What is wrong at Wine Australia? Plenty if you think organisations should be judged on the results they achieve.
The job for Australian wine producers changed over the 1970s-1980s from making good wines to selling. When the quantity made exceeded what the country consumed the task became working out how to sell overseas.
Businesses succeed when all the parts flow as one to create or produce what that business does. When a service business such as Wine Australia falters it can be hard to identify what is wrong as it may be the underlying philosophy or that the guidance built into the structure is flawed
Australia’s wine exports have not grown since 2007-2008 and the word alarming does not do justice to this debacle. This is the business problem at Wine Australia.
Whatever the reasons behind the bright future set out in the many Wine Australia documents like Strategy 2025 (from 1996), Vision 2025, Strategic Plan 2020-2025 and Vision 2050 (from 2019) the results show these were wrong.
And note the recent dramatic rise of exports to China was not the result of hard work rather being engineered by the Communist Party for their reasons. The China exports will not return to save the day as the mood in China and in the west has altered.
Wine Australia is now in a spot of bother and must examine what they wish to do and dig deep into the reasons why they have made the decisions they have.
Personally, I do not believe in the underlying philosophy of Wine Australia which promotes a fractured vision of what Australian wine should be. For example, the difference between the Murray Basin and Marlborough, New Zealand is only one of prettiness. Otherwise, they are just river flats, one warm the other cool.
Yet the New Zealanders have turned the image of their river flats in to something glamorous and profitable. Wine Australia has ignored promoting our riverlands as the source of wonderful and affordable drinking.
It is as if there is a belief that Australian wine production should be confined to areas where fanciful stories about wonderful terroirs can be used in an attempt to justify prices outside the means of ordinary drinkers.
