NO FUTURE IN OLD WORLD DISCOUNT BINS

M. Robert Beynat, Big Cheese at Bordeaux's forthcoming Vinexpo



Major Frog Kicks Ocker Teeth
Numbers War Hots Up As Everything Changes

OK. It’s official. By 2012, the United Kingdom will be world’s biggest importer of wine.

While France’s wine consumption tumbles, along with its Cognac and Armagnac guzzle, the French are hitting the Scotch whisky big time, with an eight per cent increase.

Meanwhile, the Japanese, Chinese, and Russians are following the Poms to reverse the Frogs’ trend away from wine. They're into it.

So. What’s new?

This news from Reuters’ reporter Marcel Michelson is the first of a huge wave of numbers and propaganda that we can expect from the powers that be at Vinexpo, the world’s biggest regular plonkfest, held every second year in Bordeaux.

It's on this year in June. We all hope they've got the airconditioning fixed.

Robert Beynat, chief executive and co-founder of the Vinexpo has opened the squirt by prophecying that the world will continue to drink more wine in the next few years.

Champagne and other sparkling wines will increase by twelve per cent, he forecast.

This may explain why the French have recently, suddenly, made the precious appellation of Champagne quite a lot bigger, in spite of global warming simultaeneously forcing Champagne producers to begin eyeing land in the south of England, where it is now warm enough to make wines as good, perhaps better than, Champagne’s. The geology, after all, is identical. The white cliffs of Dover are made from the same precious Kimmeridgian chalks that give Champagne and Chablis its class.

With typical Gallic aplomb, M. Beynat dumped big time on Australia.

"China will enter the top 10 producer countries while Australia is dropping out," he said, citing our water issues, new heat and “export problems due to long distances”.

“Italy, which overtook France as biggest wine consumer country in 2007, and the biggest wine producer in 2008, is set to lose the former crown to the United States in 2012 when Americans will buy some 314 million cases of wines with an 11.9 percent rise between 2008 and 2012 following a 14.8 percent gain over the 2003 to 2007 period.

“Spain will see a further 6 percent decline in 2008 to 2012 to 92.2 million cases and will drop behind Russia that will have a growth of some 25 percent in the 2008 to 2012 period.

“That compares to a baffling rise of 60 percent over 2003-2007 and remains below the 36.6 percent expected growth in China in the period 2008-2012.

This follows recent news that Australia’s exports have suddenly dropped eleven per cent in gross volume, due partly to difficult exchange rates. What made things worse was the value dropped even more – eighteen per cent.

Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation senior analyst Peter Bailey confirmed that the fastest-growing market for Australian wine was China, which spent $74 million on our product in 2008, up 32 per cent from 2007, and making the nation the fifth-largest market in value terms.

Reflecting the growing wealth of Chinese drinkers, sales of bottled wine were up 27 per cent while sales of cheaper bulk wine were down 68 per cent, lifting the average price per litre sold by 58 per cent to $4.92.

But the gains in China were not enough to offset declines in the US, Australia's second-largest wine export customer, where sales were down just 5.6 per cent by volume but plummeted 26.5 per cent by value.

At the same time, the biggest producers report increasing international sales in their more expensive brackets as they inch away from their inexplicable long-term addiction to the discount bins of the UK and USA.

Adding spice to the soup is Fosters’ claims that their up-market sales have improved, while rival Constellation is dumping a huge lump of its low-end spirits manufactory, a move, some suggest, to cash up for the purchase of Fosters’ gutted wine division.

I can't help feeling that these great prophets, bean-counters and money-changers are even more hopeless than the finance gurus which failed to forsee the recent disappearance of all the money in the world.

They obviously have no real handle on issues of climate change, the new heat, the disappearance of the water, or the true issues associated with transport of a totally unneccessary, fashionable commodity which just happens to be a major recreational drug and one of the most scary depressants available.
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COMMENTS:

Wayne Young said... Let's do some math... "In 2012, the US will consume more wine than Italy".

For the sake of comparison let's use some current statistics: Approx consumption: 300 million cases per year. Italian population: 60 million. US population: 300 million. Italian consumption per capita: 5 cases per year. US consumption: 1 case per year.

