​Australia – turning the battleship around

Over the last difficult decade for Australian wine, one of the major criticisms of Wine Australia, the old generic promotional body, was that it lacked any clear leadership. Five years ago, at the height of general discontent, I wrote in the Australian press that ‘Australian winemakers have stopped waiting for their lumbering industry battleship organisation to show the lead, and have mustered their own fast-moving flotilla of grass-roots initiatives’ – initiatives such as McLaren Vale’s world-leading Sustainable Australia Winegrowing programme (which has now, finally, been adopted as part of the industry’s environmental assurance scheme), the First Families of Wine group...