It's been a quiet weekend for the Adelaide newcomers -- but we've listened with shock to the stories coming from the Victorian firefront. The photographs and personal accounts reveal scenes akin to standing in the middle of the kind of firestorm unleashed by mass bombing: the roar, the burning wind, the chaos and senselessness at the heart of the inferno, the entire sky thick with smoke and flame hundreds of metres in the air.

Are there degrees of trauma? If so, those who have escaped and survived have been through the worst. Our hearts go out to the families affected. Everyone with children here will hug them a little harder once they've heard the reports.

We feel we're undergoing a crash course in the titanic force of Australian weather systems. It was 41°C in Adelaide on Saturday, while Melbourne was coping with a record-breaking 46.4°C (and almost 48°C in the countryside). This fierce breath from the heart of the continent feels as if you are standing in a fan oven, and the combination of temperature, a racing oxygen flow, dry vegetation and low humidity turns the countryside to tinder, and very nearly to something akin to petrol vapour. The Adelaide Hills remains in this state, just a match or a cigarette end away from disaster.

Or it did. There was a dust storm up there on Saturday morning, and by Sunday the temperature had plummeted even in the City to just 18°C; it was 15°C this morning when I went to buy milk. We returned to the beach last night ... yet it was almost deserted, a cold wind blowing, the sea grey. Only the kite surfers were enjoying themselves, dancing on the waves like dragonflies.

That's what a change in the wind direction can do. All of which makes West European weather systems seem very staid.

It's too soon to say whether or not the bushfires have damaged vineyards extensively, and I'll have a chance to see for myself when I head to Victoria in early March. Even smoke can cause terrible damage, though. I remember talking to Ross Brown last year who told me that his company had had to pour away tanks of wine affected by smoke from previous bush fires. The wine tasted as if ash trays had been macerated in it. Tom Carson of Yabby Lake, who actually faced the situation of having to stay and defend his Yarra Valley home against the fire, emailed this morning (February 10th) with horrifying pictures of flames burning around him in the orange darkness and of the scorched vineyard and landscape afterwards.

Tom Carson's narrow escape

Down in McLaren Vale, the heatwave itself is causing a lot of gloom -- according to Philip White's report in The Independent Weekly, Chester Osborn of d'Arenberg is calling 2009 'a nightmare vintage', with losses of up to 70 per cent of the crop. "Anything in shallow hard ground or reflective sands with no deep moisture is over," Philip quotes Chester as saying. "Bush vines? Poor old buggers. McLaren Vale Grenache looked amazing. All gone. The Sauvignon Blanc's brown. No flavour. The Roussanne died. Viognier? No good, but not bad compared to the rest. Petit Verdot? Shrivelled to buggery."

"Australian wine supply not threatened by extreme weather event," says the Wine Australia website, claiming losses of just 10 per cent. We'll see.