Wine baron Warren Randall is primed for a spending spree

Warren Randall isn’t letting the loss of the $1.3bn China wine market get him down as the winery owner decides to buy up big.

Sybil Lebois-Parkinson works at the cellar door of the Penny Hill winery, which has been bought by Randall Wine Penny's Hill Wines sold to Seppeltsfield. Picture: Roy VanDerVegt

Warren Randall is a big ball of energy bouncing around South Australia’s wine growing regions: playing Monopoly with real properties, picking up vineyards across McLaren Vale, the Barossa and the Clare Valley in a decades-long spending spree that has made him the largest private vineyard holder in Australia.

And he’s not finished yet, revealing to The Weekend Australian his new and grander strategy to buy up five vineyards as part of a new direction that will counter the loss of the China market and find new opportunities in other export markets led by North America and Britain.

He sets a furious pace when chatting, quickly chopping and changing subjects. From what to do with the closed China market – he believes the Australian government has let down winemakers and should negotiate – to the power of the supermarkets, Britain as a new export market, weather conditions and his beloved Adelaide Football Club where he is a director.

He has an energy drawn from what seems like a bottomless reservoir of optimism, but as Randall admits, in this industry you have to be an optimist – there isn’t much choice.

“We have to be optimists. I think that’s what you will find about the Australian wine industry. It is my 45th vintage so I have been around for about 25 per cent of the 180-year life of the Australian wine industry and it is such a beautiful industry. And we remain the eternal optimists,” Randall told The Weekend Australian after his Randall Wine Group, of which he is executive chairman, this week agreed to purchase McLaren Vale’s Penny’s Hill winery.

“We don’t receive a significant amount of support from federal or state governments when these things happen. Somehow Australian winemakers find a way to pivot to find a new market and I’ll put that down to one thing: the quality and consistency of Australian wine.”

Randall’s interests read like an extremely long wine list offered by high-class restaurants. His current holdings include the 170-year-old Seppeltsfield Wines, Tanunda Hill Vineyard, Tinlins Wines as well as Langhorne Creek and Currency Creek Vineyards.

After buying Penny’s Hill, Randall is the largest private premium and luxury vineyard holder in Australia with over 8600 acres (2750ha) of vines across South Australia.

He knows the pain of the punishing tariffs imposed by China last year, which snuffed out $1.3bn in sales including a fair chunk of his own production.

“China was paying three and a half times the amount for a litre of Australian wine than the UK was … China was just a magnificent market for Australian wine and the Chinese consumer loved the structure and fruit flavours of Australian wine – sunshine in a bottle – and they were just gulping it down.

“We were on the verge of $40m of sales a year into China and that is just gone. It was heading to $150m in five years – it was exponential.

“I’ve done 39 trips to China for two to three weeks at a time over nine years so I invested not only in money and samples but my own personal time, company time in China.

“For the government to just put us on the chopping block as a kind of sacrificial lamb has not gone down well with Australian winemakers.” Randall believes Australia should “keep its nose out of Hong Kong” and start a dialogue with China over ­grievances.

But being an optimist, Randall has moved on.

“We had to develop a new strategy because it was clear no wine was going to go to China – that literally disappeared like a puff of smoke,” he says.

“We have just got to find other export markets, so my strategy now which I developed over three months is rather than just try to find and develop new brands to sell into the rest of the world replacing China, which would take five to 10 years, a quick fix would be to go and buy established brands in districts that I already have a production capability.

“My intention is to buy five vineyards that are doing to 50,000 to 100,000 cases a year in those three districts, Barossa, McLaren Vale and Clare, and that will give me a brand portfolio of 250,000 to 500,000 cases.

“And over the next 10 years I will have an export focus and develop those vineyards to end up with 500,000 to 1 million cases.”

You don’t win Monopoly by sitting on the sidelines, and Randall is running across the board ahead of the others buying real estate. And he just might win.