This post was first published early in 2015, and it’s a great snapshot of the wine business with many links to interesting stories. That’s why I’m running it again.
Looking way back
How Australia became a country of wine drinkers is a fascinating story, which began with Barossa Pearl and Ben Ean Moselle. However, we tend to forget the role played by the wine merchants of the sixties and seventies who brought interesting wines to a thirsty new generation: Johnny Walker, Harry Brown, Douglas Lamb, Doug Seabrook, the real Dan Murphy and others. We told their story in Unsung Heroes – Wine Men who changed the Way we Live.
In 2014, Wolf Blass celebrated his 80th birthday which prompted us to set his record straight in Wolf Blass turns 80 – Fact and Fiction. It might help to listen to Richard Fidler’s Interview with Wolf a few years ago. Here Wolf tells ABC listeners that Australian wines were awful when he arrived, that he changed all that and turned the industry upside down all by himself. He never mentions Ian Hickinbotham, Max Schubert, Jack Mann, Roger Warren, Colin Preece, Ron Haselgrove or Maurice O’Shea.
The unsung hero in the Wolf Blass story is John Glaetzer, Australia’s most decorated winemaker by a country mile. Why didn’t you know that? Because John is a quiet, modest, down-to-earth kind of guy who doesn’t blow his own trumpet, which left Wolf enough space to run the entire brass section. John was happy to take a backseat and never got in the way of Wolf’s huge ego.
John has been so much in Wolf’s shadow that you can barely find anything written about him on the internet. Ric Einstein (also known as TORB – The Opinionated Red Bigot) wrote ‘A True Story’ – Australia’s most Decorated Winemaker’ in 2007, and it makes fascinating reading. We’ve updated our own story Wolf Blass – Wine Wunderkind for the occasion of Wolf’s 80th birthday.
Penfolds – The Second Coming
Max Schubert will forever be remembered as the father of Grange. Everyone knows the story of Max being ordered to stop making Grange because the early reviews were scathing, and the timid women who ran Penfolds – ‘the petticoat government’ – couldn’t see past their noses.
Few will remember that Max Schubert improved every wine Penfolds made, or that he improved every wine-making process when he was Penfolds’ Production Manager, or that he optimised the output from every vineyard and winery Penfolds owned.
So it’s sad to see that Penfolds is once again managed by inept people of no vision. Parent company Treasury Wine Estates is wrestling all kinds of alligators, mostly as a result of the countless brands Southcorp and Fosters accumulated which are now in the hands of airhead marketing juniors with no sense of history, no clue about fine wine and no idea how to rebuild great brands.
The people at the helm of TWE tried to squeeze more profit out Grange, other icons and the good old bin reds by cranking up the prices, but it did no good: by mid-year, the TWE board had several desultory takeover offers from Private Equity Syndicates on the table.
These were rejected, and then came the masterstroke: Instead of one release cycle per year – bin reds in March and Icons in May – TWE decided to bring forward next year’s cycle to October, and merge the two lines under the name The Penfolds Collection. Details HERE.
On a more positive note, enfant terrible of wine Philip White and class photograper Milton Wordley put together A year in the life of Grange, a mighty coffee table book that will break some coffee tables along with a few bank accounts. The book won a silver Coffee Table book medal at the 18th annual American Independent Book Publisher Awards, and a prize for best wine book photography at the Gourmand Best in the World awards in Beijing. Here’s a short extract.
Back in May, I went to a Penfolds lunch put on by Kemenys, breaking the rule of not travelling on the gravy train but I saw it as a chance to check my points of reference, my bearings if you like, in relation to price being no guide to quality when it comes to wine. It was an eye-popping experience in more ways than one: Kemenys Penfolds Icons Lunch 2014 – Reality Bites.
Wine Styles
In June, I came across a tasting in Decanter Magazine that compared Coonawarra’s best Cabernets with those of Margaret River. 8 out of the top 10 wines came from the west, confirming that Margaret River is our best source of Cabernet-based reds. Details here Cabernet Shootout – Margaret River Trounces Coonawarra.
