With the UK market putting the squeeze on Aussie wine producers, Austrade has taken a new approach to launch boutique, smaller scale producers into the British limelight.

Austrade’s senior trade commissioner for the UK, Kylie Hargreaves, said a crowd-sourced, live-Twittered wine auction with A$100,000 budget was hosted by UK internet ‘farmers market’ site, Nakedwines.com in partnership with Austrade and the South Australian government.

“On-line sales are one of a handful of areas in the UK economy that are actually showing strong healthy growth so we felt this was a great approach to getting our smaller producers into the marketplace,” said Hargreaves.

"The event, covered by UK national press, had a great hum about it, lots of expert wine tasters mixing comfortably with the average wine drinker. It's a great model helping to bring new wines direct to interested UK consumers while enabling Australian wineries to duck the enormous purchasing power that the UK supermarkets use to force enormous discounts onto our wines.

Naked Wines, which recruits on average 1000 customers a week, was started by Rowan Gormley, the former owner/ founder and MD of Virgin Wines - one of the UK largest online wine retailers.

“When we wanted to buy $100k of the best wines nobody had ever heard of, Austrade made it all happen for us. They found the wines, handled communications with the winemakers, even poured for us at the tasting. We could not have done it without them,” Gormley said.

“This is the future for wine. Customers get to pick the wines they like, at a price they are prepared to pay and the winemakers get to sell their wines at a price they consider fair.

“The process is fast (we did in an hour what normally takes months) and more importantly, it is free. Winemakers can focus on making great wines, rather than wasting their time, money and a huge amount of CO2 selling them. So customers get boutique wines, chosen by themselves, for the same price they would pay for mass-produced supermarket plonk."

Winemaker Dave Johnson of Greedy Sheep Winery in Western Australia was one of the fifteen winning winemakers said being chosen felt like winning the lottery.

“I got woken up by a call at 3.30am, I was online by 4am and by 5am I had an order for $12,000. Now that's the way to do business!”

A recent report from Euromonitor shows that per capita in the UK people spend £270 via internet retailing per annum, while the figure for Australia is $80. Figures issued by suggest Britain imports 1.6 billion bottles of wine per year. Britons spent £3.3 billion on wine in 2007.