The number of wineries in Australia has fallen for the first time in three decades due to a high rate of mergers and acquisitions in the sector.
The number of Australian companies that commercially sell their wine has fallen to 2,481, a net loss of 92 wine companies, according to the 33rd edition of The Australian and New Zealand Wine Industry Directory (WID) published by Winetitles.
Although the 2015 directory lists 103 new wine companies, 195 companies either went out of business, were absorbed into another existing company, dropped wine production and focused on grape growing - or requested that their details not be listed in the directory.
Prior to this year the number of companies listed had been doubling every decade, according to the directory editor Michael Major.
“The net loss in the number of wine companies isn’t entirely indicative of the overall health of the Australian wine industry, which saw an increase in domestic sales of wine the past year,” Major said.
“Whereas we did see a number of companies go out of business, others merged with larger companies while some companies dropped their wine production and focussed only on grape growing.”
All states reported a loss in number of companies listed, led by Queensland. Victoria has the greatest number of wine producers with 745 listed, compared with 703 in South Australia, 469 in NSW/ACT, 113 in Tasmania, 85 in Queensland and 366 in WA.
Accolade Wines and Treasury Wine Estates are the largest wine companies based on sales of branded wine, according to the directory, with the ranking of wine companies by total revenue remaining fairly stable, with no new company breaking into the top 10 in the past five years.
Treasury Wine Estates is the largest wine producer by vineyard area and Casella’s winery at Yenda is the country’s largest wine processing facility followed by Accolade Wines’ Berri Estates Winery.
Australia’s top 28 wine processing facilities have the capacity to process more than 1.65 million tonnes.
