By guest contributor and industry veteran Brian Miller

‘It’s a turn-around jump shot, 

It’s everybody jump start, 

It’s every generation throws 

A hero up the pop chart … ‘

Paul Simon, The Boy In The Bubble

A leading sommelier wrote: ‘[This] might be seen as self-indulgent – and probably quite rightly – however, I’m trying to convey that these producers are not trendy in my eyes – simply, they are my friends and they are making fantastic wines that I’m proud to stock and serve.’

The wine world has not changed all that much – only some of the names, labels, closures and beards. It’s not only big wine companies that sommeliers spurn, it’s any established, familiar brands, styles or companies, however venerable.

A generation or so ago, renowned restaurants wanted the then new radicals on their wine lists – Cloudy Bay, Cullen, Petaluma, Rockford. A Penfolds restaurant rep at that time complained that she couldn’t get any wines from her premium portfolio on to restaurant wine lists except for Grange.

To circumvent this trend, big companies bought out small ones – Coldstream, St Hallett, Yarra Burn – or invented their own discrete “boutique” labels – Annie’s Lane, Robertson’s Well, Pepperjack.

In another generation today’s funky, feral breed of wines will be gone, forgotten, bought out or successful, mainstream and old news. Future wine bars will disdain them for the latest new thing – ultra-clinical Rkatsiteli from Ningxia self-served from dispensing machines and paid for via a surgically implanted silicon chip.

Meanwhile it may prove worthwhile for traditional wine companies to allow their winemakers to experiment with some ‘natural’ styles. Small quantities, unconventional labels, sold young at cellar-door, with sommelier-friendly potential. Fermentation eggs and amphorae are already appearing at some most conservative companies.

The hyphenated CEO of a large-ish family wine company recently wryly commented, ‘Natural wine will die a natural death.’ He may be right, and I share his apprehension about quality challenges emerging in that segment, but in the meantime a generation is a long time to wait for exoneration.

I suggested to a winemaker in transition that he not rip out his newly acquired chardonnay wines just yet but consider making something different from them, perhaps with skin-contact, not orange (please) but at least “textured”.

He replied, ‘I’m already working on it.’

More on this subject in our post The Retail and Restaurant Disconnect

It’s a strange business, the wine business. On one hand, we have Treasury Wine Estates, a giant teetering under the enormous weight of his plundered treasure. On the other, we have small wineries started by people with little more than faith and vision making great wines and flourishing.

The point was driven home once again when we attended a trade tasting at NSW-based fine wine distributor Young and Rashleigh. In our piece on The Retail and Restaurant Disconnect, we made the point that fine wine distributors tend to source wines that you won’t find at Woolworths or Coles. That’s what made this tasting interesting.

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: Australia is the lucky country because we can buy virtually hand-made wines from dry-grown fruit off single vineyards for around $20 a bottle. In Europe, wines like these are at the top of the hierarchy and generally unaffordable.

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That first impression grew as I worked my way around the tables of Chardonnays at Sixty Darling Street last Saturday. The overall quality of the wines I tasted – mostly under $25 – was as even as a perfect equation, and high.

Radovan and Rosa have moved the bulk of their stock to a warehouse and now have 2 rooms at the back of the store for tastings. The space isn’t huge but it wasn’t as squeezy as I expected. They stock many labels you won’t see many other places, and good on them for that. On the downside, there’s no functioning website so you’ll have to shop the old way:

Sixty Darling Street Fine Wines – 02 9818 3077 – sales@wineroom.com.au

In my notes I’ve focused on the best wines I found here in our price rang, and listed them in ascending price order.

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Winestate Magazine’s Big Event is a real Challenge for Consumers

Why? Because the winners are hard to find out there. Their prices are pretty steep already, and there’s no discount relief in retail land because you won’t find these wines there. Please stay with me and I’ll explain. Winestate collects over 500 wines from all over the world every year and chooses the best overall, plus the best in various price groups. Let’s go down the list:

1^st place overall: Bird in Hand Nest Egg Shiraz 2010 – $108 at Cellarit . After a long hunt, I found some of the wine at this unfamiliar site. Parker’s rating for the wine is 91 points so it may not be worth over $100. The 2012 is on the winery’s website for $99

2^nd place overall: Guigal Ex voto Ermitage 2010. Cannot find an Australian source for this wine, and there’s no sign of anyone importing it. Overseas listing suggest a price around US$200.

3^rd place overall – Wolf Blass Medlands Vineyard Platinum Label Shiraz 2010 – $199 / case at the winery. No, it’s not a misprint but it’s a one-bottle case. It’s only fitting that Wolfie’s best comes in its own box and wears a bow tie.

