David Cumming from Define Wine responds to David LeMire MW’s column in WBM – Australia’s Wine Business Magazine about the campaign to get a better representation of NSW wines on lists at public institutions.
I agree with David LeMire’s central point: “I think we should have a higher market share for local wines in Australia. But we will be better off if we achieve that through excellence in farming, oenology and marketing rather than through asking people to buy local just because it’s local.”
That excellence already exists in NSW. Nobody disputes it. We have a plethora of world class wine from sixteen regions, and the standard keeps rising.
Andrew Margan made the same point in his response: quality, style, price and variety are not the problem. Accessibility and awareness are. LeMire makes a version of the same admission himself.
Discussing the growth of imported wine styles, he writes that he doesn’t think anyone could seriously argue that wine quality or our ability to make those styles locally is a barrier.
If our winemakers can already match imported styles on merit, the same must be true when the comparison is with other Australian states.
There’s also a straightforward case for buying local that the industry hasn’t made loudly enough.
A bottle of NSW wine travelling from Mudgee or Orange to a Sydney venue covers a few hundred kilometres. A bottle from the Barossa or Tasmania travels several hundred kilometres more, and a bottle from France or New Zealand travels thousands more, before it reaches the same glass.
Lower food miles mean a lower carbon footprint, potentially fresher wine, and less handling in transit. That’s not a minor point when ESG considerations already shape government procurement decisions.
Margan named ESG as a headwind for this campaign. Read as a transport and emissions question, it looks more like a tailwind. There’s an economic case sitting alongside it.
Every dollar spent on NSW wine keeps more of that spend circulating in NSW: growers, packaging, transport, cellar doors, regional tourism. That’s consistent with the NSW Government’s own agriculture policy of building value-add for the state’s farm produce, not a favour being asked of it.
So if it isn’t quality, the question LeMire asks is fair: why the low representation?
He lists possible reasons: the offer, the distribution, the support, the brand building, the competition.
Margan answers that directly. A small number of distribution houses have exclusive contracts with venues, and some of those distributors carry little or no NSW wine.
That’s a structural problem, not a taste problem, and it’s why only around 12 percent of on-premise wine lists in this state currently carry NSW wine, in the state that drinks the most wine in the country.
There’s a second answer to LeMire’s question, and it’s about how buyers decide what goes on a list in the first place.
Buyers and distributors work off existing sales data. That data tells them what’s already selling, which is, by definition, whatever they’ve already been selling.
Steve Jobs made the same point about customers generally: “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research.”
Nobody develops a preference for a wine they were never offered. A venue that only ever stocks what the data already shows selling will never find out what else its customers might have liked.
Government owned venues, with a captive, high volume audience that isn’t there specifically to buy wine, are exactly the place to show people something new, rather than wait for the sales data to catch up.
LeMire and I actually agree on the starting point.
He opens his column by saying the campaign for better NSW representation at public venues like art galleries “makes a lot of sense”.
Where we differ is what happens next. His column goes on to argue that the other 99 percent of venues, the ones privately run, won’t be moved by naming and shaming, and he’s right about that.
But I’m not asking for that 99 percent to change.
My issue is specifically with the one percent LeMire already conceded: venues owned by the people of NSW, including the Art Gallery of NSW.
A private restaurant answers to its own commercial pressures and distribution deals. A publicly owned venue answers to its owner, and its owner is the NSW Government.
That’s the ground LeMire and I share, and it’s the ground I’m standing on.
This isn’t a hypothetical ask, either. Mr Paul Toole MP put almost this exact question to the Minister for the Arts in Parliament on 6 August this year: what percentage of wine at state-owned hospitality venues is from NSW, broken down venue by venue, who curates these lists, what criteria apply, and whether any legislation exists to showcase NSW produce at state-owned venues.
The answer, five weeks later, was one line, referring back to an answer given in March to a different question.
That earlier answer is the only real figure on the public record.
It states that more than 85 percent of wine at the Opera House’s theatre bars, Midden by Mark Olive, Opera Bar and House Canteen is Australian, including more than 30 wines from NSW, and that Bennelong restaurant offers more than 300 Australian wines, including about 40 from NSW.
Run the numbers on Bennelong, and NSW wine sits at around 13 percent of its Australian wine list, right in line with Margan’s state-wide figure of 12 percent.
Even the Government’s own flagship example doesn’t clear the bar it’s being asked about, and when asked directly for the full picture across every venue it owns, it chose not to answer.
That’s also why “buy local because it’s local” isn’t really my argument.
My argument is: use local as the advantage it already is, on quality, on food miles, and on the money it keeps in this state.
If venues that the Government owns and leases out were required, as a condition of that tenancy, to carry a reasonable proportion of NSW wine, and to report on it honestly when asked, the volume on offer through outlets like Pearl Catering would give the larger distributors a commercial reason to carry more NSW brands in their own portfolios.
That’s not protectionism.
It’s using existing government leverage to fix the distribution bottleneck Margan and LeMire both describe, and it would work alongside industry efforts already underway, like NSW Wine Month, not instead of them.
I’m not shooting the messenger.
I’m asking why a government that owns these venues doesn’t use that position to support its own industry, and why it won’t even answer a straight question about it in its own Parliament.
Nothing else has worked. This is worth a crack.
• The David LeMire MW column that David Cumming refers to is published in the July-August 2026 edition of WBM – Australia’s Wine Business Magazine. Available in print and digital. Subscribe here.
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