By Abe Maddison in Adelaide

Grape growers are fervently hoping for a successful 2025 vintage amid an ongoing economic crisis that the industry says is the worst in generations.

Fruit quality is high but yields in some regions are down amid a climate-change influenced early harvest, growers say.

For the 2100 wineries and 6000 grapegrowers across the nation’s 65 wine regions “the biggest issue on most people’s minds is their ongoing viability”, Australian Grape and Wine chief executive Lee McLean said.

“The general consensus is that these are by far the toughest economic conditions they’ve faced in their lifetime, and in some cases, their parents’ and grandparents’ lifetimes,” he said.

“So, while there is always some excitement and optimism around vintage, there’s also a fair bit of trepidation in the industry.”

The Chinese market is showing positive growth since tariffs against Australia were lifted nearly a year ago, but this has not significantly alleviated oversupply.

The industry is looking to emerging markets like India and South East Asia for growth but needs government support and better market access, Mr McLean said.

Regions like Tasmania and Margaret River, in Western Australia, are faring better. But others like the Riverland, in South Australia, and the NSW Riverina are struggling.

Some growers are picking “about as early as they ever have” because of the impact of climate change, Mr McLean said.

David Lowe owns Lowe Family Wine Co, an organic and biodynamic vineyard in Mudgee, in the NSW central west, which responded to climate change by planting a “Latin Quarter” vineyard in 2017.

“By 2040, climatically we’re going to be quite close to southern Italy, so I started growing grapes to mirror what will happen in 2040 – and those are the first wines we’ve made this year,” he said.

“It’s really been a fascinating experience, because wine is like the blotting paper of climate change.

“We’ve processed our first of these Italian wines, mostly whites, and we’re really delighted with how they’re handling the conditions.”

This year’s growing conditions had been “really variable, and that’s actually a good thing,” he said.

“What we’re seeing now is extremes – we’re seeing very hot and very cold, very dry and very wet – but the average is actually the sum of those two divided by two.”

The climate has a huge impact on how grapes ripen and what wine makers do, and how the flavour develops as the fruit grows, he said.

Big companies want to make wine with the same flavour and colour.

But small wineries “love the variation that comes from the effect of the climate, effect of the soil and the effect of conditions and the market, so we can easily make a wine that is different,” Mr Lowe said.

Howard Park Wines, which has vineyards across WA’s south-west and great southern regions, says its 2025 vintage is “exciting” after particularly good growing conditions.

“We’ve had cool nights and nice, warm, dry days,” owner Jeff Burch said.

“A lot of the whites have been picked, so we’re about 50 per cent into the vintage and it’s about two to three weeks early this year, which is a bit surprising.”

An unexpected challenge was “an incredibly compacted vintage”.

“The quality was good, the grapes are good, there was no disease, but everything was ripening at the same time,” he said.

“And that’s put massive pressure on the wineries to cope with the intake.”

He predicted chardonnay and riesling would be “spectacular”, the sparkling base “is going to be really good” and the reds are “ripening a bit faster than we would like”.

“Surprisingly, we’ve started picking grenache and pinot noir from Franklin and from down in Mount Barker, and we wouldn’t normally pick this until March.

“We’ve never picked those varieties in February.”

The industry has been in a tough place after Australia’s diplomatic upset with China.

In 2024, wine exports increased by 34 per cent in value to $2.55 billion, driven by the end of Chinese tariffs in March.

From April to December, 83 million litres of wine worth $902 million was sent to China.

Mr McLean said while a lot of wine was being sold to China “it’s not really doing the job that some people suggested it would, in terms of rebalancing the oversupply situation”.

“The market in China has changed to some degree, people are tending to buy less,” he said.

In SA, a record dry year, major frost damage and heat have contributed to crops being ready up to a month earlier than usual.

Adam Eggins, Chief Winemaker at Taylors Wines in the Clare Valley, said drought and frost “travel together”.

It had been a “fascinating season” and harvesting started about three weeks early.

“Everything’s happening very fast. We think we’ll actually be done and dusted by the end of March.

“And then, as a community, we’re praying for winter rain. Without that, it’s going to be pretty tough and pretty hard.

“We’ve got perfect ripening conditions, we’re relatively disease free, but everything is lacking in moisture.

“We were driving around vineyards this morning for four hours, and there’s a lot of empty dams, which is just bloody heartbreaking.”

Despite the challenges, Mr Eggins remained optimistic.

“The quality of what I’ve seen this year, it looks amazing, we’re going to make some killer wines,” he said.

“But my heart does go out to the growers, because they just may not find the tonnes that they’re hoping to find because of the drought-induced yield reduction.”

In the Barossa Valley, grape grower Marco Cirillo said the drought had meant that the crop at Cirillo Estate was harvested in January for only the second time in 50 years.

“It’s definitely bleak at the moment – there’s a lot of people that are struggling mentally and financially, and both of those things usually coincide,” he said.

“I don’t think quality is an issue, there’ll just be a massive yield loss. I would say we’ll be down by about a third, but there’ll be other growers out there that’ll be 50 per cent or worse.”

Mr McLean said many winemakers were really short on cash because they incurred huge losses when tariffs shut down the Chinese market and there was “no question” growers’ and wineries’ futures were at risk.

“We have growers in some regions that have been selling grapes well below the cost of production for up to five years and that’s obviously unsustainable,” he said.