April 03: New regulations, effective this week, give Australia’s wine export regulator Wine Australia broader powers to protect the reputation of the country’s wine exports, with its CEO Andreas Clark announcing today that the new regulations included a number of changes, the most important being the capacity to assess whether an exporter was a ‘fit and proper person’
‘Australia’s wine exports continue to climb and our reputation for delivering on quality is a very important part of that growth’, Mr Andreas Clark, Chief Executive Officer of Wine Australia said, adding, ‘these new regulations will extend Wine Australia’s power to do more to protect Australian wine’s reputation overseas by ensuring the bona fides of potential and existing exporters, according to a Press Release today.
Australian wine exports continued to grow strongly in both volume and value during the 12 month period ending September 2017 with the value growth clocking 13 per cent to A$2.44 billion and volume growing by 9 per cent and flirting with 800 million-Liters mark, according to the one-year Export Report released by Wine Australia in October, 2017 and published by delWine. Wine Australia is responsible to publish these statistics regularly.
With harvest for the current year, that started in February 2018 and will end in April, indicates that yields look above average, according to an industry spokesperson who added that an above average year wouldn’t be a problem due to the growth in sales.
Wine cannot be exported from Australia without approval from Wine Australia. Mr Clark said that the new regulations gave it the authority to deny the approval of shipments where a product could not be lawfully sold in the country to which it would be exported. This could include preventing the export of a wine from Australia that infringed intellectual property-related laws in the destination country.
Moreover, exporters will not be able to export now on behalf of companies or individuals who are not themselves eligible to hold an export licence-for instance where such a licence has been cancelled for any reasons.
‘Unfortunately, it’s a fact of life that copycats and counterfeiters can move in when they can leverage somebody else’s good reputation to make a quick buck. If left unchecked, the damage accrues not just to an individual brand but to the reputation of the country targeted and its other brands’, Mr Clark said.
Other aspects of the regulations will be liberalised. For example, to cut red tape for exporters there will no longer be a prohibition on placing a vintage indication on innovative wine products such as flavoured wines. The regulations have also been modified to allow the continued use of grape varieties that are also geographical indications.
Wine Australia
Wine Australia is an Australian Commonwealth Government statutory authority, established under the Wine Australia Act 2013, and funded by grape growers and winemakers through levies and user-pays charges and the Australian Government, which provides matching funding for RD&E investments. It supports the highly competitive wine sector by investing in research, development and extension (RD&E), growing domestic and international markets, protecting the reputation of Australian wine and administering the Export and Regional Wine Support Package.
The Australian Government gave last year a $50 million Export and Regional Wine Support Package known simply as the $50m Package which is a one-off allocation of $50 million, aimed to increase the growth of Australian wine sector by showcasing the nation’s wine tourism offering and driving demand for Australian wine exports. Wine Australia is responsible for delivering the Package in consultation with the Australian wine sector.
IGPB similarities with Wine Australia
The now defunct Indian Grape Processing Board (IGPB) was started with much fanfare in 2009 and was to be administered more or less on the lines of Wine Australia except that neither the government nor the industry took it seriously enough, partly due to the fact that the industry was struggling to survive financially and is still not fully out of its woes and there were no levies by law by the government which only tried to persuade the industry through the Ministry of Food Processing Industry to contribute their share even as the funds kept on dwindling, till the Board scraped the bottom of the barrel and the government withdrew its financial support.
Despite a flicker of hope, the Board is still defunct and it has not been able to re-start functioning and the exports are only due to the individual, efforts of the domestic wine producers instead of collective and focussed approach adopted successfully by the Australians-and many other countries.
For more details and information about the regulations, please visit www.wineaustralia.com
For a few of the Articles regarding IGPB, please visit:
Defunct IGPB to be Monumental Embarrassment to India
Indian Grape Processing Board in Expansion Mode
Editorial : Whining Indian Wine Board
Blog : IGPB Revival may be on the Cards
Subhash Arora
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