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Water shortage is a pressing issue for everyone and not least affected are the country’s leading winemakers. Certainly the ongoing drought is a topic that keeps the normally irrepressible Geoff Merrill awake at night.
“I worry about water and how much of it from the Murray-Darling is going to be allocated to the South Australian vineyards where I buy fruit for the rosé I export to [UK supermarket chain] Tescos,” he says. “I won’t know how much fruit there is and what the price is until January or February 2008. If it doesn’t allow me to make a competitive product, the buyers will go somewhere else.”
Although the Murray-Darling Basin receives only six per cent of Australia’s annual rainfall, it contains 42 per cent of the nation’s farmland and produces 40 per cent of the country’s food. At the same time, it supplies about three quarters of NSW, all of ACT, half of Victoria, a major portion of southern Queensland and a part of South Australia.
That foray across state borders means management of the 3430-kilometre waterway by the Murray-Darling Basin Initiative, a partnership between state governments, has been constantly in the news. In August 2007, the federal parliament passed a government proposal for a $10 billion Commonwealth takeover of the Basin. Ensuing debate over whether the Murray-Darling should be a state or federal responsibility has made fighting the drought seem “like a country going to war”, Merrill quips.
Water is a crucial issue for rural industries and one over which there’s little opportunity for risk control.
“The best solution would be that it rains in torrents and water is allowed to run freely down the Murray,” suggests Merrill, who has three vineyards of his own: the Pimpala vineyard that surrounds his Mt Hurtle Estate; the new Wickham Downs vineyard in McLaren Vale, just south of Adelaide, and Graymoor in Coonawarra, 381 kilometres outside the South Australian capital. They rely on rainfall, but receive supplementary irrigation from bore water to sustain the vines when drought conditions bite.
Other issues on the winemaker’s mind late at night include: reducing debt, improving cash flow, losing some weight and getting his golf handicap down from 12.5.
“Golf and rain.” he says. “ That’s what I’d like more of in 2008.”
