MEDIA RELEASE: Wine Industry Impact Summit brings together the value chain

ADELAIDE, 19 August 2026 — Eighty-five delegates from across the Australian wine industry gathered at the National Wine Centre, Adelaide, on Thursday 13 August for the inaugural Wine Industry Impact Summit (WIIS), a one-day event presented by the Wine Industry Suppliers Association (WISA) in partnership with Wine Australia along with Event Sponsors, MGA Insurance, Visy, Bentleys SA and College of Business & Law, Adelaide University.

Built around the thread of “real challenges, real solutions, real proof they work,” the Summit deliberately traded sales pitches for stories behind innovations, bringing growers, suppliers and researchers into the same room to hear, first-hand, what has actually worked, for whom, and why.

The program opened with a panel of Wine Industry Impact Award winners, Heather Mackenzie of Affinity Labs, Dr Eveline Bartowsky of Lallemand Oenology and Dr Rocco Longo of Enartis Pacific sharing the journeys behind three commercialised innovations: Affinity’s Nutritional Information Service, Oenodia’s STARS fermentation technology and WINEGRID by Enartis.

From there, the day moved through a run of case studies and panels covering the breadth of the value chain: autonomous vineyard spraying, a three-way collaboration between wine company, Vinarchy, the Australian Wine Research Institute and Agri Automation Australia; a redesign of a standard wine bottle to deliver a more sustainable package, led by Visy, SIG and Wirra Wirra; risk, insurance and business structuring for growth with MGA Insurance Group and Bentleys; disease-resistant vine breeding through a collaboration between CSIRO and Wine Australia, with fruit from these new generation vines now being made into wine by the likes of  Monak Wine Co; modern winery operating systems with Innovint and Hill Smith Family Estates; and a frank look at adopting AI with confidence with the National AI Centre and Hydra Consulting.

The afternoon's program introduced the Australian Wine Future Fund (AWFF), a new mechanism designed to increase funding opportunities for impactful solutions to benefit the grape and wine sector, before Associate Professor Justin Cohen of the University of Adelaide's Ehrenberg-Bass Institute closed the day's sessions with a framework for growth, unpacking Mental and Physical Availability, the twin forces that make a business easy to think of and easy to find and buy, and showing delegates how to apply it to sharpen their own innovation planning and management decisions.

“Genuine collaboration looks like exactly what happened in that room: people willing to share their wins, their learnings and their pitfalls, and honest enough to ask each other for help. That's what we set out to build with this Summit, and it's what we want to keep building in all our events.”

— WISA Executive Chair Liz Schoen

"Innovation delivers the greatest impact when it is developed collaboratively. The Wine Industry Impact Summit showcased the value of bringing researchers, suppliers and wine businesses together to tackle the challenges of the wine sector and identify practical opportunities for improvement."

— Martin Cole, Wine Australia CEO

Nominations for the 2026 Wine Industry Impact Awards, celebrating the suppliers, researchers and producers driving meaningful change across the Australian wine value chain, are now open, ahead of the Awards Gala on 19 November in Adelaide.

About WISA

The Wine Industry Suppliers Association (WISA) is a not-for-profit, volunteer-run association connecting growers, suppliers, researchers and producers across the Australian and New Zealand wine industry. WISA’s purpose is to improve the competitiveness and profitability of the wine industry by championing innovation, partnership and the exchange of practical knowledge across the value chain. wisa.org.au

Executive Chair & Media contact

Liz Schoen, Executive Chair

0467 709 315 | executivechair@wisa.org.au