Australian Coonawarra Wine to Enter Moroccan Market

Australian winemaker Coonawarra has set its sights on the Moroccan market. It expects to export three of its signature wines to the Moroccan market from next March

Coonawarra's rich red terra rossa soil

Coonawarra is one of the most famous Australian winemakers, whose success the company claims is due to "a magical marriage of rich red terra rossa soil, limestone, pure underground water and a long cool ripening season for the grapes." Coonawarra is known for producing world class red wines especially Cabernet Sauvignon. This weekend, international media reports that the Australian winegrower is interested in the Moroccan wine market, which it considers to be under-exploited.

"Hoggies"

 The Coonawarra winemaker recently obtained its license to market its products in the Kingdom.

Reports say that Coonawarra has already entered into a partnership with Moroccan importers who will be responsible for distributing the wines on the market.

The first batch exported to Morocco will be a container of a thousand boxes containing a mixture of three of the winemakers top labels.

The winemaker's objective is to eventually achieve a market share of 5% of the 10 million Moroccan wine consumers.

Coonawarra winemaker Gavin Hogg and his business partners have already established a warehouse in Morocco and are working with two local distributors. Hogg said the first shipment would be a range of wines from his three brands – Kopparossa, Hoggies and Olivia.

He said he and his colleagues had invested a lot of time and effort to procure a licence to import alcohol into Morocco. “The first lot will be a container, which is 1000 cases, and that will be mixed. It’ll be a bit of a scattergun approach to show everyone what’s there and then see how the market responds,” Hogg said.

“The current availability of wine is pretty limited – it’s French, French and French, so I just thought ‘this is another frontier’.”

Known as the Gateway to Africa, Morocco is part of a group of fast-growing nations described as “African Lions”.

The Australian Government announced in November it would establish an embassy in the Moroccan capital Rabat in late 2017 or early 2018 for the first time. Previously, the Australian Embassy in France was responsible for Morocco.

Winemaker Gavin Hogg.

“It’s probably the most liberal Islamic country in the world – there are bars and hotels, liquor stores, and there’s 10 million tourists that go into Morocco each year and 80 per cent of those drink,” said Hogg.

“There’s probably about 10 million people in Morocco who are drinking at any one time, so we tend to think if we can get 5 per cent of that market we’ll be going pretty well. We’ll establish our labels first and then there will be some people over there who say, ‘I know of some other Australian wines – can you bring those in?’ and we can act as a conduit.”

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