As it happened, we had planned a trip to the West in July, and this was one of our most memorable despite some pretty fowl weather in the Great Southern. The Wines of the Great Southern made up for the weather, and we were spoilt for choice when it came to picking The Best of Margaret River.
Margaret River Sunset
We’ve long championed Aussie Riesling, which has been our most undervalued wine for ages. So we put the case for Riesling in Australia is Blessed with the Unpopularity of Riesling, where we discover a possible cause: wine writers for giving their readers bad advice on matching Riesling with food.
An even less popular wine style these days is Sherry, and I realised what we were missing after attending a A Sherry Dinner to Top all Wine Dinners put on by a fellow wine lover, truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
A trend we saw gathering strength in 2014 was that of more wineries releasing wines made from new-to-Australia grape varieties such as Vermentino, Arneis, Tempranillo, Nebbiolo and others. We ask the simple question: which ones are worth persevering with, and which ones are a waste of time?
Independence in Retail
We’ve always championed independent wine merchants, and will continue to do so in the face of the overwhelming power wielded by Woolworths and Coles. Woolworths won the war between those two hands down, at least in the grog side of the battlefield, but that wasn’t enough: the next goal is total market domination by crushing Dan Murphy’s competitors. More in Woolworth & Coles – Masters of Wine Part 3
Coles seemed happy to focus on food, much of it stale as it turned out, and on fighting the ACCC. ‘There’s no freshness like Coles freshness,’ took on a new meaning, and Woolworths must be laughing all the way to the bank. The big two hired old rockers and celebrity chefs to boost their stale images – Woolworths paid Jamie Oliver $90 million and then ‘asked’ their suppliers to contribute to the cost. More in Master Chefs – Brands for Hire when the Price is Right
We’ve worked hard to promote and support our remaining independent wine merchants. We’ve written several posts on why you should buy from them, and how The Online Option has broadened our choices and created a more level playing field. And we’ve updated our list of Online Wine merchants – the Good, Bad & Ugly.
Independence in Wine Writing
We lost one of my favourite wine writers, Jeremy Pringle, who died of cardiomyopathy. He wasn’t even 50 years old. Jeremy was outspoken, articulate, thoughtful and usually right on the money with his reviews. He was widely admired for being the thinking man’s wine writer, and he is truly missed by all of us.
The cosy relationship between wine writers and industry came under the microscope on an ABC program in Melbourne, where where Angie Bradbury, Wine Communicators of Australia summed the issue up this way: ‘I don’t think the consumer or the reader understands the co-dependent relationship that now exists between wine producer and wine media.’ This issue goes to the core premise I built the BWU$20 website on, and the reason why we asked subscribers to pay for the service rather than getting revenue from affiliates and kickbacks. More in Pulling the Cork on Ethics in Wine Writing.
A fellow from Hardie Grant – the people who publish the Wine Companion magazine – pretty much admitted that wineries had to pay to have their profiles included in the magazine’s listing of James Halliday’s ‘Best’ selections for 2014. Worse, he couldn’t see anything wrong with that. In our piece on The Flawless World of the Wine Companion magazine, we ask another simple question: is Wine Companion a wine magazine, an advertising platform or a tourist guide?
Independence in Wine Scoring
What the venerable James thinks of these goings on we don’t know. We do know what he thinks of wine bloggers who question our wine judging system, and we tried hard to put those comments in perspective in the piece Is Wine a lot of Bull? No, but there’s a lot of it in Wine. Our Mission is to take the BS out of Wine, and to keep our feet firmly on the ground when it comes to reviewing wine.
Others have allowed themselves to get carried away: over the last few years, Robert Parker has given dozens of Bordeaux reds from the 2009 and 2010 vintages 100 points. The most powerful voice in the wine business has not lost has love for huge reds, even when it comes to Bordeaux, as we find in this peice Parker still seduced by overripe Reds.
