When is a wine a hollow log?
Grapes and Lager were kind enough to send us this great little video: The Mystery of Cow Bombie
Several months ago, Cow Bombie Margaret River Shiraz 2012 won a trophy for best red at the Margaret River show. This is a wine that costs $11 at Dan’s, so we grabbed a bottle to see if this was the bargain of the year, and this what we wrote:
‘Another trophy falls off the mantelpiece, despite the cute label. Cow Bombie is the name given to one of the biggest breaks off the Margaret River coast line so perhaps it’s fitting that his is one of those big, chunky, four-square Shiraz reds that lack refinement of any kind, along with charm, interest and enjoyment. 85 points. AVOID.
Gary Walsh at the Winefront was more generous with 89. Still nowhere near trophy territory. We added this note: The back label got me intrigued, since the address given was Cow Bombie, Siegersdorf Road, Tanunda. A quick check revealed that this is a Woolworths one label, and the wine probably made at their Dorrein winery at Tanunda. This is a useful check list that shows the origin of many labels that are Buyers Own Brands: http://whomakesmywine.com.au/thelist.html
Hollow Logs
A while back, Stephen Strachan, CEO of the Winemakers’ Federation of Australia, told Max Allen at The Australian: ‘We have a situation now where our customers [the supermarkets] are also our competitors. We believe that private labels simply take market share from our members’ existing labels, undermine the established brands and make it harder for us to clear the oversupply of wine afflicting the industry.’
Ross Brown of Brown Bros told The Age the same thing: that the big retailers’ private labels were crowding out quality Australian wines. He made the point that people thought these labels were brands. ‘I call them hollow logs,’ he said, ‘because they masquerade as brands but in fact they are just a label, which has none of the values traditional family wine companies bring to the market …’
He also made the point that these private labels showed no innovation or leadership. They simply copied the styles serious winemakers had developed over the years. ‘It’s not going to develop a wine industry that’s very serious in the future,’ Brown said, ‘and will just turn wine into a commodity.’ That about sums it up.
A Big Crush
Woolworths and Coles aren’t standing still, though: they’re going into the wine making business, no doubt chasing even fatter margins. All they have to do is buy cheap grapes, which is not a problem given the current surplus, and buy a winery. How convenient that Cellarmasters already owned a huge winery when Woolworths acquired the company: Dorrien Estate, which crushes some 12,000 tonnes every year for Cellarmasters, the New Zealand Wine Society and third-party distributors such as David Jones.
Philip White calls Dorrien Estate, ‘one of the Barossa’s bigger wine refineries,’ and says it ‘is expanding into Beckwith Park, the old Southcorp winery at Nuriootpa. At Dorrien, Woolworths already crushes about as much as Penfolds do at Nuri; the humungous volume of bulk wine that also passes through these Woolworths joints for finishing after being crushed somewhere else is nobody’s business but their own. Consider it big.’
Cellarmasters also owns Australia’s largest independent bottler, Vinpac International with a 500,000 case warehouse, and an outfit called Nexday Logistics for rapid dispatch. Cellarmasters also brings a telephone list of 330,000 customers. All of this gives Woolworths a huge leg up, and shows beyond doubt that the ACCC who approved the acquisition is embedded with the big end of town. Bugger the consumer, and choice, and …
David Farmer talks about Beckwith Park, a facility jettisoned by Fosters a few years ago, as a place that ‘slowly filled up with an array of local businesses renting office space, taking over sheds for wine making and leasing the stainless steel tanks for wine storage.’ Then he adds: ‘Into this happy family scene has wandered the giant Woolworths group …’
‘These big chains can make life extremely difficult by refusing to stock your product,’ writes Philip White in The Land, ‘or by stocking it, then destroying your market and reputation by discounting it to the point where it’s not only cheaper than you can afford to sell it at your own cellar, but cheap enough to destroy any image of prestige you may have struggled to build over the life of your business.’
The real Cow Bombie http://www.margaretriverdiscovery.com.au/cow-bombie-breaking-2012-05-10
Kim
