Happy days are here again

‘This feels like a watershed moment', said McLaren Vale winemaker Corrina Wright, one of a record 150 Australian exhibitors at Vinexpo in Hong Kong last week. ‘It feels good to be out and proud and positive again, like we’re crawling out from under a rock onto the world stage.’ 

I can’t remember the last time I heard Australian winemakers expressing sentiments like these, or the last time the Australia wine industry as a whole felt so positive about itself.

Actually, I can. It was back in the early 1990s. I was working in...