Australian wine might be the most highly taxed wine industry on Planet Earth, but that didn’t stop the Federal Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Warren Truss, from proudly announcing that the Australian wine exports had reached a billion dollars a year. Neither this Federal Government nor the one that preceded it has viewed Australian wine as anything more than a short-term solution to immediate budgetary problems. For the year ending in July Australian wine exports were valued at $1.07 B, an increase of 28% on the previous year. Volume sales of 222,869,063 litres were also 14.1% up on the previous year. Each day over 670,000 branded bottles of Australian table wine leave our shores for tables in parts foreign, but Australia still has less than 4% of global market share in wine exports. Imagine how successful it might be if Canberra took the view that the wine industry was to be nurtured and not pillaged.
