Penfolds owner Treasury Wine Estates could be in line for a $70 million-plus cost saving as red wine grape prices slide in the wake of the hefty China wine tariffs and a 2021 harvest more than 15 per cent higher than last year.
Australia’s biggest wine company gets only about 24 per cent of its grapes from vineyards it owns or leases and, as grape prices drop, it can expect big input cost savings. This could partially offset the big hit to profits from the punishing tariffs imposed by China.
Red wine grape prices are falling because of the heavy China wine tariff hit and this year’s bigger harvest.
The Chinese government announced in late March that the final tariff applied to the company’s wine exports (in bottles and containers holding less than two litres) had been set at 175.6 per cent for at least the next five years.
Treasury Wine had been selling about $500 million of wine annually to China and has warned it will take between two and three years for it to gain full traction on a program to diversify to other markets including South Korea, Thailand and Japan.
Bank of America analyst David Errington said the benefit of lower grape prices to Treasury Wines could be between $70 million and $80 million.
He said grape growers are “expected to be materially disadvantaged” in 2021 and 2022 as contract grape prices fall, and the prices fetched on the spot market drop even further.
Reds hit hardest
Mr Errington said the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Science had forecast the contract price of grapes could fall by about 20 per cent, while the market clearing price could be down by between 40 and 50 per cent. In 2019, the Chinese market was the end customer for about 10 per cent of Australia’s total wine production.
Tony Battaglene, chief executive of Australian Grape and Wine, the national body of grape growers and wine producers, said the grape harvest for 2021 was likely to be about 1.8 million to 1.85 million tonnes.
This was likely to be slightly above the long-term average. He said it was red wine grape growers who would be under the most pressure because most of Australia’s exports to China had been in higher-end red wines.
The 2021 grape harvest is headed into its final few weeks in many of Australia’s wine regions and is generally completed by the end of April.
The retail market was still adjusting to the early stages of the China wine tariffs, and he predicted the downward pressure on grape prices would be exacerbated in the 2022 harvest.
“Obviously there’s going to be a lot more pressure next year,” Mr Battaglene said.
Treasury Wines declined to comment on the extent of grape price declines, and a spokeswoman said the vintage had not yet been completed.
The company said its grape sourcing strategy had been set out in a “fact book” released to the ASX in mid-December 2020, which showed that in 2020 owned and leased vineyards represented 24 per cent of total grape intake. In the luxury wine segment, the amount of owned and leased vineyards is 34 per cent.
Wine Australia figures show the 2020 grape harvest intake was 1.52 million tonnes, 12 per cent below that of 2019 and about 13 per cent below the 10-year average. Smoke taint from bushfires and poor weather conditions pulled the 2020 grape harvest lower.
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