WINE LABEL PRINTERS POPPING CORKS

Label printers in the country’s vineyard regions are celebrating, as China has officially ended its effective ban on Australian wine, meaning tens of millions of wine labels could soon be rolling off the presses again.

In the year prior to astronomic tariffs being loaded onto Australian wine, destroying a $1.2bn export business, up to 100 million bottles of wine were exported to China. They came with 100 million labels, a large number of those labels with added value, and added margin, embellishments. Those labels have never been replaced.

Now wine label printers can look forward to firing up their presses again, although while the ban was enacted overnight, resurrecting the trade will take longer, industry figures predicting it will take some time for numbers to grow to previous levels.

Glassmaker Orora, which manufactures most of the bottles for Australian vintners, says it does not expect an impact on production until the new financial year. Similarly, spokesmen for Treasury Wines and for Accolade, the two biggest winemakers in Australia, have said they do not expect export numbers to snap back to 2020 levels, but nonetheless they are gearing up to export again.

The return of up to 100 million labels, most with embellishment, is another boost for the label industry, one of the sectors of print that has grown consistently over recent years, incouding all through Covid, and which is persuading many commercial printers to open a labels division, particuarly with the new generation of digital label presses.

There were 2366 wine producers exporting to China in 2019, but today that figure is just 114. China was by far the biggest export market for Australian wine, importing more bottles than the UK, US and Canada combined. Since the introduction of the tariffs in October 2021, the Australian wine industry has suffered from large scale over production, with huge vats of wine stored or thrown away.