Seven months after lifting Aussie barley tariffs, China on March 28, 2024 ended a longstanding punitive tariff on Australia’s wine imports.

This follows an understanding that Australia has enforced anti-dumping measures that will prevent unchecked flow of wine to China.

Dumping overshadowed a 0% wine import duty provision of 2015, which had given Australia a 14% tariff advantage over rivals.

Six years later, Beijing slapped a massive 218.4% on Aussie spirits for five years starting March 2021. In the event of which, wine exports fell to their March 2023 levels of 0.14% in comparison to 2020’s 27.46%.

Now wine makers in the Land Down Under look with expectation at the new duty moratorium. Given the large size of the Aussie wine business, it won’t be long before export values echo those of 2019, worth $1.1 billion.

Indeed, by December 2023, anticipating the duty freeze, traders had forward-shipped 2.5 million liters of wine to Hong Kong. The volume is nearly 5 times more than the monthly average shipments since 2021. 

Wine was among a bevy of Australian products worth A$ 20 billion ($12.98 billion) that China was recently heavily taxing. 

Since 2020, Australia’s wine sector has been facing economic headwinds and has registered some of the world’s lowest bulk order prices.  Even in retail, a liter of wine in leading supermarkets has been costing around A$11 ($7.14) in March 2023. 

All in all, with or without exports, the local wine industry remains the biggest slice of the consumer market.  It accounts for 40% of the consumption or 500 million liters of all wine produced in Australia each year. 

With the end of the tariff regime, Australia’s wine sector may reap the historically balanced import price by China, too. Its price promise stems from the fact that China ranks eighth globally in wine consumption, at 0.88 billion liters a year.