This is rosé wine country, with many spectacular vineyards belonging to domaines (wine estates) or private winegrowers.
EVER since they started pumping water for their vines, the winegrowers of Langhorne Creek have learnt to cope with crises.
New Zealand Winegrowers (NZWG), a national trade body, boasts that the industry sold 1 billion glasses of wine in nearly 100 countries.
Burgundy's winegrowers also staged furious protests at their annual meeting in July.
"With quality wines, you need 15 to 20 years for an investment to mature," says Aníbal Ariztía of the main winegrowers' association.
For almost 30 years French winegrowers battled to combat the dastardly bug while wine yields plummeted.
Europe's Mexico option Reprints Related items A survey of wine: The globe in a glassDec 16th 1999But France's winegrowers have a clever solution too.
Faced with the unpalatable prospect of destroying 10m litres of unsold Beaujolais wine the equivalent of around 13m bottles Maurice Large, president of the Beaujolais winegrowers' association, has accused modern wine-buyers of being "philistines".
LVMH, a French luxury-goods conglomerate which owns Veuve Clicquot among other brands, was reduced to courting tiny winegrowers.
German brewers, to the chagrin of many, failed to secure the beer franchise, which the organisers, FIFA, sold to Anheuser-Busch, the American brewers responsible for Budweiser, for a reported €40m ($47.6m).German winegrowers see the football tournament as an unparalleled opportunity to smash the country's beer-hall stereotype and restore the fading fortunes of German winemakers.
But the smiles could be wiped off winegrowers' faces if wood decay disease, which now affects 12 per cent of vines in all of France's wine-growing regions, continues its relentless march across the country.
