Alcohol available for consumption in Australia

Data sources

Prior to 2014–15, estimates for wine available for consumption were based on the Shipments of Wine and Brandy in Australia by Australian Winemakers and Importers collection (ABS 2014). This involved collecting sales information directly from winemakers and importers and had very high coverage of the wine sold in Australia.

The final year of this collection was 2013–14, and apart from a survey run by the ABS in 2015–16, no other direct surveys of winemakers and importers have been run. As a result, a new set of data sources was required to calculate alcohol available for consumption in the form of wine.

Wine Equalisation Tax and alcohol available for consumption from wine

While beer can be calculated based on excise data, this has not historically been possible with wine. This is because wine is taxed according to the Wine Equalisation Tax (WET), which is calculated as a proportion of the price of the wine rather than a proportion of the amount of alcohol in the beverage, as beer and spirits are. As a result, WET data cannot be used to calculate the amount of wine that was made available in a given financial year.

If it is not possible to directly measure how much wine is sold or produced in a given financial year, then the next best approach is to use data to project the amount of wine being sold from the previous surveys. This is where WET data becomes useful.

Total WET collected can increase for one of two reasons:

• More wine is sold; or
• People pay more money for the same amount of wine.

Given this, if the average price of the wine is accounted for, then the changes in the WET amounts should correspond to changes in the amount of wine being sold.

This publication uses two data sources in this approach:

• Wine Equalisation Tax data, collected by the Australian Taxation Office and published on their website (ATO 2024).
• Consumer Price Index (CPI) data for wine, as published by the ABS (ABS 2024).

Previous estimates from the Shipments of Wine and Brandy in Australia by Australian Winemakers and Importers (ABS 2014) are projected into future years, using WET data and accounting for wine price changes using CPI data. This means that alcohol available for consumption in the form of wine estimates are indicative of the trends in consumption, but absolute values may not necessarily match amounts of wine sold. However, this method does produce estimates that closely match those produced by the Shipments of Wine and Brandy in Australia by Australian Winemakers and Importers series even after nine years of projection, as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5: Comparison of alcohol available for consumption from wine between the ABS series and estimates projected from 2004–05 to 2013–14

Note that the total amount of WET paid is used in this collection, rather than the net amount of WET collected after rebates have been provided to winemakers. WET also covers both domestic and internationally produced wine available for sale in Australia.

It is assumed that all wine being sold (specifically the sale that involves payment of WET, usually a wholesale purchase) in a given in a financial year is made available in that financial year. All products that attract WET are grouped into the category of wine for the purposes of this collection, apart from cider.

While some forms of cider do attract the Wine Equalisation Tax, these calculations account for that by subtracting a portion of the WET data based on the alcohol available for consumption from cider proportions generated from the National Health Survey.

Subdividing total wine into wine categories

As a result of using WET to project total wine sales, volumes for individual wine categories cannot be estimated directly. For the first time in 2024, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) has used sales data to disaggregate the total amount wine sold in all years into the relevant sub-categories (red wine and rosé, white wine, sparkling and carbonated wines, fortified wine, and vermouth). This method has been applied to all years of data from 2014–15.

Calculating wine available for consumption

Wine covers a range of beverages with a range of alcohol strengths. This publication uses a different average alcohol content for different types of wine, as shown in Table 2. The average alcohol content for red and white table wine was based on the results from testing wine that was exported from Australia and were sourced from Wine Australia (Wine Australia 2024).

Testing data is based on the year that the wine was exported. White wine uses a two-year rolling average and red wine and rosé uses a three year rolling average.

The wine category volumes created by subdividing total wine estimates were used in combination with the average alcohol strengths in Table 2 to estimate the total wine available for consumption in each financial year.

Methodological considerations

This publication represents a substantial change in the approach to calculating wine available for consumption. This method was chosen as it yields similar results to the previous long-term data series, Shipments of Wine and Brandy in Australia by Australian Winemakers and Importers, and the use of taxation data creates a methodological similarity to the calculation approaches for beer and spirits used in the collection.

Estimates largely match those previously published by the ABS through to 2013–14. The WET projection method has been applied from 2014–15 onwards, so results will not exactly match those previously published by the ABS. The similarity in estimates as seen in Figure 5 indicates that the estimation methods are consistent over time, however care should be taken when interpreting absolute values of wine available for consumption for all following years.