Canberra District Wine Industry Association president Anne Caine said that as long as wine was of a high enough quality, there would always be buyers.

As part-owner of Lerida Estate, her and husband Jim Lumbers stopped the tradition of burning the vine offcuts about two years ago, and now uses the by-products to mulch under the vines, making the vineyard carbon neutral.

Mr Lumbers said, ''We use the waste, which usually releases CO2, and we spread the mulch under the vines so carbon is locked into the soil by worms and micro-organisms.

''We add lime and do other things with the mulch but basically it is left stewing away and breaking down in piles, it ferments getting hot and killing the weeds and then we break it all up with the tractor.''

The 20 tonnes of wood from the vines used to create about 40 tonnes of CO2 annually, now it helped improve soil and vines and, hopefully, the end product.

The result was obvious with thicker foliage, something he wasn't seeing when using bought products.

Yarrh Wines' Neil McGregor has taken the process one step further, turning those leftovers into a super mulch and also trying to go organic to increase the help of microbial life.

''I wasn't seeing the improvements in the vines that I wanted. With traditional farming we've depleted the carbon and humus complex in the soil so now we've got to replace it,'' he said.

He adds straw, manure, soil, winery waste and uses a large compost turner to add oxygen and lots of water to his 100 tonnes of compost. Already this season he has noticed more bees during flowering and fungus breaking down the slashed grass under the vines.

Dionysus Winery has started to mulch the by-products as well.

For Lark Hill Winery, this is all old news. It has been a biodynamic farm since 2003. Composting and mulching and using milk sprays instead of poisonous fungicides.

Shaw Vineyard Estate has also been mulching and using turkey manure on the vines for about seven years, so to improve sales in the tougher times it is now sending wine further afield hitting Vietnam, Singapore and Europe, as well as Queensland, Victoria and hopefully soon Western Australia.