Introduction

Less than a generation ago, a few visionary leaders were optimistic that far more investment funds could be attracted to expand the Australian wine industry. Their optimism was triggered by the change in liquor retailing laws in the United Kingdom, to allow supermarketing of wine to increasingly more affluent baby boomers, plus the low value of the Australian dollar (AUD) in the mid-1980s. Those leaders developed a 30-year strategic plan, laying out 30-year targets for production and exports by 2025 (AWF 1995). The plan created a demand from prospective investors for more information on the industry, including on past investment booms and slumps. In response, the Winemakers Federation of Australia, the South Australian Government and the Grape and Wine Research and Development Corporation provided funds to support during the summer of 1997/98 a compilation of pertinent historical data. The resulting report (Osmond and Anderson 1998) was modest, but it served its purpose of providing basic background data and a few summary indicators for first-time would-be investors and other analysts.

Despite the clear evidence in that report of each previous boom being followed by a long period of stagnation, investment in Australian vineyard expansion flooded in and many of the WFA's 30-year targets were exceeded within a decade of the strategic plan's release.

Even in the best of circumstances, the consequent growth in winegrape and thus wine output was bound to generate a marketing challenge in the new millennium. However, a series of exogenous events added to the downward pressure on prices and profits. That perfect storm of shocks included a multi-year drought, the global financial crisis that began in 2008, a dramatic mining-induced appreciation of the Australian dollar, rapid wine export expansion by competitor countries, and an austerity dictate in 2013 by a new Chinese Government aimed at reducing conspicuous consumption in that burgeoning market.

That coincidence of shocks brought to a sudden halt the fifth boom in Australia's wine industry development. This is therefore an appropriate time to re-visit the long history of the industry's booms and plateaus, and to draw out more clearly the lessons that can be learnt from that history, so as to provide a better foundation for understanding the industry's prospects for recovering from the current slump and establishing a more sustainable growth path.