Beyond Chateau Chunder

In 10 days time, I head off for Australia to visit the odd supplier, do some field visits with a distributor in Sydney and then head off to the Barossa and MacLaren Vale to arrange grape purchases for the 2013 vintage.

It was therefore very timely that the much trailed Chateau Chunder aired last week and, like most people in the wine trade, I found it pretty entertaining. But there were aspects that troubled me.....

I joined the wine trade in 1992, straight out of university and as such I was a willing convert to the Australian cause - even I was tiring of the seemingly endless "reserves" of Bulgarian Cabernet. My first memories of wines are littered with historical names, Rouge Homme, Leo Buring and Mitchelton Preece - many of whom have been, sadly, put to the sword by corporate Australia.

Subsequently, I have travelled, supported and bought Australian wine in a professional and personal capacity and remain a huge supporter of Australian wine. However, the Australian wine phenomenon of the 1990's and early noughties has had a lasting detrimental effect.

Most "booms" are just that - unsustainable, over heated markets with an inevitable crash and though, in the UK, Australian wine cannot be considered to have crashed, it certainly has lost considerable market share and suffered from a rather beleaguered image. When, in fact, the quality and diversity of Australian wine has never been higher, why is this the case and how is it connected to the past?

Over Delivery or Under Selling?
Various comments were made during Chateau Chunder about Aussie wine "over delivering" and it has been a consistent theme of Australian wine marketing in Western markets. More recent forays by Australian producers in Asia may well have discovered that over delivering there is tantamount to under-selling your product and in a market influenced by prestige and glamour, this is a distinct no-no. The image that Australian wine over delivered was immediately attractive and in the early days, was generally very true. Once volumes rose and promotional mechanics took hold, the ability to over deliver disappeared.
So, whilst it seemed amazing that Australian wine offered the consumer so much more fruit, so much more flavour and so much more bang for the buck, it also gave the consumer unreasonable expectations of what they could expect at low price points - price points and quality ratios that should the exchange rate ever move (which they have) would not be sustainable.
Moreover, the belief that high quality wine can be made at low costs spoilt the UK consumer forever and set in train the promotional mechanics that have held the industry hostage ever since.

Vinous Nihilism

The democratisation of wine that the Australian wine boom helped to bring about has many positives. It increased the overall volume of wine drunk, moving the overall alcohol consumption of the UK towards wine and away from beers and spirits. It introduced wine to a whole new generation and sector of society with its colourful varietal labelling and vibrant flavours.

But for all the good that Australian wine did, the industry both globally and locally is not in a healthy state. We constantly talk about how we get consumers to move away from buying solely on promotion, how we get consumers to trade up and how we get consumers to engage with us but have we, through this process of  democratisation and demystification created consumers who do not care how it is made, where it is from or for that matter, what it tastes like as long as the price is right? I've heard it described, by one of the journalistic movers and shakers of the time, that in bringing down the walls of wine snobbery, they opened up the world of wine but then did not replace it with anything to support it other than price.
In the U.S they have points, influences in Asia are based on health, prestige and gifting, in traditional wine producing countries they have a wine culture that values the product more realistically but in the UK we have price.


There is of course no going back but there are lessons to be learned on how to build brands for the long term, how to value your product correctly from the start and, however much you might want to, once you have stripped something naked, no amount of hurried dressing will rebuild that air of mystery.