Supply Chain Design

Australia Wine Group is a collection of wine companies that has grown organically over the past couple of decades. Wanting to create a family business, the founder acquired four iconic wineries in different regions in Australia over a ten-year period. Many of their grapes are estate grown, although they do purchase 40 percent from other growers to provide stability in vintage variation. Due to the high cost and complexity of shipping to other countries, they opened their own distribution center in eastern Australia to take advantage of shipping large quantities to other countries. This facility added bottling equipment in addition to state-of-the-art storage capabilities, and they now offer bottling and logistics services to other companies as well. Another complexity they faced with respect to shipping to other countries was import regulations; therefore they opened importing offices in the United States to manage imports through New York and California, and a joint venture to handle imports to China. They also employ independent distributors in Australia and the UK to manage relationships with sales outlets. Retail/restaurant sales outlets seem to be the only pieces of the supply chain that are not part of Australia Wine Group.