 |
 |
News Analysis |
|
|
Page 1 of 3 |
|
|
| February 11th 2007 |
|
| Wines without frontiers |
by Robert Joseph and Joel B. Payne
Wine lovers have strong feelings about provenance. They are, however, happy to buy Italian shoes from China, Toyota cars from British factories and Leica camera lenses from Japan. |
|
|
How much does the origin of a wine really matter? The con-ventional response, and certainly the one favoured by most wine lovers, is that a precise sense of the provenance of all but the very most basic examples is of essential importance. Recent conferences on the future of the Australian and South African wine indus-tries have included calls for greater emphasis on regionality, new appel-lations are being created across the world and vineyard names are appearing on labels at an unprecedented rate.
But a brief glance at the current trends in the wine market as a whole paints a rather different picture. Alongside those mini appellations, there is an inexorable move towards officially recognising larger wine regions. France which is doing its utmost to avoid this phenomenon, ironically helped to give birth to this phenomenon by launching Vin de Pays d’Oc, a single designation that covers the world’s biggest wine producing area. When it was conceived in the 1970s, no one imagined that wines sold under this name and that of other Vins de Pays would ever compete with appellations such as Muscadet, Bordeaux and Burgundy, but that is precisely what brands like Fat Bastard and E&J Gallo’s Red Bicyclette are doing today.
Just as unimaginable at the time was the possibility that French wines would be pushed off their pedestal in several key markets by Australia. But the ability of the producers like Jacob’s Creek and Yellow Tail to make millions of cases of wines of consistent quality and style owes hugely to another regional designation: South East Australia. One of the mysteries of the modern wine world concerns precisely how the International Office of Vine and Wine (OIV) came to rubber stamp the creation of an appellation that sounds as though it covers a small part of a country but does in fact encompass well over 92% of all the vines grown there. But if Australia’s big brands benefit from the wide range of grapes and wines on which they can draw, firms like E&J Gallo and brands like Blossom Hill have hardly been hampered by bearing a designation as imprecise as “California”. New Zealand has “East Coast” which is nearly as all-encompassing as South East Australia, while South Africa has “Western Cape”.
In Europe, the competition from wines produced under these liberal conditions, initially led to the creation on the Iberian peninsula of “super regions” like Beiras, an umbrella region which covers both Bairrada and Dao, and Catalonia covering areas including Penedes, Priorato and Terra Alta. More recently, decisions have been taken to create appellations enveloping almost the whole of Spain (see Victor de la Serna’s column on page 8) and Portugal respectively. France has also put forward similar legislation. Further, included in the current proposals for wine reform is a wider European denomi-nation that would allow producers to use grapes from anywhere in the community and label the wine with varietal and vintage, details which are currently illegal for such blends.
The theory behind these |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
News Analysis |
|
|
Page 2 of 3 |
|
|
moves is that when they are buying wine at all but the more premium price points, modern consumers - especially in the growing Anglo-Saxon markets - are less interested in regions than in styles and brands. When Calvet switched sourcing of its white wine from Bordeaux, the region with which Calvet is traditionally associated, to Gascony, there was no negative reaction from the trade or from consumers. Indeed (see feature on page 20) professional buyers acknowledged an improvement in quality.
But both of these Calvet whites came from the same country. In the early 1990s, several Californian wineries turned elsewhere when they ran out of local grapes. After doing a Cabernet Sauvignon from Chile, Mondavi imported some 2.25 million litres of Merlot from the Languedoc. Monterey Vineyards - a Seagram brand at the time - only imported half a million litres, but raised more eyebrows in Europe where traditionalists remarked on the juxta-position of a brand named after a region of California and wine from the Mediterranean. In the US, however, Cary Gott, executive vice-president for Seagram’s Sterling Vineyards, said that there had been no negative response. A Mondavi spokesman speaking off the record, while admitting that his company had misgivings about going offshore, explained the move by claiming that it was a response to blackmail by big American retailers who had threatened to remove the entire Woodbridge range from the shelves if it did not include a Merlot. Mondavi subsequently - and unsuccessfully - converted its Californian Vichon subsidiary into a 100% French brand. In the meantime, new plantings in California have reduced the need to import from overseas, but the lack of consumer resistance to multi-regional sourcing has remained in the corporate memory.
