A NEW research trial has been established to help inland winegrape growers struggling to decide which varieties they should grow in future.

The wine industry downturn, several years of grape prices below the cost of production and a surplus of millions of litres of wine have left growers scratching their heads over what to do next.

    AT A GLANCE
  • What: alternative wine grape varieties
  • Why: finding replacement for unwanted chardonnay
  • Where: Dareton, NSW
  • Report: SANDRA GODWIN

Some are considering converting to dried fruit, but most baulk at the expense of installing new trellis systems and machinery.

They would rather topwork or graft their vines to a new variety of wine grape, but which one?

Murray Valley Winegrowers industry development officer, Liz Singh, said it was important for growers to ensure they had "a secure point of sale" before planting any vines.

Growers also should ascertain whether a variety suited the climate and if it required leaf or fruit thinning, which added to production costs.

"It is likely that many Italian and Spanish varieties growing in Australia will have an early harvest, which could affect flavour characteristics," Liz said.

"There is (also) a need to educate consumers about new varieties."

Liz said alternative varieties were a hot topic in the wine industry.

Top of the list for removal in the Murray Valley, which includes the Murray-Darling and Swan Hill wine regions, is chardonnay, the region's most widely planted variety.

An explosion of chardonnay plantings resulted in oversupply and prices falling from $1000 a tonne five years ago to $150 this year.

The annual crush survey by the Victorian Department of Primary Industries indicated the Murray Valley produced 104,616 tonnes of chardonnay grapes last year, 16 per cent less than in 2008, but 52 per cent more than the next most common variety, shiraz.

Nationally, chardonnay accounted for 398,576 tonnes, or almost half of last year's white-wine grape harvest.

NSW Industry and Investment district viticulturist, Gregory Moulds, said the trial of alternative varieties had been designed to assess their performance after they had been reworked on chardonnay or ramsey rootstock.

"This is typical of a lot of the chardonnay in this district, which is 10 to 20 years old," Gregory said.

"We want to see how they react to reworking, management and heat over the next three to four years."

Three traditional varieties and 12 promising alternative varieties - from Italy, France, Spain and South Africa - had been chip-budded on to vines using two different grafting methods.

The 18 rows of 15-year-old vines at Dareton, totalling about 0.5ha, had previously been used for research into mothballing strategies to help winegrape growers cope with drought.

The vines were growing on a two-wire vertical trellis watered by a drip-irrigation system.

The new vines are being trained to grow into a single-wire canopy with a catching or foliage wire to reduce canopy rolling.

Gregory said he hoped to find out whether it was better to bud into the rootstock or the chardonnay scion, whether there were different growth rates for each method and the cost of reworking in the first and second year.

He will measure the growth and performance of all varieties to try to develop the best management practices for each alternative variety and assess whether it is more cost-effective to rework an unwanted variety than remove it completely and replant.

The information would be shared with local growers at field days, he said.

The standard varieties in the trial are cabernet sauvignon, shiraz and muscat gordo blanco.

The six white alternative varieties are arneis, sauvignon blanc, pinot gris, fiano, vermentino and viognier, and the six reds are graciano, lagrein, montepulciano, pinotage, tannat and tempranillo.

  • For more details, phone Gregory Moulds on (03) 5019 8412.
  • Mildura hosts the Australian Alternative Varieties Wine Show each November. For more information, visit www.aavws.com