louis Roederer Emerging Wine Writer, her first book The Wines of New Zealand was published in 2018. She also runs wine events and has her own consultancy business The Drinks Project. She was a judge at the 2019 Decanter World Wine Awards (DWWA).