Wine business is big business these days, and it’s being strongly influenced by analysts and media whose background is business, not wine. That’s fine of course, provided the traders and the critics do their homework. This point was rammed home to me when I scanned the article by Malcolm Maiden on the main business page of today’s The Age newspaper (published in Melbourne). Introducing a discussion of Southcorp’s ‘Project Veraison’, Maiden begins with a paragraph explaining what the term ‘veraison’ is all about. Correctly identifying the word as French, he adds that it ‘describes one of the most pivotal periods for the wine industry, when grapes transform themselves on the vine from hard, green acidic berries to luscious purple and golden-green fruit’. He then adds that it is a ‘time of simultaneous promise and uncertainty for winemakers, because critical pruning and irrigation decisions are required to maximise the yield and quality of the crop’. Veraison, as Maiden implies, occurs towards the end of the season, in mid to late summer, depending on the location of the vineyard. Pruning, on the other hand, is an activity that is empirically required to occur in winter, before the vine reawakens from its dormancy in spring. Why anybody is making pruning decisions at this time of year is entirely beyond me. Furthermore, any Australian winegrower making irrigation decisions around this time in order to maximise yield will quickly go out of business. Even in the bulk-producing inland river regions, the highest economic returns per acre are now achieved in the pursuit of the various quality parameters demanded by the large wine producers, which usually means dropping yields. Isn’t the wine industry now a large enough participant in the milieu of Australian business to justify accurate reporting of so-called fact?
