Winemakers offer growers much less

Press, 18 December 1985, Page 7

Winemakers offer growers much less

PA Auckland Winemakers wanting to halve their bill for grapes this year have offered growers $250 a tonne, more than $2OO down on last season’s average price. Last season’s harvest cost winemakers more than $35 million — 78,000 tonnes at an average of about $460 a tonne. This season, the opening bid has been $250 a tonne. “I hope that the growers will realise that the situation is serious; that there’s no way we can pay more,” the chairman of the Wine Institute, Mr Bryan Mogridge, said in Auckland last evening. “They have to realise that we are trying to stay in business, not profiteer.”

Last year Montana Wines, of which Mr Mogridge is managing director, made an opening bid of $350 a tonne for the 1985 harvest.

Although Montana had previously been regarded as a pricing trendsetter its growers did not accept and the issue went to an independent decision-maker who decided that the price should be nearer $5OO.

“We told the arbitrator of the dangers if the price were too high, that what has happened would happen,”

Mr Mogridge said. The wine industry’s surplus, mainly in white table wines, is equal to two harvests, and two companies are already in receivership.

“Grape growers who think that the companies will continue to take grapes, whatever the cost, should think again.” Mr Mogridge said the reason $250 was being offered for this harvest was to “over-correct” for last year.