| Nature is at work to reduce the current Australian wine glut - by giving them a dry winter and the consequent lower grape crop.
Western Australia 's wine grape growers are predicting the volume of their crop this year will be about 30 per cent below average.This year's national wine grape crush is expected to be down by 40 per cent with a forecast harvest of 1.2 million tons, down from 2 million tons on the previous vintage.
Harvesting is nearly finished in the Swan Valley and growers there are reporting crops up to 50 per cent below average for the area.
Margaret River growers say they are about 15 per cent below average so far.
John Griffiths from the Wine Industry Association of Western Australia says last year's dry winter is behind the drop.
"I think we had a cool spring in 2005 when the buds for the fruit were formed and just extremely dry year we've had, I think a lot of people have got very dry soils then we've had some hot weather which has exacerbated that," he said.
At the International Wine and Health Summit which was inaugurated at Napa today, Dr. Justin Ardell, owner of the boutique Reilley Winery in Claire Valley told Subhash Arora,' there are some areas where the production has been hit by as high as 50%. The drought has hit the growers very badly, especially after frost had earlier affected the crops already.' He is very certain that they way weather has been behaving, there will not be any surplus next year.' Unfortunately small boutique winery owners have been hit badly as,' We have lost 10,000 cases of our 25,000 cases capacity already. This will cut into our sales and consequent profits for this year.'
Justin promised to up date Arora about the next year's crop in January at the cricket test match between India and Australia who he believes will beat India no matter how the weather behaves.
Source: http://www.abc.net.au |
