Despite a seven-and-a-half-hour flight - two-thirds of the time it takes to fly to France - Australia seems like a close-by neighbour.

We import their cheese, send our kids to their universities and drink a sizeable quantity of their wine.

Last week, I returned from a busy tour of a few of the 200 wineries in and around the Adelaide area of South Australia. It was a week punctuated by awe and angst, as we visited facilities in ascendance and others made redundant in all but name by the juggernaut of corporate efficiency.

A few facts about Australia's wine industry reveal some of what's behind many buy-outs and consolidations. In 1998, there were 990 wineries countrywide compared to 2,200 last year. Annual production then was about 737 million litres of wine, in contrast to the near exponential leap to 164,000 million litres now.

Australia is the fourth-largest exporter of wine in the world. In a market awash with good quality table wine, lower margins are the only route to profit, which is often fatal for small wineries. Economies of scale from equipment to personnel are mandatory in order to compete and survive.

Penfolds is one of the larger producers prospering under the corporate umbrella of beer giant Fosters, which two years ago swallowed up previous owner, Southcorp. Donning hard hats and safety vests prior to trekking through the heart of Penfolds' six-hectare Nuriootpa mega-production facility says volumes about the cold, hard facts of profitable wine production today.

Kilometres of steel-grated catwalks connect hundreds of three-storey-high stainless fermentation and storage tanks. Technicians scamper along to monitor every aspect of wine in process. Dozens of beeping forklifts zoom to and from temperature-controlled football-pitch-sized barrel "rooms", moving some of the 80,000 barrels of wine to their ageing stacks. The frenetic pace at Penfolds is in stark contrast to Seppelt, another Barossa Valley winery in the Fosters portfolio. Founded in 1851 by German immigrant Joseph Seppelt, it was the mainstay of an entire community of fellow Germans opting for a new life in Australia.

The vast complex of this now ghost-like site boasted the first gravity-flow fermen-tation and racking system in Australia, as well as innovative distillation techniques used in its famous fortified wine production.

A skeleton crew maintains a large solera-style ageing cellar holding nine million litres of wine, some more than 100 years old, which is the base of Seppelt's legendary sherries and ports. Table wines are now made more efficiently at another facility in the province of Victoria.

While the individual character and charm of smaller wineries is, in many cases, being lost amid these consolidations, the wines generally benefit from otherwise unaffordable equipment and technology.

Penfolds' wines are recognised globally for consistently good to great quality. Seppelt table wines are reliable value for money and their tawny ports are hallmarks among fortified wines.

Call Bangkok Beer & Beverage at (02) 661 9446.