Australian wine supply outstripping demand

By Hamish Graham

Published: 01 December, 2025

Wine Australia has unveiled its Production, Sales and Inventory Report 2025 which detailed a worsening imbalance between supply and demand over the past year.

The national stock-to-sales ratio (SSR) has increased by +4% for 2024-25 to 1.9. This figure sits +15% higher than the 10-year average of 1.66 – driven by a +5% increase in inventory. Total inventory now stands at 2.06 billion litres of wine.

The increase in SSR was predominantly driven by still white wine, with the category seeing its SSR increase by +19%. The touted reason for this shift is falling sales for whites and a coinciding increase in inventory. Wine Australia manager market insights, Peter Bailey, believes this SSR rise is down to an over-correction, after two years of strong demand while global supply was low.

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Red wine by contrast saw its SSR decrease slightly to 2.12, though still above the 10-year average for the category of 1.88.

Bailey, added: “Currently there is an excess of around 262 million litres of wine in stock, based on the 2024–25 sales volume.

“That is the equivalent of around 375,000 tonnes of winegrapes. To remove this excess, the next few vintages would need to be below the 1.5m tonne level.

“Without an accurate picture of our vineyard supply base, including new plantings and removals, it is very difficult to keep supply and demand in balance. With the support of Australian grapegrowers, the National Vineyard Register Project has the potential to provide an accurate, digital foundation dataset that can support this.”

The 2025 vintage in Australia saw production increase, with 1.57m tonnes of grapes crushed, up 11% on 2024. In terms of volume, this harvest saw 11.3 million hl of wine produced (+9% compared to 2024). This figures still sits below the 10-year average of 12.2 million hl, however.

Volume sales for 2024-25 only increased +0.5% to 10.8 million hl. Value sales indicate a premiumising market for Aussie wines, this figure growing by +5% to $6.02bn.

A similar picture is true of export sales, with volume and value sales up +3% and +13%, respectively. Wine Australia details the growth in volume sales was driven by growth in exports to mainland China, the 2024-25 export volume figure (850,000hl) only being half of its 2017-18 peak, however. The past 12 months represented the first full financial year of trading since tariffs on Australian wine to China were lifted.

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