Agri Partners building on bulk exports to China Thachi winery in the Riverland. David Harris. WHILE everybody else might be looking to offload vineyards, David Harris of Agri Partners has been steadily buying them up over the past five years. The Adelaide-based consultancy has bought about 880ha of vines over the past five years, based on a business model which lands bulk wine in China in containerised flexitanks, where it can then be bottled at Chinese labour and packaging rates. Agri Partners last week bought the Thachi winery in the Riverland, which has a storage capacity of 34 million litres and a 25,000 tonne crushing capacity Through the winery, renamed Riverland Vintners, the company will be offering the same business model it has itself been using. We've got reasonably significant plantings in Clare, and my business partner Greg Koch has got reasonable holdings in the Limestone Coast. The pair had been getting their product contract processed in the past, then brought into China through the company's offices in Hong Kong and Shenzen. Mr Harris will be offering the same service to growers wishing to get their product to China in bulk, giving them the opportunity to get a much better return, rather than selling product to other winemakers. Riverland Vintners would not be making its own branded product for export, and would never compete with its customers, Mr Harris said. He is very bullish on the growing demand for wine out of China, but based around his business model - landing wine in China in bulk where it is then bottled. The product is a lot better (than Chinese wine) but you're competing with the same overhead. That's a direct opposite to what the industry is trying to do here. The industry is chasing regionality and varietal characteristics. My partner and I are probably the largest exporters of wine out of Clare into China and no one knows we're there. It all just goes to one of the big state-owned wineries and they are blending it up within Chinese wine and we are getting the equivalent of nearly $2000 a tonne. Mr Harris said Agri Partners could provide an end-to-end solution for growers wanting to sell their product direct into China, now that it had bought its own winery. (The winery) will handle 10 times what we produce ... and we won't own vineyards in the Riverland. Growers can put product through this winery very competitively and we can broker it out the other end. we won't buy it but we'll be offering bulk contracts to people. We'll specialise in doing that. The winery itself will never buy fruit and compete with its customers. Mr Harris said growers could strike deals with the large supermarket chains worldwide, which increasingly were bottling in-market. People in Australia say there is too much fruit. I totally reject that," he said. In 2008 in Hong Kong people consumer a litre per head. This last year they consumed 6 litres per head. China's gone from nothing to about one litre a head. When China gets to three litres it will be the biggest wine market in the world. Mr Harris said the global supermarket giants such as Tesco, Carrefour and so on, knew how to bottle their own wine and get it on the shelf - similar to the models being used by Coles and Woolworths in Australia - and represented a huge market. "The speed at which it's going to go from a fragmented, old-world supply chain to something resembling what goes on in the UK and Dan Murphy's is about five years," he said.