Wine News

Almost 5 million litres of Australian red wine will be poured down the drain or turned into vinegar unless sold by February.Growers are desperate to get rid of the equivalent of 7 million bottles of wine, the result of a bumper harvest last year and overplanting of vineyards, to clear the vats for next season. Unless a buyer can be found, the wine is likely to be thrown away or made into vinegar.

"It's a bargain waiting to be snapped up," Winegrape Growers' Council of Australia chief executive Rhett Marlowe said. "If you have a bit of extra cash lying around, I would say buy it cheap. "In the past, brokers in New Zealand have snapped up some very reasonably priced wine. There's no reason why the same thing couldn't be done by a UK buyer. Red wine travels pretty well."

The Australian wine industry doubled its production between 1995 and 2002 to more than 1.5 million tonnes of wine grape s. Rhett Marlowe has said the problems experienced by Western Australia should act as a wake-up call to the rest of the country. "We have been warning since 1998 that the rate of planting was much too fast," he said. "People should have been more cautious."