The popularity of wine as a drink, and its quality, were originally very much the product of talented individual winemakers, whose names are now legend in Australian winegrowing circles. This is not peculiar to this country. French winemakers suffer a greater failure rate due to climate, which explains why their good vintages always commanded inflated prices. A combination of a boost in local demand, and newly-opened opportunities for export to the world market, led to an increasing technical interest in the winemaking process. Irrigation, once scoffed at by afficionados, is now commonplace even in traditional conservative wine growing areas.
Fermentation is now climate and temperature controlled.
The industry today. Today, Australian wine-making is amongst the most technically intensive and advanced in the world. Part of this can be directly attributed to the first Oenology school at Charles Sturt University in Wagga. Australian winemakers can now produce oceans of high quality, technologically, and gastronomically superior wines for world wide consumption. As a result, there has been increased demand for further acreage under cultivation.