What's everyone drinking? Australia's most popular wines revealed

Australians love a good drop, especially at this time of year — and especially when it’s home grown. According to government statutory corporation, Wine Australia, there are more than 2150 wineries across 65 winegrowing regions around the country, representing about 6000 grapegrowers.

Just in time for the new year, wine storage provider, Wine Ark, has released its most collected wines of 2023.

Shiraz was the most collected variety, followed by Chardonnay, but for single wines, Penfolds Grange topped the list.

Keeper of Bottles at Wine Ark, John Cuff, said the Penfolds Grange was a hard wine to topple from the top spot.

“This is the second edition in a row that sees Penfolds Grange be the most collected wine in Australia, which is also one of the country’s most expensive wines, again emphasising the importance of this iconic wine to Australian wine collectors,” he said.

Penfolds Grange also represented reliability for collectors, he said, both in terms of drinkability — and investment.

“In relation to investment, I would say that historically Penfolds wines have held their value very well,” Mr Cuff said. “When they approach their drinking window, if you were to look to exit the wine, then yes, you could make some money on it.”

While many of the wines in the top 10 such as Wynns Coonawarra Estate and the Leeuwin Estate Art Series would be familiar to wine lovers, Mr Cuff said lesser known cooler climate wines including Mount Mary, Tolpuddle and Crawford River were gaining ground. The Tolpuddle Vineyard Chardonnay gained 66 places to break into the top 50 while Crawford River Riesling rose 59 places.

Mr Cuff said while warmer climate wines would remain popular, especially among those starting their wine collecting journey, more people are beginning to appreciate the merits of cooler climate wines.

“When people start their collecting journey traditionally they are either guided towards, or believe they should start with, the more popular regions such as the Barossa valley,” he said. “We all know that wines from the Barossa are brilliant and provide people with a glass of forward, flavoursome, rich wine that appeals to new wine buyers and collectors alike.

“Wines from cooler climates have a lovely angular acid line, elegant tannins and, traditionally, have lower alcohol than warmer climate wines. They also match our current food styles and climate very well.

“In saying that I do love a big steak and glass of heavy red!”

Given more than half of Australia’s wineries are based in South Australia, it’s perhaps no surprise to learn wines from the state are also the most popular with collectors. The Barossa Valley was the most popular by region, followed by the Hunter Valley in NSW.

Wine Ark Tasting Room. John Cuff recommends to buy what you enjoy drinking, even if it’s for investment.

For those looking to restock their cellar or start collecting in 2024, Mr Cuff’s advice is simple: collect what you enjoy drinking.

“There is no use buying Coonawarra Cabernet for an investment if you don’t like Cabernet,” he said. “Worse case, if you can’t sell it, you can drink it.”

His tips for good Australian tipples include Margaret River Cabernet and Chardonnay, Yarra Valley Cabernet, Tasmanian Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, single vineyard McLaren Vale Grenache and Shiraz from the “new” Barossa.

Here’s cheers.

OpenAI says it is scrapping the release of its next-generation AI model over safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing, in one of the clearest signs so far that agent misbehavior could stymie the industry’s rapid progression.

The move follows a summer punctuated by reports of artificial-intelligence systems industrywide going rogue, and marks a rare case of a major AI developer ditching a new release because of safety concerns.

The company had planned to launch the model, known as GPT-6.1 Astra, in the coming days or weeks, aiming for an October debut. The model was more capable than the company’s previous models in completing challenging tasks from end-to-end without human assistance, as well as writing.

The company instead will focus on improving the safety of future models, which it expects to be even more capable.

Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said in an interview that GPT-6.1 Astra regressed in two areas. Compared with its predecessor, GPT-6 Astra, the model performed poorly on tests measuring alignment, or how well the model adheres to what humans would like it to do. Specifically, GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception: It wasn’t always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn’t take.

Another issue was what OpenAI calls “scope authorization,” meaning that GPT-6.1 Astra would push ahead on a task without asking the user for permission, and would at times reach for external tools and services even if it might be unsafe.

“For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade off,” Jain said. “You really do need to find what’s the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attended a United Nations Security Council meeting about AI last week. Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images

While GPT-6.1 Astra improved in areas such as “model laziness,” Jain said it didn’t quite meet OpenAI’s bar for safety and alignment, so the company decided not to launch the model publicly.

The announcement comes one day ahead of OpenAI’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. In the past, OpenAI has used the conference as an opportunity to launch new models and services that reduce costs for software developers—a segment the ChatGPT-maker competes with rival AI company Anthropic to win over.

In recent weeks, OpenAI and Anthropic have called on industry partners to slow down the development of cutting-edge AI models and invest in safety standards, noting they will temper the pace of their own internal AI progress.

OpenAI says it is working to investigate a range of agent security incidents that it has discovered in recent months, and address the safety issues underneath them. As part of the work, the company has implemented a new monitoring system to catch AI-agent misbehavior more quickly, and started requiring engineers to use stronger security guardrails for testing its AI systems.

Earlier this summer hundreds of OpenAI’s internal agents, which were tasked with completing a cybersecurity test, ended up hacking into the AI company Hugging Face. Since then, high-profile organizations such as the Australian government and United Nations discovered that OpenAI’s agents used similar, but less extensive, techniques to gain access to their websites.

Many of the publicly known agent-security incidents involved OpenAI’s internal AI models that were never slated for public release.

Last week, OpenAI said it paused training on its most capable AI models after an AI agent slipped through a gap in the company’s internet restrictions to query a public chatbot. The company said its new monitoring systems flagged the incident within 15 minutes, and training on these models remains paused.

GPT-6.1 Astra isn’t one of those models, but a different case, the company said.

“We want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that’s in the company, or when we ship it to users,” Jain said. “But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment.”

While the company decided not to ship GPT-6.1 Astra, it hopes to use the same base model to do additional reinforcement learning runs, and create future generations of its GPT-6 models.

OpenAI plans to conduct several deep dives to identify the root cause of the problems identified in GPT-6.1 Astra, Jain said. The work includes ensuring that OpenAI’s reinforcement learning environments are rewarding the right type of behavior, Jain added, though she noted the company would investigate all stages of model development.

AI companies have begun to draw scrutiny from policymakers and public officials, who are paying attention to the rapid development of the technology. Later this week, a Senate subcommittee is holding a hearing with third party AI researchers titled, “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks.”

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a Republican, sued OpenAI in June, claiming that the company and Chief Executive Sam Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users.

In a motion for temporary injunction filed Monday, Uthmeier sought to prevent OpenAI from developing new AI models without third-party approved safeguards, stop ChatGPT from soliciting user engagement and limit the company’s ability to advertise ChatGPT as safe.

Tech companies claim they “cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government,” Uthmeier said in the filing. “The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help.”

An OpenAI spokeswoman said that people want to know AI is being developed safely, “and that starts with what companies like ours do ourselves.”

“Governments have an important role to play in setting robust safety standards for AI, and we’re committed to working with Florida and other states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry—not just one company,” she said.

What’s everyone drinking? Australia’s most popular wines revealed

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