After awhile it starts to become predictable.
As soon as you spot another state of the Australian w(h)ine industry article in the media, you know the line the particular protagonist is going to be taking.
If it's the Prim (sic) Minister you know the remarks are going to flavoured by his thing about binge drinking.
If it's the Leader of the Opposition you know it's going to be more or less diametrically opposed to whatever the other bloke said.
If it's someone from one of the corporate conglomerates that dominate the Australian food and liquor industries it'll be whatever is best suited to justifying the obscene bonus cheque he's looking to vote himself at the corporation AGM.
If it's coming from a premium wine producer....
I'm sure you get the picture. Identify the key speaker in the article and their position is pretty predictable.
If it's Hughesy speaking, it's a case of: I want to be able to keep drinking the best quality wines I can afford.
Now, regardless of who's analysing the current situation in the Australian wine industry three things are pretty obvious:
(a) We need to reduce the size of the annual vintage;
(b) We need to get rid of the wine lake that's already out there, and;
(c) It'd probably help if we could persuade some people to get out of the industry, which would make (a) and (b) a bit easier.
You could probably also throw in a
(d) It'd help if we could cut the volume of wine we import, particularly when it comes to cleanskin Kiwi Sauvignon blanc.
That, like the position anybody contributing to the (mass) debate is going to adopt, is pretty obvious. What's not so obvious is the actual solution that's going to need to be adopted.
There are all sorts of wild schemes that could be implemented.
We could counter the Kiwi Sav blanc flood by exporting our own wine lake to the Shakey Isles and sell it for the cost of shipping across the Tasman.
Well you could, but you’d also bet your bottom dollar that the price points such wines would usually command would tend to rise in the face of a substantial government subsidy.
Now, the easiest way might be to do nothing and see what comes out of the inevitable shakeout. Market forces will end up doing what they end up doing, so let 'em run and see which way the dice rolls, but the way the dice actually rolls will inevitably be affected by the big players and their corporate and tax strategies, so that isn't really a solution either. No, after lengthy musing on the matter it's obvious to me, at least, that the answer to all the above lies in areas of public policy that aren't wine industry-specific.
We're supposedly on the verge of a substantial redesign of the Australian tax system. Part of the redesign will involve changes to the way that wine is taxed, and those changes will inevitably have some effect on the industry-wide shakeout that's going to occur over the next few years.
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