When we get American consuming HALF what Italians consume, per capita, that will be news.

BOOZEBIZ CHATTERBOX TAKES GREEN HUE

ENVIRONMNENTAL SCIENTIST DR DAVID PATON ON THE RECEDING WATERS OF THE MURRAY-DARLING ESTUARY: EVERY BARGAIN BIN CLEANSKIN YOU BUY SUCKS MORE WATER OUT OF THIS RIVER SYSTEM


Solving The Carbon Footprint Crisis
While Keeping The Booze Flowing
by PHILIP WHITE

Bacchus only knows just how far The Wine Supply Chain Council is willing to go to ensure wine drinkers make less of a mess of the global environment, but they’re having another talkfest in Melbourne next week.

The shocking condition of Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin, with the cruel extant fact of the death of its estuary, is partly the work of Australian wine drinkers determinedly demanding cheap squirt; partly the work of the thirsty who buy from the humungous booze mongers of Britain and the USA.

It is certainly partly the work of some of the winemakers of Clare and the Barossa, who built their own private pipelines to import salt water from the Murray to guarantee sufficient irrigation supplies to maintain their manufactory of industrial quality wine for export.

Such water inevitably increases the salinity of the ground to which it is applied.

The WSCC was devised to address such issues, but tends to approach the problem from the “must have” point of view, as in “these markets exist, they must have our wine; ergo we must work out how to get it there”.

The meeting follows one held in South Africa last year and will set the cooperative research agenda for the next 3-5 years to benefit wine producers.

“Experts from around the world will talk about how to ensure consumers receive the best wines possible” the WSCC says.

“The meeting on January 13-16 includes 25 industry leaders, academics and researchers. Australian representatives at the workshop include researchers from CSIRO and Monash University and senior managers from some of Australia's wine companies including Yalumba and Orlando Wines.”

(Orlando is part of Pernod-Ricard. It is not Australian.)

CSIRO mathematical and information sciences research leader, Dr Simon Dunstall, said one of the major issues for discussion will be how to reduce the environmental impacts of the wine and grape juice industry's transport task.

"Transport is a significant consideration in Australia, particularly the carbon footprint involved in moving wine over long distances," he said.

Consumers are quickly becoming directly concerned with such issues, and some wineries are already taking advantage of this.

I have, for example the first bottles from Zilzie’s Bulloak Carbon Neutral wine brand on my tasting bench now. From irrigated Murray Basin vineyards, these retail at $10 in Adelaide, a full day’s drive from Zilzie.

London is a lot further.

Surely the best way of easing the carbon footprint is to grow grapes closer to the markets which want the wine. If Texas can produce wines as fine as Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin and perhaps Coonawarra (see articles below), then why shouldn’t Texas be producing such fruit for the US market?

A hint of the future lies in Fosters new three-year contract with the Indian wine company, Indage Vinters, (formerly Champagne Indage), to package Fosters’ wine in Britain.

This wine will be shipped from Australia, South America and South Africa in tank, and packaged in the marketplace which drinks it. This reduces the footprint of such ridiculous mechanisms as taking bottles from Italy to Australia, filling them up, then taking them to Britain for sale.

While the UK drinks over 110 million cases a year, and drinking more and more of it at home, the feverish pressure there to supply ever-cheaper booze is forcing such Australia producers to chop costs.

Similar pressure in India will see more of that country’s booze made there.

Since Stephen Hickinbotham worked a consultant to the Indian government in the early ’eighties, it has been apparent that India can easily produce sufficient wine to supply its fledgeling market.

Given the water supplies, the same thing can be said of China.

One wonders just how the WSCC committee can flex its direction to suit such massive collisions of the booze world’s tectonic plates.

Topics the Council has discussed include: tracking temperature changes of wine as it is shipped around the world; improving order management processes; and, exploring the finding that 99% of wine currently made in the United States came from states that voted Democrat(!).

Dunstall's team uses a branch of mathematics called 'operations research' to simulate and optimise supply chains in a range of industries. It recently developed a “grape maturity forecasting system” which is being used in Australia and New Zealand to estimate when grapes are ready to harvest.

This was not much use in the harvest of 2008: we shall soon see how well it works this vintage, which is upon us.

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