USA down, China up for Australian Wines

More China Wine Market News…

The Australian wine producers that are expected to excel in the future will be those with a high value-add, high-quality product that appeals to the increasingly affluent Chinese middle class with a growing appetite for the finer things in life. ‘The average value per litre of Australian bottled imports to China is now for the first time higher than the average for French wines’ said Wine Australia’s Darren Cheesman. Wine Australia released their Wine Export Approval Report to the sound of cheers from vintners who’d been putting more and more resources into the Far East. The boom in sales of big, highly-alcoholic red wines to the United States starting in the late 1990s (encouraged by Robert Parker) has well and truly tapered off, and China’s appetite is on the up and up.