Home topics small-business-resources growth-import-export Growth | Import | Export Growth | Import | Export Australian Wine Exports Guest Author February 15, 2007 While the 90s saw Australian wine become one of the country’s biggest export success stories, it has now hit snags in the shape of frost, drought, oversupply and increasing international competition. But Cameron Bayley finds it’s not all doom and gloom, and many wine producers are coming up with ingenious solutions. The image of the typical Aussie with a beer in hand might be in danger. Figures from the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation (AWBC) claim Australian beer and spirit consumption is declining, while our wine intake has risen to an average of 22 litres per person each year. And we’re doing a pretty good job of making our own, with Australia ranking as the world’s fifth-largest wine producer , behind France, Italy, Spain and the US, with enough exported product to fill about one billion bottles. It sounds pretty good, but now it seems we have more wine than even increased consumption can handle. With 2,000 wine companies in Australia, there is currently between 500–900 million litres of oversupply, according to the AWBC. "We’re an industry that grew in the 90s because we were very quick to interpret consumer demand," says Stephen Strachan, chief executive for the Winemakers Federation of Australia (WFA). "We were putting a product into the marketplace that was different, that was very strongly demanded, and we were very good at it. We’re still