AS LOCAL grape growers and winemakers – particularly in the red wine sector – are still reeling from the 2023 vintage, North West Farmer columnist (and grape grower) Colin Free has described the season end “as a kick in the guts”.
Mr Free said he, and many others, must be feeling as though they had just had a “whack on either side of the head” following the pressure of an extreme disease year, compounded low prices and very low demand for red varieties for next year.
The annual grape crush report for the Murray-Darling and Swan Hill wine regions showed production from independent growers and winery-owned vineyards had collapsed to 205,000 tonnes.
This is down significantly on the 327,000 tonnes produced in 2022 and way below the 355,000-tonne average of the previous five years.
Murray Valley Winegrowers chief executive Paul Derrico said not even a revival of the Chinese market would be the lifeline the industry needed right now.
He said even if Australia could recover its 21 per cent slice of current wine imports into China, it might add up to about 70 million litres of wine (90,000 tonnes).
“And, if not for the major crop losses in 2023 due to disease (predominantly downy mildew), we believe significant volumes of reds would have remained unsold this year,” Mr Derrico added.
“In fact, growers of contracted reds may have already been approached by their wineries to look at reducing yields or mothballing, which means enforced caps or renegotiating contracts by mutual agreement,” he said.
“We urge all growers to consult their winery or regular buyer as soon as possible to gain direction for the upcoming challenges.
“Growers need to do this now, the increased costs at the vineyard level suggest the price to recover the cost of production is likely to be much higher than the likely red grape price to be offered next season.”
Colin says “as the annual crush figures show”, it was a record low intake mainly due to the disease pressure during the growing season.
He says growers had their chemical costs more than double while fighting diseases, along with the double whammy of the higher fuel and fertiliser prices.
“With lower yields and much lower prices for red varieties, many growers are carefully considering their future in the industry for which they all have so much passion,” Mr Free said.
“The fact that it is such a sudden change has to be seen as the main concern,” he said.
“In other times of oversupply, the wineries still want to fill their tanks to lower their overall costs per litre of wine produced.
“However, this time around they are restricting intake to only what they think they can sell and that is something different and worrying.”
Mr Free said as a grower, and knowing what other growers in the district were thinking, the end result of this radical remake of the wine grape market was the looming fact that at least 40 per cent of the red varieties now used by growers needed to be removed before some sort of supply balance was returned.
He said from where he was standing this had been caused by a general downturn in wine sales – exacerbated by the trade problems with China – and many, too many, consumers faced with the soaring cost of living starting to bite hard, further hampering wine purchases.
“The governments seem to be a lot more interested in waving their multicoloured flags and fostering the misguided environmental twits, rather than supporting the grape and wine industries, which are major employers and significant export earners and taxpayers.”