It’s hard to see where Parker might go from here – does he need a 1000 point system? Or should he make sure his scores actually mean something? Parker is clearly besotted with the number 100, mind you, and has launched a magazine for the private jet set called – you guessed it – 100.
I’ve also been critical of James Halliday and his generous point scoring, which has skewed the ratings of Australian wines for good. We now have ‘Halliday points’ and other points since James’ scores are consistently 3 -6 points higher than those of the Winefront, Huon Hooke and ours. Many of you have written in saying you’ve stopped paying attention to Halliday’s scores for the same reason. Problem is that every wine merchant out there uses Halliday points to push wine.
The reviews of Matthew Jukes are like a fresh breeze in this context,even if they’re way over the top on occasions. Matthew writes for the Daily Telegraph in the UK, and pops up down under every year as Tyson Stelzer’s partner in organising the Great Aussie Red Competition. In advance of that event, he publishes his own list of top 100 Aussie wines. Here are some excerpts from his most recent one: Matthew Jukes 100 Best Australian Wines – Finding the Gems.
While we’re on the subject of wine reviews, we were pretty chuffed when Max Allen Validated the way BWU$20 assesses wines. He did what we do and assessed them over a couple of days.
Wine People, Wine Hype and a Reality Check
I’ve made occasional comments about Winestar, a Melbourne-based online wine store run by Bert Werden and his brother. Bert sends out a newsletter every Tuesday morning, which usually begins with yet another 96 Halliday point bargain that sells for under $20. In Wine Hype and Reality, the 96 points were scored at the Melbourne Wine Show, and the wine cost $12. The bargain of the Year?
Not as such. A subscriber and long term wine lover who is on Winestar’s mailing list wrote in saying he’d ordered 2 cases of the St Hallett Gamekeepers Barossa Shiraz 2010, one for himself and one for his 87 year old mother-in-law. His wife pronounced the wine undrinkable and refused to use it for cooking. His mother had opened just one bottle when he last visited her, and an out-of-work friend he gave 6 bottles to complained that it was poison.
I have written to Bert and complained about several wines he’d pushed hard that just weren’t up to scratch, but he insisted that the judges at the Melbourne Show, and James Halliday et al were far better equipped to judge wine than me and my band of loyal subscribers.
More recently, I asked Bert to send us a few samples since we give him a lot of links in our Mailer and Best Lists. He said No, even when I offered to buy samples at cost (for wines I couldn’t find another source for). And he said No when I asked him to waive the unbroken dozen condition on some of his cheaper wines. And he said he didn’t care if I took all the links away and gave him no more (even though I had not implied any kind of threat).
As Rex Mossop would’ve said, I was flabbergasted. Since Bert runs a good business, I continue to support him – you can’t let your emotions get in the way if you pride yourself on your independence.
The same goes for the recalcitrant David Farmer. If you’ve got lots of miles on the clock as I do, you’ll remember Farmer Bros, the first national wine retail operation run by David and brother Richard out of Canberra. The dream run ended in the mid-nineties, and a few years later David popped up in the Barossa buying/blending and selling wine under his own labels. I’ve supported Farmer’s little GLUG operation, I’ve promoted his wines after buying some samples, I’ve shared coffee with him in the Barossa, I’ve sent him feedback from subscribers who rave about his wines, and I’ve asked him for more samples. I copied his staff and sent the email twice, but got no response. None. Zip. Zilch.
Food
We don’t mention our recipe section very often, since we’re not master chefs or even MKR candidates (we don’t own black wine glasses with gold rims, for one). We put up the web page Great Food made Dead Easy for our friends and our own convenience, since we can get to these recipes wherever we are. They are about real food for real people, easy to cook with easy to find ingredients, and plenty of real flavour.
Barbara, a tennis friend and subscriber told me back in December that she’d tried my recipe for Goulash and raved about how good the result was. A nice Christmas present, thank you Barbara.
Our Best Wishes for 2015 to all of you, and may your camels cross the desert safely.
Kim