To be fair, in some countries, this kind of move is less easily received. In New Zealand, when Kate Radburn of Hawke’s Bay pioneer CJ Pask responded to short harvests by importing Chilean Sauvignon to sell on the local market, there was a national outcry. There was a similar reaction in Australia to FGL’s introduction in 2006 of a Chilean and South African wine under its recently acquired Lindemans label. Chris Canute, spokeswoman for the Barossa Grapegrowers Council, was quoted in the Adelaide Advertiser as accusing FGL of a “using highly-rated and well-recognised Australian brand with a reputation for quality and integrity and raping it”. Canute’s perhaps predictable reaction on behalf of grape growers was echoed in Internet chat rooms by Australian consumers such as the one who wrote that “Lindemans... produced some of Australia’s greatest wines. Foster’s seem hell bent on wiping out some of our greatest wine heritage”.
That sad wine drinker with memories of the great Lindeman’s Hunter Valley wines of the 1960s is, however, less relevant to FGL’s shareholders than the American and European consumers who, according to Lindemans’ Global Brand Director, Oliver Horn “are interested in experimenting with wines from new places but... want a reliable |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
News Analysis |
|
|
Page 3 of 3 |
|
|
choice from a known and trusted producer.” Horn justified the move by referring to research which had revealed Lindemans to be seen as a truly international brand – not Australian-specific – by consumers in these markets”.
Assertions like these may be disconcerting to traditionalists but they echo the results of a British survey carried out by Sogrape which discovered to its surprise that British consumers were unaware that its supposedly quintessentially Portuguese brand Mateus actually came from that country. Other research in the UK has revealed that many con-sumers don’t realise that Gallo is American or Kumala South African. Customers walking out of major supermarkets are often far more able accu-rately to name the grape used to make the wine they have bought, than the country where it was produced. This pheno-menon is exacerbated by the growth in “international” wine names and label designs, like Bulgaria’s “Blue Mountain” and France’s Fat Bastard. There is less reason to notice a country when picking a bottle from a gondola. Pinot Grigio is presumed to be Italian, but a Hungarian wine bearing the Origin label recently outsold all others at Thresher, the UK’s biggest specialist wine retailer.
Blue Nun Australian Shiraz
Sogrape’s research justified its launch of a Spanish Tempranillo under the Mateus label, echoing the decision by the owners of Blue Nun, another major 1970s brand, to create a range of wines under this label. Today, where there was once a single semi-sweet Blue Nun Liebfraumilch, there are nine German wines, none of which is a Liebfraumilch, plus others, ranging from Chilean Chardonnay, French Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot to Spanish rose and Australian Shiraz. The crucial point about this range is that it can evolve with new styles being intro-duced and sources changing in accordance with supply and demand.
In one sense, all that brands like Blue Nun and Mateus are doing is following a path that was originally beaten by retailers with their own label ranges. By far the most impressive of these was Origin, a soft brand created in 2003 by Winery Exchange for Thresher. This range of 11 wines from six countries sold 25,000 bottles per day in its first week - 20% of all wine sales - without promotion and is credited with reviving the chain’s fortunes.
Managing multi-national brands is far from straightforward, and there are inevitably risks of confusing customers. LVMH is only one of a number of Champagne companies that has deftly adapted its strategy to local conditions. Australian consumers know Moet & Chandon’s locally-produced fizz as Domaine Chandon; in the UK market, the same wine is sold as Green Point. There are apparently no plans to offer wine drinkers in Sydney the chance to buy Lindemans’ South African wine. The New Zealand giant Montana did launch an Australian Barossa Shiraz in its domestic and Asian markets, but the last vintage was the 2002. On the other hand, South African wine drinkers are surprised that they are the only people in the world to get Fat Bastard wine from the Cape; elsewhere, the brand is French. Sustaining international brands is not easy either: One of the earliest modern examples of the trend was a UK-focused label called Hirondelle which, in the 1960s and 1970s came from sources including Cyprus and Eastern Europe and, like its Spanish contemporary Corrida is now to be found in the brand-graveyard from which there is no return.
Ultimately, all that is happening in wine is what has long been true for other consumer goods. Global beer brands are produced locally where appropriate. Consumers - including those who feel strongly about vinous provenance, happily buy Italian suits from China; Toyota cars from British factories and Leica camera lenses from Japan.
And if we turn the clock back a little further, in the 16th century, the word “Sack” was used for wines from Jerez, Malaga and the Canaries. In 1896, the Victoria Wine Company offered its customers a choice of Spanish ports. California was represented by Big Tree “Chablis type” white, which was cheaper than the Australian “Burgundies” Oomoo and Kuladah. In 1905 France imported some 417m litres of wine from Algeria, little of which was sold under an Algerian label. Plus ça change… |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
