The challenges we are facing in the Wine Industry as a whole are detrimental.

From struggling to make profits to struggling to pay day to day bills or even worse at risk of losing our homes and businesses.

Together we have a solution to find, below I have listed a couple of options that will be brought to the meeting in Barmera on Wednesday the 21st of February, if you believe these options could be of benefit to yourself or our industry please sign the petition.

The glut of red wine is currently the main problem, followed by the high volume of Red vines planted and not enough white varieties.

Our suggestion is if the government would be willing to pay growers to harvest their produce onto the ground this season and potentially next?

It’s not an ideal answer by any means but will it create demand in future years, maybe? Does it solve the immediate financial problem, I believe to a degree, yes.

$300 per tonne is what we are proposing to the government, to enable us to drop Shiraz & Cabernet Sauvignon on the ground.

It pays the harvesters, pays the growers, the winery doesn’t end up with further full tanks that they aren’t able to move. It solves this years dilemma.

Pair this with a re-investment package, growers are out of funds to develop or change varieties. We are asking the government to offer a limited number of packages to redevelop current Shiraz & Cabernet Sauvignon plantings to preferred white varieties. Fixing the oversupply of red grapes. This would be a discussion that would need to be had with the wineries to determine how much red vines we would need to have planted to continue the correct supply and also to determine how many packages/hectares of white plantings would be offered.

Correcting the supply of both white and red will ensure the survival of our Riverland Wine Industry.

If we don’t act now, we will lose our farmers, the Riverland as a whole will struggle. If our farmers have no money, then our small businesses have no money!