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That’s the heading of a post Huon Hooke has written, partly as a follow-up to his piece in the SMH on Sommeliers trying to outdo each other with ever more obscure wines. Huon says ‘it seems as though retailers and restaurants inhabit two separate worlds. The problem for the drinker is that when you discover a wine you like in a restaurant, and later try to buy a bottle from the retail trade, you can find it impossible.’

Huon quotes one sommelier who told him that ‘retail was poison to any wine,’ and that many sommeliers would not consider stocking wines that were also sold through regular retail outlets. Huon says he received emails from readers who ‘felt ripped off in restaurants where they bought an obscure, often imported, wine only to later find out the wine’s retail price was a fraction of the restaurant’s price.’ More here.

There’s nowhere to hide

I had a similar experience when I approached several fine wine distributors for samples. One was frank enough to tell me that most of their sales went into restaurants, and therefore it wasn’t in his interest to have his customers find out that they could buy the wines he sold them from a retailer at the same price point or lower.

I saw some distributors’ price lists, and half the wines on them I could buy for the same price or lower at retail. Therein lies the problem: In this online world, there’s nowhere to hide so distributors supply restaurants with wines that you won’t see at Dan Murphy’s. It’s the same survival strategy our remaining independent wine merchants use: they don’t sell the wines you see at Dan Murphy’s either.

The Parallel Universe

Some merchants make a virtue out of that with signs that promise to match any price at Dan M’s. When you point out that they don’t sell the same wines, big grins come over their faces. It follows that their wines will be more obscure. It also follows that their wines will be more interesting, since they have to find their gems in different fields. Just walk into Annandale Cellars in Sydney or Prince wine store in Melbourne or East End Cellars in Adelaide and you’ll see what we mean.

There’s no formal distribution system in the wine business in Australia. Anyone can sell to anyone and does. There’s also a surplus of wine, and great deals are on offer every day. Somehow, distributors have to survive in an environment where we can buy wines cheaper at retail than they can buy them wholesale. That’s why there’s a disconnect.

Huon uses the Wynns Black label Cabernet as an example, a wine with an RRP of $45. He says you can buy it for $30, we know we can buy it for $25. Huon says a high-end restaurant would probably charge about $90 for it (double the RRP), and that would look like a rip-off. That’s why distributors don’t list Wynns wines, and Sommeliers won’t touch them.

Kim

‘There are so many stories about Wolf Blass that it’s hard to know when fact shades into fiction.’

So says Tim Atkin in his Guardian review of Wolf Blass – Behind the Bow Tie by Liz Johnstone. ‘Did he really page himself at airports so that other people would hear his name? Did he once drive his Rolls-Royce into an electricity pylon, pitching a city suburb into darkness before disappearing into the bush clutching his personalised number plates? And what about those trademark bow ties? Practicality or affectation?’

Photo credit: Jeni Port

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When Brands Lose their Stories, they Lose their Lives 

You can tell when companies have lost it. They do dumb things like putting up prices that are too high already, or they become hard to talk to or work with. TWE has just announced a $100 million loss for the last financial year, and its shares have fallen from an all-time high of A$6.43 a year ago to under $5. CEO David Dearie was given his marching orders late last year after writing off A$160 million, when thousands of gallons of cheap plonk TWE had exported to the US had to be destroyed.

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Beauties that run skin-deep – under $100

As a wine reviewer, it’s essential to go to tastings that give you a chance to check your points of reference. The recent Kemenys Penfolds Lunch was such an occasion: it’s all very well to write derogatory stuff about these fancy wines but you need to check that you’re on the right page first. The GTW Bordeaux tasting was a little more modest, since all the wines cost less than $100.

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We’ve long argued that wine tasting, reviewing and judging are flawed disciplines. So we review wines over a couple of days, with and without food – does that make our scores more reliable? No. Wine judging is is subject to a handful of factors that have a major impact on our perception:

• Our personal preferences, biases and blindspots
• The location, the space, the ‘comfort zone’, the temperature of the wine
• The people we’re tasting with, the glassware used, the bread and cheese provided
• Our mood at the time, the kind of day we had, what we’re looking forward to …
• The clothes we’re wearing (are the pants too tight, are then new shoes hurting?)

You get the idea. We can measure alcohol, sugar, tannin, acid, phenolics and chemicals in a wine with great accuracy, but that’s about the extent of objective assessment. The rest comes down to the individual’s ability to taste wine, and to find suitable words to describe the experience.

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Woolworth’s plan for World Domination

We wrote our first piece on this subject HERE, and our second HERE, and if you care about what the WC duopoly is doing to the fresh food business in Australia, Supermarket monsters by Malcolm Knox is mandatory reading.

Now we read in SMH Business Day that ‘Supermarket and liquor giant Woolworths is in the final stages of a plan to crush rival online liquor retailers with a dramatic expansion of its Dan Murphy’s online business, which already has 46 per cent of the online liquor sales market in Australia.’

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