Amid a globally slow sales picture, activity on the bulk wine markets of France, Spain and South Africa managed to tick up through April into early May, for a variety of local reasons.

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Australian wineries have huge volumes of unsold wine. Most media coverage blames China’s swingeing punitive tariffs for this situation. But, as Dudley Brown reveals, Beijing’s responsibility for the situation is quite limited.

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High inflation levels and rising interest rates in many markets around the world have engendered pessimism as to the retail sales outlook. Food inflation has generally been lagging overall inflation’s levelling-off trajectory, encouraging consumers to cut back on supermarket spending. In this context, global bulk wine activity has proceeded cautiously through the final quarter of 2022 while sales are carefully analysed; no one wants to find themselves overstocked, or having paid too high a price. Report by wine broker Christian Jungbluth from Ciatti.

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Observers of the heady growth in Australian exports to China from 2016 to the end of the decade ignored a downward trend in Chinese wine consumption that began in 2018. OIV statistics reveal that this trend has continued during the Covid pandemic.

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Denys Hornabrook launched VINEX as a global B2B trading platform for bulk wine in 2015. Four years later, bottled wines were added to the mix. While the business is international in its focus, Hornabrook's own experience in Australia where he was educated and worked for BRL Hardy and Kingston Estate, gives him unique insight into the current plight of that nation's wine industry in the wake of Chinese sanctions.

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Due to the zero covid policy in China, ProWine Shanghai will not take place in 2022. An alternative date is not yet known. What does this say about the Chinese wine market?

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ProWine Shanghai 2022 was originally scheduled for Nov. 8-10, but now, at very short notice, the organizers have announced a postponement to Nov. 20-22.

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The wine industry is only just recovering from the pandemic. Now Robert Joseph, playing Cassandra rather than his usual Devil's Advocate, suggests that the wine industry is facing tough financial headwinds. The only hope is of China coming to the rescue, but that's far from certain.

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Penfolds, the renowned brand of Australian wine giant Treasury Wine Estates (TWE), is also producing in Ningxia, China (as Meininger's has reported). The first Chinese Penfolds wine is to be launched in October - first exclusively in China, but a global launch is planned for mid-2023, as reported in the Chinese trade media Vino Joy.

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