Vineyards See Red As Seven Million Bottles Go to Waste

Australian wine growers, grappling with a hangover of monumental proportions, plan to dump 7m bottles of plonk after bingeing on red grapes.

A surfeit of grapes causing a glut in the local market has left producers with an estimated 5m litres of red wine stored in tanks that need to be emptied before the 2004 vintage is collected in late January. It could be turned into vinegar orpoured away.

Sarah Dent, chief executive of the Wine Industry Association of western Australia, said the amount of land planted with vines had increased by 165% in the four years from 1998. "The majority of vines planted were red varieties as opposed to white," she said.

"They do have to find a home for that wine because some of those storage tanks will be needed for the 2004 vintage.

"I wouldn't use the word dumping, but the reality is they are going to have to find somewhere to put it."

The Australian wine industry has expanded aggressively in recent years, with a new winery opening every two days, in anticipation of growth in exports.

But competition from South American and South African vineyards has limited overseas sales, and between 1998 and 2002 Australia produced nearly a billion litres more wine than it sold.

The problem was highlighted in 2001 when south Australian giant Normans Wines collapsed with nearly £30m debt in a year that saw record profits for the industry as a whole.

The overemphasis on red grapes has meant that white wine grapes are in short supply in western Australia, with prices for chardonnay surging.

Of the 1.36m tonnes crushed in the 2002-03 season, nearly half the grapes were for red wine, including 320,000 tonnes of shiraz, 230,000 tonnes of cabernet sauvignon and 97,000 of merlot.