Introduction

The Australian wine industry's export-led growth and quality upgrading since the 1980s has added remarkable wealth and vitality to many rural regions of Australia. It has also altered the characteristics of grape and wine production in those various regions. This Chapter summarizes the more easily measured of the industry's regional economic contributions. Other contributions multiply those regional benefits, including to the complementary restaurant, accommodation and other tourist-related industries, and to input-supplying industries such as bottle producers, designers and printers of labels, and transport firms.

This Chapter also summarizes some key characteristics of the industry at the regional level. In doing so it reveals the increasing distinctiveness of the various wine regions as they seek to add value by differentiating themselves from each other and from producers abroad.

One reason for compiling regional data is because regions are investing increasingly in their own promotional efforts, as a supplement to national generic promotion through the Australian Grape and Wine Authority and its predecessors. Pressures to move in that direction have intensified in recent years as the Australian dollar strengthened as a result of a boom in mineral and energy raw material exports, and as competition from other New World suppliers intensified.

Another reason to focus on regional differences within the industry is to assist producers in each region to develop strategies to adapt to climate change and associated developments in water markets. Changes such as rising mean temperatures, a greater frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, changing precipitation patterns, and widening fluctuations in irrigation water prices and availability are altering over time the optimal methods of production and possibly even the optimal regional location for producing particular varieties of winegrapes (see, e.g., Webb 2006 and other references cited in Anderson et al. 2008). For that reason we highlight climate zones in addition to geographic regions: each region is classified, according to the region's average January and February temperatures and growing degree days (Webb 2006, pp. 239-40), as belonging to one of three viticultural climate zones as defined at the bottom of Table 45 and detailed in Table 46: hot, warm or cool.