This article originally appeared in the February/March 2011 issue of 'Hotel and Restaurant Times'.

Major and minor weather events have wreaked havoc with harvests wherever grapes are grown, since time immemorial.
Wind-borne bacteria have spread the dreaded phyloxera disease in many wine regions around the world, while early and late frosts wipe out large sections of the harvest in regions from The Rhine to Niagara. Last year a massive earthquake devastated vineyards and wineries in Chile, and this year it has been the turn of Australia.
While the first wave of flooding was concentrated on Queensland, and particularly the area around Brisbane, it avoided most of the vineyards. A second wave in January however hit Victoria in the South East of Australia which is a major wine-growing area. Here, growers lost an estimated 20 per cent of their crop to battering rainstorms and flooding just weeks ahead of the harvest. Where grapes remained standing, they became vulnerable to fungal diseases. The worst hit areas have been Grampians, Great Western and Pyrenees. Throughout southeastern Australia, downy and powdery mildew are already threatening to become the primary concerns this vintage. In the Clare Valley in South Australia, locals estimate that more than 10 percent of the region’s crop has already been affected by these fungal diseases. As floodwaters from both the Victorian and Queensland floods make their way toward the river systems of the Riverina and Riverland, Australia’s largest wine regions, there are widespread fears of outbreaks of botrytis.
This catastrophe follows closely on several years of drought in the Australian Murray-Darling basin which left thousands of acres of vines gasping for water. With typical courage and pragmatism the Australian wine industry has responded to these weather events with a series of initiatives which include new viticultural practices, more careful husbandry of  water supplies and , in the wake of the most recent flooding, a major fund-raising drive to help winegrowers and their families whose crops have been destroyed.
The combined impact on the Australian wine industry has been a downturn in production which will again be evident this year. In 2008 Australia crushed 1.83m. tonnes of grapes but this fell by almost 7% to 1.7m. tonnes in 2009. Best estimates are that the current harvest will be around 1.4m. tonnes. The impact of these smaller harvests on Australian wine prices has not been very evident however for the good reason that the country has been producing more wine than it can sell in bottle for many years and has large stocks of good quality wine in stock. Even in recent years Australian wine companies have been selling bulk wine to export markets for blending and have been exporting large quantities of entry-level wines which are bottled in Europe and the USA.  Unlike a ‘weather event’ in Bordeaux or Burgundy, which can send prices soaring, the overall impact of the droughts and floods on mainstream Australian wines, is likely to be negligible. Major retailers like Tesco and Lidl may find some difficulty in sourcing low-priced wines in Australia this year, but if this is the case, they will simply turn to other volume producers such as Chile, Argentina or South Africa for their supplies. Much depends on what vineyards are hit. If they are owned by volume producers, then prices will remain much the same, but if they are premium estates with a small production, prices will probably move upwards.
At this distance we can remain detached from the earth quakes, floods and droughts which afflict wine-growing areas, but we should nevertheless spare a thought for the thousands of farmers and wine industry families whose life has been devastated by wind, rain and storm.