Visionary export plan

Family-owned Clare Valley winery Taylors has joined the trend for bottling a special luxury wine for the Asian market. Taylors, whose top wines until now have been its St Andrews reds at $65, has bottled a new cabernet sauvignon called The Visionary, after founder Bill Taylor snr, made with grapes from the best blocks on the property, including the oldest vines, now 46 years old. It is a 2009 vintage, to be released in November at about $120 a bottle, and is rich, ripe, concentrated and fruit-sweet, yet beautifully balanced. A fair proportion of the quality product will be exported to Asia, but chief executive Mitchell Taylor says the company won't be bowing to pressure from China to revert to corks - Taylors has only used screw caps since 2004. ''We have an education program in China, and the message is that the screw cap is all about quality,'' he says.

Boothby gets house in order

The former brand ambassador for Bollinger Champagne in Australia, Paul Boothby, has resurfaced as the public face of another champagne house, Bruno Paillard. Boothby, a former lawyer-turned-wine retailer then wholesaler, is a former winner and judge of the biennial Vin de Champagne Awards and worked for Bollinger as an employee of wine and spirits distributor Fine Wine Partners, formerly Tucker Seabrook, the long-time importer of Bollinger. Bollinger and Paillard have been at loggerheads lately over a bottle design - Bruno Paillard alleges Bollinger's new bottle shape, launched in 2012, is a copy of Paillard's bottle. Bruno Paillard himself is also communications director of the CIVC, the Champagne industry's official body.

Unfair exchange

It's no secret that the strength of the Australian dollar is crippling our wine exporters. John Geber, the owner of the Barossa's Chateau Tanunda, says he lost $1.2 million on currency in 2012. ''We're not forex traders, we're winemakers,'' he says. ''We shouldn't have to worry about foreign-exchange contracts. We have enough trouble with the drought - it hasn't really rained this summer. We've had two inches [50 millimetres] in seven months.'' Brown Brothers has scaled back its British operation because the exchange rate has cut its revenue from sales there to 10 per cent of levels five years ago.

Women in wine

A women-only wine exhibition at Sydney's Overseas Passenger Terminal will mark the end of April's Australian Wine Month. Women In Wine is on April 30 from 6-10pm - cost $90 - and will feature more than 20 of our top female winemakers and viticulturalists, including Prue Henschke, Emma Bowen, Janice McDonald of Howard Park, Corrina Wright of Oliver's Taranga, Rebecca Willson of Bremerton, Katherine Brown of Brown Brothers, and Penny Jones of Petaluma. Women prominent in other facets of wine, including television presenter Maeve O'Meara, will present a series of workshops. Bookings essential at eventopia.co/womeninwine.