By DANY RAMOS CANAS
Staff Writer
A Southern Australian winemaker named Jerrad White, had spent almost a decade creating a business back in China. He was doing well throughout his career in the industry, but came crashing down in only a matter of months. According to an article from CNN Business, the worsen diplomatic friction between China and Australia and not about the wine itself being the problem in White’s vineyard back in McLaren Vale. Jerrad White was living in Shanghai for many years, creating a network of distributors to sell his Jaressa Estate wine to Chinese Markets. This is where the demand of foreign wines in the middle class started to grow. 96% of Jaressa Estate’s wine were being sold to consumers in China by mid-2020; Up to seven million bottles a year! But then everything came crashing down back in November when Beijing announced crippling tariffs on the Australian wine as part of the “anti-dumping investigation” to see if the wines were being sold too cheaply in China. This came to be when there were complaints made by Chinese wine producers and the chinese government heard about them. White has made a comment claiming that he hasn’t sold a bottle since then. Currently, hundreds of thousands of bottles are piled up in a warehouse in Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, waiting for the tariffs to be lifted. White is devastated about the whole situation occurring, but he’s not the only one who is dealing with this. Other Australian wine producers who also invested with China’s wine boom now have to face an uncertain future for their businesses. The value of exports of wine to China had dropped to close to zero back in December according to the statistics throughout the industry group Wine Australia. The total number of wine exported to China for all 2020 dropped by 14% to about 1 billion Australian dollars ($790 million). Australia is the world’s fifth largest wine exporter and the home of most famous wine regions such as the Barossa Valley in South Australia and New South Wales. Wine industries contribute up to $35 billion (45 billion Australian dollars) to the country’s economy annually. Before the event in November, China was Australia’s biggest wine market ever. In 2019, more than a third of the wine that was exported from Australia went to China. Before any tariffs, Australian wine industry was having a difficult year due to the horrific weather yielding by as much as 40% in the first half of 2020. In the pandemic, it led to reduced orders from China and elsewhere as the economic growth slowed around the globe! This also caused political problems between the two countries as the Prime Minister Scott Morrison called for an international Investigation into the virus back in April 2020. Beijing was furious at this and China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang called out Morrison’s comments “highly irresponsible.” Shortly after, the number of Australian exports, timber, beef, types of coral, and wine began to encounter a lot of problems entering in Chinese markets. Some winemakers such as Purbrick had a quarter of the exports from his family’s Tahbilk Winery had been to China; that business is now gone.
CNN Business (https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/16/business/australia-china-wine-tariffs-dst-intl-hnk/index.html)