The Australian wine industry is in flux. Supplies of inexpensive wine produced with maximum added water and minimum human hand that have underpinned Australia’s export effort have been drying up, quite literally. Thanks to the fierce drought that persists in southern Australia, the wine glut is now definitively over. Spot prices of bulk Australian wine rose from A$0.40 in 2006 to over A$1 a litre in 2007. This year more vine growers than last have been buying increasingly expensive water to grow grapes for the harvest currently under way. The 2008 Australian vintage may be slightly bigger than originally predicted – at least 1.4m tonnes, the 2007 total – but it is still likely to be much smaller than the 21st-century average, and is certainly no cheaper to produce.

The biggest all-Australian wine company, Foster’s, started sourcing wine for their popular Lindemans brand in South Africa for the US market and Chile for the UK market (which seems geographically inconvenient) in 2006. This practice – which Troy Hey of Foster’s corrected me by calling “regional expressions of the Lindemans winemaking ethos and quality standards rather than bulk commercial wine exports” – is likely to be applied to other brands as supplies of basic Australian wine become scarcer and more expensive. The phenomenal Australian wine export success story is no longer quite so Australian.