LAST year's wine season couldn't have been worse.
The drought mixed bushfire smoke, that brought regular smokey days to the NSW Central West region, resulted in a disastrous crop.
But now thanks to some good rain in recent months, smiles have been brought back to the faces of Bathurst's vignerons.
"Right now, things are looking very promising," Vale Creek Wines' Tony Hatch said.
"This rain has been fantastic and there's forecast for more rain in the future.
"We're pretty excited about that, so it's looking to be a promising season ahead at this stage.
"Who knows, we might have another dry Christmas, but the forecast is that it's going to be a pretty wet one. We've got El Nino conditions and they're talking about a fairly damp spring and summer."
Mark Renzaglia, of Renzaglia Wines at O'Connell, said he can't complain about the recent rain, considering how long it's been dry for.
"It's nice to see everything green for a change, so that's a positive," he said.
"We've had a good start to the growing season but we still have a long way to go. We'll keep our fingers crossed."
A spring frost almost two weeks ago did have an affect on Mr Renzaglia's crop.
"It's hard to know how it'll affect us," he said.
"From our producing crop, we'll get more growth but it won't be as productive or as fruitful.
"We might have lost 15 per cent of our crop, but that's a rough guess," he said.
"It's still a bit of a question mark. We need to give it a couple more weeks to get an idea of what is happening."
In terms of the coronavirus pandemic, Mr Hatch said the wine industry isn't in the worst position.
"We have enough to keep us going," he said.
"Fortunately we've got enough wine in stock. We have run out of some varieties. We have no rosé, no vermentino. That's just the way it goes.
"We've still got people coming in but it's been a bit busy for us. We've had to schedule people because we can't have more than a few people in at one time."
"The cellar doors are doing well because there's a whole lot of people escaping Sydney."
Mr Renzaglia said he's still having people through the cellar door too.
"We didn't use to have such a big cellar door presence, but the past four months have been really busy and positive," he said.
"We're still trying to figure out how to manage the cellar door because we don't want to be tied down to that.
"We're only open by appointment at the moment, on the weekend, with one group in at one time. We're not allowing people to drop in and have multiple groups."
