The SA Wine Industry Council says a loss of 85 jobs at Orlando Wines reflects a challenging export market.
The company bottles Jacob’s Creek, Richmond Grove and several other wines and says most of the jobs are going from South Australia.
Louisa Rose of the wine council says the industry is having a hard time because of a high Australian dollar.
“It’s going to be disappointing for a lot of parts of the community, we’re seeing the same sort of impacts I suppose from other industries such as the car manufacturing industry and unfortunately it’s the result of what happens particularly with the exchange rates and the global economy,” she said.
“We’re in an industry which relies so much on the rest of the world to support it.
“Hopefully there’ll be positions that those people can go into elsewhere. It will have an impact certainly on the communities because they’re (the jobs) likely to go from the one region for example, it’ll be fairly significant.”
Orlando says it will seek voluntary redundancies as the jobs are shed over the next 12 months.
if the wine industry just turned those grapes into ethanol perhaps it wouldn’t matter if we had a wine glut
you could build a truck that ran on ethanol and that would take wine to the buyer.