/ Markets
Australia is one of the world's great wine producers and still imports serious premium wine, Champagne above all. The tariff is small and shrinking. The real friction is the wine tax and the labeling, and your importer carries both.
/ The short version
There is an obvious objection to exporting wine to Australia: they make their own, and they make a lot of it, very well. It is a fair point and the wrong conclusion. A great producing nation still imports the styles it does not make and the prestige it cannot manufacture, and Australia is a committed, sophisticated buyer of exactly that. For a French or Italian producer, the question is not whether Australia buys imported wine, because it plainly does, but which part of the market is open to you and how to navigate the few real frictions, which, as in every non-EU market, your importer largely carries.
Australia imports premium, not everyday. Its own industry covers the value and mid-market shelves comprehensively, so imported wine succeeds where the local product cannot reach: prestige and styles Australia does not produce. Champagne is the clearest example. Australians are enthusiastic Champagne drinkers, shipping around seven and a half million bottles in 2025, which makes Australia one of the larger Champagne markets in the world and one of the highest per capita. Fine Bordeaux and Burgundy, Italian classics, and distinctive European styles fill the rest of the imported space. The opening is for wine that offers something the formidable local industry does not, sold to drinkers who already know wine intimately.
This is worth getting exactly right because it has been moving. For years the EU and Australia negotiated a free trade agreement, and those talks collapsed in 2023 over agricultural access and the protection of European names. They were then revived in 2025 and concluded in March 2026. The important nuance for a producer is that a concluded agreement is not yet an agreement in force. As this is written in mid-2026, the deal still has to be ratified on both sides, which can take a long time, and until it is, the existing rules apply.
In practice that means EU wine entering Australia today still pays the standard import duty, around five percent. Once the agreement enters into force, that duty is set to phase out toward zero, which improves your landed cost. But do not price your wine on a tariff that has not arrived yet. Plan on the five percent for now, and treat its eventual removal as upside rather than a number you can already bank. Either way, the tariff is the smaller of Australia's costs.
The bigger cost is the Wine Equalisation Tax, the WET. It is a 29 percent tax on the wholesale value of wine, and it applies to imported wine just as it does to domestic, collected at the border. On top of that sits the 10 percent goods and services tax. The WET is a significant part of why wine is not cheap at Australian retail, and it has to be built into your pricing math from the start, because it lands on every bottle.
The other technical requirement is labeling. Australia and New Zealand run a shared food standards system, FSANZ, with specific requirements for what must appear on a wine label sold there. Here is the reassurance that matters: both of these, the WET accounting and the FSANZ labeling compliance, are your importer's burden, not yours. The importer is the one registered to handle the tax, clear the wine, and ensure the labeling meets local rules. Your job is the wine, clean documentation, and a price that survives the WET and still leaves margin in the chain. Theirs is the machinery. This is the standard non-EU pattern: the compliance looks intimidating from the outside and sits almost entirely with the partner on the ground.
Australian retail is one of the most concentrated in the world, and you need to understand it to avoid wasting effort. Two groups dominate: Endeavour, which owns Dan Murphy's and BWS, and Coles Liquor, which owns Liquorland, First Choice, and Vintage Cellars. Between them they control something like seventy percent of packaged liquor retail, with Endeavour the larger by far. This is a duopoly with enormous buying power, and a small foreign estate has essentially no chance of cracking it on favorable terms, nor any reason to try.
The important nuance for a producer is that a concluded agreement is not yet an agreement in force.
The good news is the other half of the market. Australia has a genuinely vibrant independent scene: specialist fine-wine retailers, importers with curated books, and one of the most engaged sommelier cultures anywhere, in a restaurant trade that takes wine seriously. This is where imported premium wine actually lives, and where a small European estate with a real story can win. The independent buyer and the sommelier are looking for exactly what the duopoly's shelves do not carry, character, provenance, and a wine with a point of view. That is your market.
It is worth being concrete about where small estates actually win in Australia, because it is a specific place: the sommelier-driven on-trade and the independent fine-wine retailers who supply and feed off it. Australia has one of the most engaged restaurant wine cultures in the world, with sommeliers who actively hunt for distinctive imported wine to set their lists apart from the duopoly's shelves. A wine poured by the glass with a story told at the table builds a following here that no retail listing can buy, and that following pulls independent retail along behind it. So when you assess an Australian importer, weigh their sommelier and restaurant relationships heavily, because that channel, not the supermarket, is where an unknown European estate earns its reputation.
The targeting follows the usual logic, sharpened by Australia's structure. Skip the retail giants and aim at the specialist importers and distributors who serve the independent trade and the on-trade. Match yourself to a book that already looks like yours in style, price, and prestige, and favor the importer who owns the sommelier and fine-wine-retail relationships your wine needs. Look at who imports comparable European wine, and reach the right few directly and consistently rather than blasting the whole list.
Carry the reassurance into those conversations: once you have the right partner, the WET, the tax accounting, the labeling, and the customs clearance are theirs to manage. You do not need to become an expert in Australian wine tax to sell wine in Australia. You need a wine that fits a gap, a price that works after the WET, and the right importer to carry it. The country that makes its own wine still has a wide-open door for the wine it does not make, and the friction guarding it is mostly someone else's job.