Sweet Sassy Mo-Lassy

There are those of us in the industry (myself included) who from time to time get all wrapped up in the 'romance' of wine, the small vineyards, hand crafted, miniscule production kind of stuff. On the contrary, every now and then, something comes down the pike and you start to feel like your head is going to explode.

This is one of those times.

The stunning growth of the Australian wine industry has come to a dramatic halt with at least 60,000 tonnes of grapes -- equivalent to 55 million bottles -- left unpicked and almost an entire 12-month supply of wine still in vats from last year.

For the mathematically challenged, that 55m equals jsut under 4.6 MILLION cases of wine. I feel it no understatement to say - that's a shit-ton of wine to just leave on the vine.

It goes on:

He said estimates of wine still in storage varied from between 500 million and 900million litres.

Again, going back to the calculator, the amount of juice sitting in 'storage' amounts to somewhere between 375M and 675M bottles of 'finished wine'. Granted, a great deal of this stuff will processed out into various 'alco-beverages' but still, has there been a better example of the old phrase 'Too much of a good thing'.


I would think that even a leviathan such as [yellow tail] might have a little difficulty dealing with these sorts of numbers.



Maybe this could become the 'alternative fuel' that the clowns on TV keep talking about. Anyone interested in R/D for this type of thing ought to head down under, I suspect you can get testing material for pennies on the dollar.