Does the world care about Australian Shiraz any more? That isn’t a loaded question, but one asked out of genuine curiosity. After all, I’ve written (and read) more over the last five years about Australia’s new-look Chardonnay, Mediterranean varieties and the Grenache renaissance than I have about the country’s most planted variety. It seems odd – like nobody talking about Tempranillo in Spain.
Then, last year, Treasury Wine Estates (TWE) put a string of its commercial brands up for sale – among them Wolf Blass, which used to be synonymous with a certain crowdand wallet-pleasing style of Shiraz. The latter was everywhere in the 1990s and 2000s, but now it’s unprofitable, unloved – and apparently dispensable.
So, what’s happening? Is Aussie Shiraz a distorted power-chord in a world that wants finger-picked acoustic ballads, or is it still happily doing its thing, only we’re no longer noticing?
Smallest crush
An initial look at the most recent figures for Shiraz production is not promising: 2023 and 2024 were the smallest Shiraz crushes since 2007. Shiraz typically averages around 400,000 tonnes per year, but in 2023 the crush was 340,000 tonnes, and 2024 was smaller still, at 290,000 tonnes. It was the first time in more than a decade that the country harvested more Chardonnay than Shiraz.
As a vintage, 2023 was, admittedly, a small year across the board – affected by drought – while 2024 was erratic, with regions variously suffering from heavy rainfall, flooding, thunderstorms, hail, severe wind, heatwaves and windy conditions during flowering. But most Australian winemakers (off the record) are happy to attribute the fall in Shiraz crush as much to economics as to the weather.
“I have colleagues in the Barossa who said last year there were vineyards with grapes just left hanging at vintage,” said one winemaker. If a lot of unsold wine was sitting in tanks after vintage 2023 and, particularly, 2024, then the reason isn’t hard to divine.
Australian sources reckon the country produces 10%–20% more wine than it can sell. But this is a common problem for other wine-producing countries, too.
China tariffs
What is unique to Australia, however, is China’s blitzkrieg introduction of antidumping tariffs of up to 218%, imposed on the country’s wine industry in two tranches in November 2020/March 2021. The punitive tariffs stopped exports to China dead more or less overnight – a disaster for a country that had based a large part of its foreign sales strategy on supplying upwardly mobile businessmen and the nascent middle classes in Shanghai and Guangzhou.
In 2019, China spent way more on Shiraz than the rest of Australia’s export markets combined, and average prices for Shiraz wines, at more than AU$9.00/litre, were high. By 2023 – at the nadir of the tariff effect – Shiraz exports had fallen 30% by volume and 55% by value compared to pre-pandemic. The rest of the world couldn’t soak up all that wine – and certainly not at comparable prices – and it left Australia with an almighty hangover.
Ripple effect
“The ripple effect [of the tariffs] was impossible to digest in the short term, and it still isn’t,” says Matt McCulloch, MD of Langmeil. “A situation of full tanks, unpicked (and uprooted) vineyards and the lowest weighbridge prices for a decade made for an ugly 2024 vintage. One wine producer told me that the situation a year ago was so bad that even distilleries were turning away juice. Literally nobody wanted it,” he said.
If this is all sounding a bit like a John Martin painting of Shiraz Growers in Hell, then perhaps it’s time to row back a bit.
Click HERE to read the full article.