Endeavour Drinks, the Woolworths liquor and hospitality spin-off that controls Dan Murphy’s, Langtons and a smorgasbord of wine brands and facilities, is having a fire sale.

I’m not on the Endeavour/Pinnacle mailing list, so you’ll need to head over to WBM to read the full release and hot damn, is it a serious sell-off.

The big news is that Chapel Hill is being shuttered in just a few weeks, with cellar door operations and the winery shuttering at the end of June. I’d heard rumours there was something happening at Chapel Hill this year (with minimal grapes processed in McLaren Vale), and now it’s confirmed. I feel extra sorry for Michael Fragos and the team, who are doing such good work (you only have to look at the latest releases to see the quality). The brand will apparently be retained and moved to Dorrien, leaving the old chapel and some wonderful vineyard assets for sale (the featured image above is of some of these vineyards). What a sad way to seal the Chapel Hill story…

Meanwhile, what is basically an exit from a large part of the Pinnacle winery holdings includes the jewel in the crown: Oakridge is up for sale (again). Apparently, this is a going concern, so less worry about losing one of Australia’s finest wineries, though it’s also hardly reassuring. There was so much trepidation when Oakridge was first sold that it would be mangled by Endeavour, though thankfully, they instead backed it (of sorts) as Dave Bicknell talked about here. It means that for anyone with some cash keen to get into wine, there is a prime opportunity for one of the most A-grade wineries in the land.

Then again, this sort of sale only serves to reinforce what I was discussing last week – we’re getting deeper into existential crisis mode for Australian wine.

Digging deeper into the press release, the other hard news is that Vinpac is closing its McLaren Vale site. This is a hugely important processing, bottling, and storage facility for the Vale, which will impact many small boutique wine operations, not just Endeavour.

More telling, there’s a line in the press release that really spells out the state of play in Australian wine right now, with Endevour’s move ‘resulting in approximately 99 per cent flexible sourcing of purchased bulk wine and grapes from the viticulture market’.

In other words, there is so much excess grapes and wine out there at the moment, even absolute top-tier McLaren Vale Shiraz, that there is no point in holding onto physical assets like a stupidly capital-intensive vineyard and winery. It’s a rough old time! Indeed, I had a conversation yesterday with a wine distributor about a renowned Langhorne Creek wine name that can’t pay its bottling bills, and if they can’t stump up some serious cash by the end of June, the business would be gone.

So, who’d like to buy a winery?