It’s a rough time in the Australian wine industry right now.
Let’s start with the 2026 vintage. This might well be the smallest Australian harvest in decades, and not for good reasons. The three fs – frosts, fires and floods – are the first culprit here, punching holes in yields across the country, from Tumbarumba (multiple rounds of frosts), Central Victoria (where the Longwood fire basically wiped out the whole Strathbogie Ranges region), to the Murray-Darling (with floods in late March delivering plenty of berry split).
Quality-wise, this is hardly a shit vintage (and that sort of generalisation is dumb in gigantic Australia anyway), but lots of producers in premium wine regions are looking at yield drops.
On the other side of the vintage equation, there will be thousands of tonnes of grapes unpicked this year, or indeed from vineyards now ripped up, with the Riverina alone removing 5,000ha of vines. No doubt this is because grape pricing is so low that it costs more to pick grapes than growers will receive. Winemakers aren’t exactly ramping things up either, given that the industry has over 262 million litres of excess juice…
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