Are you a champagne house aspiring to grow your presence in Australia or to find an importing partner? Or are you an Australian agency seeking a new champagne brand or an opportunity to grow your existing brands?

It’s my great pleasure to announce my exciting new collaboration with Skale Australia!

Skale is a new luxury business consulting firm with whom I am proud to partner to support champagne houses to scale sustainably in Australia. This relationship provides a foundation to energise houses with an aspiration to grow their existing presence in Australia and to support those seeking to enter the market for the first time.

Over the past 15 years and seven editions of The Champagne Guide, 15 Champagne Tours, hundreds of tastings and dinners across the country and around the world, not least 40 Taste Champagne events, it has been my personal mandate to provide opportunities for Australian champagne lovers to broaden their horizons and experience the incredible diversity that champagne has to offer across a plethora of houses, growers and coopératives, and categories beyond entry non-vintage, to discover rosé, blanc de blancs, blanc de noirs, vintage, low dosage, prestige and more. My partnership with Skale provides a new foundation to further these opportunities to support the exciting and dynamic evolution of the Australian champagne landscape.

Last year I hosted an incredible series of tastings for Cartier at their flagship Sydney store over five days with some of their top clients and staff from around the world, at the invitation of their Global luxury marketing and client engagement executive of the past 15 years, Sophie Seymaux. I was inspired by the way in which Sophie and her team presented Cartier and built authentic relationships with their clients. Sophie left Cartier this year to establish Skale with her colleague Julie Kim in the broader luxury world of not only jewellery and fashion but also cars, retail, lifestyle, arts, culture, hospitality and media. There is tremendous opportunity for champagne in Australia to build stronger ties with other luxury brands, and Sophie and Julie are better positioned than anyone else I know to initiate this.

Australia’s maturing champagne market currently presents an incredible stage for growth and diversification. As the seventh largest champagne market by volume and value, we boast the fourth highest consumption per adult in the world, and the largest outside of Europe. Australia imported a record of more than 10.5 million bottles in 2022, but in 2024 this dropped to less than 7.3 million, with a forecast to rebound in the coming years. While Australia boasts the second-highest median wealth per adult in the world, the diversity of champagnes available here is the lowest of champagne’s top 12 markets. In 2024 we imported just 310 champagne brands, compared with 663 in Belgium, with just one-third of our population.

I am very much looking forward to working with Sophie and Julie to support the next exciting chapter of a greater diversity of champagne down under, in both a greater diversity of brands and a stronger positioning of brands with an existing presence!

Please reach out if this is of interest and we’ll share our 30-page deck that details the four stages through which Skale can support champagne houses in their Australian journey through crafting tailored go-to-market strategies and in-market solutions.

Santé!

Tyson.