Wolf Blass blasts duopoly’s ‘risk to wine’

BLAIR SPEEDY
The Australian
June 22, 2012

WINE industry veteran Wolf Blass has attacked supermarket majors Coles and Woolworths for slashing returns for winemakers and called for an industry-wide levy to promote Australian wine overseas.

“The biggest risk in the domestic market is the catastrophic duopoly controlling 60 per cent of our market,” said Mr Blass, whose eponymous brand is now owned by Treasury Wine Estates.

“It is a situation where there is no profit to be made, and if there is no profit there is no money for development.”

Mr Blass, who now works as a brand ambassador for TWE, promoting the Wolf Blass label at home and abroad, said the company needed to do more to support independent retailers and restaurants to help maintain a profitable market for its own products in the face of cut-throat discounting by the supermarket majors.

“We have to protect the independents and the on-premise operators — that must be Treasury’s priority. The government has allowed this issue to become so bad that the whole agricultural industry is in diabolical trouble,” he said.

His comments follow a series of complaints against the major retailers from food manufacturers, with the Australian Food and Grocery Council claiming that demands for ever-lower prices have made local production uneconomic for some operators.

Mr Blass said the wine industry was also suffering in export markets for a lack of promotion, and called for the imposition of an industry-wide levy to fund a major marketing push.

“Something very important happens if you don’t promote: nothing. That is the downfall of the industry,” he said. “The Wine Federation has no money to promote Australia — Hardys, Orlando, Casella have all pulled their money out of the WFA and are doing their own promotion.

“What they have to do is make sure that the 2500 so-called winemakers contribute to a levy for generic promotion of Australia.”

Wolf Blass is the biggest-selling table wine brand in Australia, as well as TWE’s biggest export brand, selling 8.7 million litres globally per year.