From the Barossa. From the young Turks.
This is an older post with a mature flavour, and it’s about a really bold marketing campaign. I came across this wine with a really different label in a bottle shop at Crows Nest in Sydney: Count (Graf) Ferdinand von Zeppelin’s face graced the label, sporting a spiked German helmet from the old Kaiser’s time. I grew up in Germany and I was surprised that Australians had grown up enough to look beyond the crass stereotypes of World War I to the genius of German engineering.
I wrote to Kym Teusner down in the Barossa, since his name was on the back label where it said ‘winemaker’, asking where the branding had come from for this range of wines. His response was: ‘Nicholas Crampton is the marketing brains, I just make the grog.’ Kym is a man of few words, but he put me in touch with Nicholas who used to be a brand manager at Fosters and now runs Echelon http://www.echelonwine.com.au/ .
Creating a BOLD new Brand
Nicholas explained that it had started with the simple thought of joining a couple of ‘artisan of the Barossa’ winemakers – Kym Teusner and Corey Ryan from Sons of Eden – and creating a more personality driven brand. ‘Both the guys have a significant German ancestry [about 6 generations], said Nicholas, ‘and I thought it a good place to start when looking for a name that brought it all together.’
Why Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin? Because he was ‘a man of ambition, a dreamer, an innovator, a brave and progressive man who thought really big! It also helped that his prime years were well before World War I in a golden age of innovation and travel. I also thought the name sounded cool – so we really just briefed on the thought of “before Birkenstocks, when Germans were cool” – big men, big moustaches, big laughs, big cars, big cigars, big airships and most importantly big personalities!’
It made my patriotic breast swell with nostalgic pride, hearing stuff like that, but the label in front of me had a man in one of those spiked helmets that most people associate with WW I. It has long puzzled me that the Germans were blamed for starting that war too, even though it was a family feud between aristocratic European cousins gone horribly wrong. Regardless, the campaigns run by the British and Americans painted extraordinary pictures of ‘the Hun’ as the German race was referred to collectively. The Hun, the monster …
To the left is our own Norman Lindsay’s take on The Hun in the Bulletin in 1916. The Brits and the Americans were just as subtle.
A Brand with Big Balls
Looking at these pictures, I wondered about the wisdom of Nicholas. Most Australians don’t know much of European history, and I suspected that they’d think of the Hun as soon as they saw the spiked helmet of Count Ferdinand. Making things worse, Nicholas called one of the Zeppelin wines Big Bertha Barossa Shiraz. Bertha, a woman’s name, was given to the biggest canon of WW I, ‘a train mounted monstrosity used to bombard Paris,’ Nicholas wrote adding that this was ‘not something we dwell on.’ To him, Big Bertha was perhaps more of a concept name.
‘In terms of packaging, the brief was to be bold and visual,’ Nicholas filled in the remaining blanks. ‘Big Bertha was all about celebrating that golden era of travel / crossing over mountains and taking giant leaps – boys own adventure stuff. This label has been well received and works well.’
I admire bold thinking like that, but wondered what the drinking public would make of it all. Nicholas conceded that the Zeppelin Core Label (the one in front of me) was more controversial. ‘It appears unfortunately that people don’t know their history and thought that Zeppelin (and the helmet here) was associated with Nazi Germany … ‘ There were a lot of complaints, and Nicholas decided to change the label. After that, people complained that they missed the old one. ‘Better to be loved by 20% and disliked by 80% than not noticed by 100%,’ says Nicholas. As I said, the man has big balls, and here is the new set of somewhat neater labels:
Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin
Count Ferdinand studied science, engineering and chemistry at Tübingen University in the late 1850s. He served in the Prussian engineering corps in the run-up to the Austro-Sardinian War, travelled to the USA as an observer of the Civil War and then joined the Union Army as a volunteer. There he met German aeronaut John Steiner who organised his first ascent in a balloon made at Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Back in Germany, Ferdinand served in the Austrian war of 1866 and in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. From the 1880s, he began to work on the design of an airship – a rigid aluminium framework covered in a fabric envelope, featuring a number of separate internal gas cells. The controls, engines and gondola were rigidly attached. His biggest challenge was finding engines that were light and powerful enough for his Zeppelins, which kept crashing after short flights. One such crash in 1908 in Austria sparked public interest in the Zeppelin and helped Ferdinand raise 6.5 million German marks to establish the Luftschiffbau-Zeppelin GmbH.
Up until 1914, the German Aviation Association transported 37,250 people on over 1,600 flights without an incident. Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin died in 1917, before the end of World War I. He therefore did not witness either the provisional shutdown of the Zeppelin project due to the Treaty of Versailles or the second resurgence of the Zeppelins under his successor Hugo Eckener. (Thanks to Wikipedia for the history).
This photo is from 1935 – yes, the Nazis had a fling with the big airships after all.
Of course, what most people remember about Zeppelins is the Hindenburg disaster of 1937, where the German passenger airship LZ 129 Hindenburg caught fire during its attempt to dock with its mooring mast at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey. There were 36 fatalities, including one death among the ground crew. The disaster received world-wide news coverage and forever shattered public confidence in the giant Zeppelins.
Back to the boys in the Barossa
The grapes for Zeppelin wines come from vineyards owned by Teusner Wines or Sons of Eden around Greenock, Angaston and Ebenezer, vineyards with low-yielding vines up to 80 years old. Like the Teusner and Sons of Eden reds, Zeppelin wines are made with traditional techniques using open fermenters, pumped over by hand, and basket pressed. The wines are matured mainly in older French oak barrels before bottling without fining or filtration. The wines are made to express their origins rather than to show off the young Turks and their winemaking talents.
The 2009 Zeppelin Grenache wraps a heady 15% alcohol into a big, warm, soft and cuddly red that’s driven by sweet Grenache fruit and spice. Liquid blackberry jam on toast. This would a make a perfect breakfast wine, except that it would send you back to bed toute-suite. It’s big. Really big.
I had some with a lamb shanks casserole – see the recipe I just posted – thinking it might overpower it, but it was a perfect match: the sweetness of the Grenache and the lamb and carrots and sweet potato. Mind you, the wine is a bit one-dimensional, and you can see why Grenache is usually blended with Shiraz to give it some authority, backbone and length. Still, this is a fun wine and a history lesson rolled into one, so who’s complaining?
Kim