Australia's wine glut

Australian drinks giant Foster's Sunday warned one quarter of the nation's grape vines needed to be pulled up to reverse a damaging wine glut forcing growers to let their fruit wither on the vine.Chief executive Ian Johnston said global wine growers were experiencing a "very painful period" due to the global economic downturn, and a significant amount of Australia's vineyards needed to be pulled up."The commonly held number is somewhere around 30,000 to 40,000 hectares, about a quarter of what is planted," Johnston told ABC television's Inside Business programme.

Australian winegrowers have been forced to let their grapes wither on the vine and halt production due to damaging levels of over-supply in the sector, a leading industry body said Sunday.The country needs to lose 20 percent of its vineyards to counter the glut, which, coupled with a strong Australian dollar, has left the industry facing its worst crisis in decades, the Winemakers' Federation of Australia said."The over-supply is in the order of magnitude of about 20 percent of the industry," chief executive Stephen Strachan told AFP.

Five years and 16 million foreclosures after the 2008 housing crash, most Americans have not lost faith in real estate.

China and India's premiers agreed Thursday to double bilateral trade to 100 billion dollars by 2015, during talks that otherwise showed no apparent progress on a series of nagging disputes.Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and his Indian counterpart Manmohan Singh also agreed to push Indian exports to China in an effort to bridge a current trade surplus estimated at 20 billion dollars a year in China's favour.The talks came on the second day of Wen's visit -- his first to India in five years -- for which he led a delegation of 400 Chinese business leaders.

Japan has extracted natural “ice gas” from methane hydrates beneath the sea off its coasts in a technological coup, opening up a super-resource that could meet the country’s gas needs for the next century and radically change the world’s energy outlook. The state-owned oil and gas company JOGMEC said an exploration ship had successfully drilled 1,000ft below the seabed into deposits of methane hydrate, an ice-like solid that stores gas molecules but requires great skill to extract safely.

MONTREAL — Efforts by successive Quebec governments to find more revenue sources over the years have contributed to an unintended consequence on the store shelves of the province’s liquor monopoly: the near-extinction of cheap wine.