Wet weather hammers grape growers

SEEING this year's prime grapes withered and moldering on the vine makes Lyndon Morrison wild.

Lyndon Morrison

SEEING this year's prime grapes withered and moldering on the vine makes Lyndon Morrison wild.

It's a rotten shame in more ways than one: wet conditions across Australia's eastern states have fostered a plague of disease and decay this season. Mr Morrison has already lost half the crop from parts of his 180-acre vineyard near Mildura on Victoria's northern border; another 40 to 50 acres worth may yet be rejected as too damaged by the wineries.

With losses rising like the damp, the third-generation grape grower wonders if he will have to sell part of his family's land in order to make ends meet.

"This season has been very bad," Mr Morrison said.

"We thought we were going to have a fairly good crop but all that rain has demolished maybe half of it now.

"I feel upset, angry - it just makes me wild."

Mr Morrison said he had already lost at least $100,000 worth of grapes and spent close to $30,000 extra on chemicals battling the blight.

"It's got to the stage where we might have to sell something," he said.

Mr Morrison, like many of his farming neighbours, was hoping for a good crop this drought-breaking year.

Not so.

CEO of the Murray Valley Winegrowers association, Mark McKenzie, said the season has been worse than any the industry suffered during the drought.

"It's a continuation of the drought years but worse," Mr McKenzie said.

"In the drought we had less irrigation water and low yields, but we didn't ever have a year where we had a total right-off crop."

Mr McKenzie's colleague, the association's chairman and local grape grower, Dennis Mills, agreed.

"We've had about 440 mm (of rain) since the beginning of January. When you think about our annual rainfall being maybe 250 mm, in a very good year, we have already had double that in three months; when you add the rain we had in November, you get a very wet season indeed," Mr Mills said.

He described the situation as a "perfect storm"; he said some growers would harvest no grapes at all.

Lawrie Stanford, executive director of the industry's peak body Wine Grape Growers Australia, said the inland grape-growing regions were the worst affected because they were typically warmer, meaning diseases could flourish more easily.

"The disease pressure has been basically mildews, which thrive in the warm inland conditions," Mr Stanford said.

"The Murray Valley has been more affected than the Riverland or Riverina."

Mr Stanford said a brief reprieve from the wet conditions in January had allowed growers in northerly wine regions, such as the NSW Hunter valley, to harvest most of their white-grape varieties, and the industry had high hopes for the early crop.

However, he said southern growers, including those in the Adelaide Hills, remained on tenterhooks with many of their whites still on the vine.

Red grapes across Australia's eastern states are struggling to ripen because of the cool, damp conditions, he said.

"Under the current conditions it will take two to three weeks for the ripening to finish, but the rot will set in in that time. If, however, the weather fines up, we should get a good crop," he said. "We've a real concern about the second half of the harvest."

He said Shiraz and Merlot were the most vulnerable because of their thin skins, whereas thicker-skinned Cabernet grapes were more resilient.

Mr Stanford said conditions in Western Australia had been "diametrically opposite" this season, with most areas experiencing hot, dry weather.

"Yields may be low, but given the warm, dry conditions the whites are going to be very crisp, clean and aromatic, so it should be a good season in WA," he said.

He said growers with the resources to spend more fighting disease had fared better than those without.

"Many growers haven't had the financial possibility of undertaking these very costly management practices," he said. "There's a lot of fruit out there with very poor prospects in the market."