A RAPIDLY shrinking export market caused by the high Australian dollar has forced Milawa’s Brown Brothers winery to cut 10 jobs.
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Its chief executive, Roland Wahlquist, said yesterday the company was providing career counselling to the workers, part of a 200-strong team at the 120-year-old winery.
“We have lost some very good people, but we’ve got a very strong community here at Brown Brothers,” he said.
“They’re given all the support we can with full redundancy packages and career transition counselling.”
Mr Wahlquist said the high dollar had pumped up Brown Brothers prices in Britain and elsewhere in Europe.
“Probably the worst-affected there has been the United Kingdom, as that was our largest export market,” he said.
Mr Wahlquist said that, at its peak six years ago, Brown Brothers sent about a container of wine a day to Britain but now would be lucky to send two a month.
“Our European markets also are quite difficult as well,” he said.
“It’s a combination of the high Australian dollar making our wines very expensive in the UK and Europe and all those European economies struggling that has seen our wine consumption declining.”
At one stage, Brown Brothers was selling $17 million of wine into Britain — now sales are barely 10 per cent of that.
Mr Wahlquist said the 10 jobs at Milawa were spread across the business, including finance, information technology, sales, engineering and marketing.
The difficulties in the export business started to bite the company’s bottom line when the dollar started to rise in 2011.
“It’s been getting tougher and tougher in those markets and it’s just got to the stage where we felt we couldn’t see the exchange rate getting better any time soon,” Mr Wahlquist said.
Mr Wahlquist said the company had a “very strong” domestic market that had always underpinned the business.
He said the Brown Brothers’ moscato and the King Valley-grown prosecco were both going well.