If you were looking for good news in the wine industry then Australia would not be the obvious place to start with headline after headline depicting a country in a production and export crisis. But go behind those headlines and you find producers and winemakers making wines in styles that fully deserve their place on premium on and off-trade lists. Here Victoria Sharples makes the case for why premium Australia has never been more exciting and was there for all to see at the recent breakthrough Amelia Jukes’ Elevate Australia tastings in London.
The Burgundy room was busy. Winemakers poured their own wines, the story came alive, and you could watch a buyer lean in. Here is the number behind it; premium Australian bottled wine grew 15% by volume in the UK last year, even as almost every other segment shrank. That is the Australia worth talking about right now – growing, quietly, at the top, while the headlines look the other way.
Because the headlines are real, and worth being honest about. Australian wine exports fell 8% in value and 6% in volume in 2025. The UK, still Australia’s biggest market by volume, took 9% less wine, and total UK off-trade wine sales slipped 4% over the year (Figures from Wine Australia’s export report for the 12 months to December 2025, published January 2026).
Some of that is no one’s fault: drinkers everywhere are cutting back, the cost of living bites, and rising duty adds to the squeeze. But much of it is a bulk-wine story. The cheap, tankered commodity that still accounts for the overwhelming majority of what Australia ships to the UK, steadily draining away. That is not a loss so much as a shedding: the part of the trade Australia has every reason to leave behind.
Dig into the same Wine Australia numbers and that growth holds up under scrutiny. The premium tier – anything shipped above A$7.50 a litre – spans varieties from Shiraz to Sauvignon Blanc rather than any single style, and Australia remains the biggest wine source in the UK off-trade.
Two stories are running in opposite directions here, and the trade has been reading the wrong one. The country is not being rejected. Its’ cheap end is contracting; its premium end, quietly, is not. It is a thin slice on a small base, not a flood, but the direction is the point.
That complicates the phrase “finding its footing again.” Australia did once command real fine-wine respect in the UK, then let the commodity end define it and quietly squander that standing – so the footing is less lost than misplaced.
Elevating Australia
The export data tells you premium Australian wine can still sell here; it does not, on its own, tell you which Australian wine.
I spent two afternoons this spring at Amelia Jukes’ Elevate Australia tastings – one setting Australian Grenache and white Rhône varieties against the southern Rhône, the other, today, pitching Australian Chardonnay and Pinot Noir against Burgundy.
Many of the producers were ones I have known and championed for years, and the wines were excellent. The case the room made was for cool-climate Chardonnay and Pinot Noir – most, though not all, from genuinely cool sites – as the category to rebuild on, at a price and quality tier Australia has rarely held here. The producers to do it are the ones at Jukes' tasting, not the labels stacked at the end of a supermarket aisle.
What stayed with me, though, had less to do with the quality in the glass than with the rooms themselves.
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