Mercer Wines case study

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Mercer Wines is a wine business based in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales, we've been running for about 5 years now.
Mercer Wines operates as a a contract wine making entity, operates as director-to-consumer, and we have for large wholesale businesses as well.

International export was sort of always there on the Whiteboard for us, but it seemed difficult. We're a small company.
We're under-resourced, like everyone.

Investment New South Wales came to us with an opportunity, a well-though-out and well-funded program that we could  get on board with and had rather rapid results. Within 8 weeks, we put the first pallets of wine on
a ship.

Without the help of Investment New South Wales we simply wouldn't be exporting wine to China, or it would be somewhere on the horizon and still just a a note on the whiteboard.

The New South Wales Wine Road Show allowed us to step our foot into the export market and give it a try and see if it was for us. It was really exciting to be a part of it.

The response that we got when we were there and how excited Aaron was when he saw the culture, people drinking wine, young people drinking wine. I think it's really exciting, that it's just opened up some doors for us.

The most challenging aspect of export for me is the administration. The support that we were provided by Investment New South Wales with relation to getting our export licenses through to communication, paperwork, absolutely everything we could we could seek assistance for.

There was always someone on call that we could ask a question. The support was really valuable, it saved us time, it saved us money, it saved us sleep. To have that person by our side was invaluable.

I think some people might find that export is a little bit scary, so with the support of Investment New South Wales, we really overcame those fears and, yeah, it's not as scary as you think.
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