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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It comes around every year, on the first Wednesday of August. Sneaks around I should say: it’s a very low-key affair compared to the fanfare-and-drumroll launch of Penfolds Bin Reds and Icons. It’s indicative of the low-key approach chief winemaker Sue Hodder has brought to the job, in contrast to the high-profile Peter Gago.

Sue just gets on with the job, and it’s a huge job given that she and vineyard manager Alan Jenkins are looking after an area of vineyards that covers almost half of Coonawarra.  More of that HERE.

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Who Makes my Wine? The Mystery of Cow Bombie

The guys at Grapes and Lager were kind enough to send us an entertaining little video – The Mystery of Cow Bombie – which left us in no doubt that there was no such winery in Margaret River.

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James Halliday announced the annual Wine Companion awards on Tuesday night this week, at an invitation-only ceremony in Melbourne. This is the prelude to the release of the 2015 Wine Companion due out on Friday August 1.

Six major awards were presented:

• Wine of the Year: 2011 Xanadu Stevens Road Margaret River Cabernet Sauvignon, WA (Sponsored by Qantas epiQure)
• Winery of the Year: Hentley Farm, Barossa Valley, SA (Sponsored by SMEG)
• Dark Horse of the Year: Haselgrove Wines, McLaren Vale, SA (Sponsored by Nikon)
• New Winery of the Year: Flowstone, Margaret River, WA (Sponsored by Kennards Wine Storage)
• Winemaker of the Year: Castle Rock Estate’s Rob Diletti, WA
• Best Value Winery of the Year: Hoddles Creek Estate, Yarra Valley, VIC

Halliday’s Scores compared to the Winefront’s

Halliday also announced his best wines, and Gary Walsh at the Winefront wrote a note on WF’s Facebook page that compares Halliday’s scores with some of the Winefront’s. I’ve said more than once that Halliday’s scores are consistently 3 – 6 points higher than the WF’s, which covers several brackets. That’s a serious issue in the 100 point system since you only have a range of around 10 points to work with (87 – 97):

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Big Name Chefs will flog any rubbish for pots of money

‘You cannot criticize a man for going to work. You really cannot,’ says Celebrity Chef Marco Pierre White. ‘But you can criticize a man for choosing to go to work as a pimp and a whore,’ says a reader on Eater.

White became the brand ambassador for Knorr ‘Homestyle’ stocks in the US. ‘He is no stranger to Knorr (a division of mega-conglomerate Unilever), as he’s promoted the company’s boullion cubes in the UK since 2006.’ White claims to have used Knorr stock in his kitchens for 30 years and says: ‘It is my secret ingredient.’ MORE.

Marco Pierre White making love to a hindquarter (Source: www.eater.com). 

The surprise is that more and more celebrity chefs are doing more of this and seem happy to trash their own brands in the process. They don’t seem to mind spruiking complete rubbish either. ‘We are excited to once again be supplying the MasterChef Australia pantry with the same great food customers will find in our stores,’ says Simon McDowell from Coles. Should we be excited too?

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The Wine Wonder of the West

Compared to the more remote Great Southern, Margaret River is a bustling place. The town is substantial, and conveniently located half way between Cape Naturaliste and Cape Leeuwin. It’s about half an hour’s drive either way. There’s the highway or Caves Road, named after the magnificent limestone caves here.

Limestone is a feature often found in great wine areas, from Bordeaux to Coonawarra. It’s a little warmer here than in Bordeaux – 1600 degree-days vs 1500. Coonawarra is about the same as Bordeaux. Limestone plays a minor role in Margaret River’s vineyards, which sit on a ridge of ancient granite said to be 2,000 million years old. Most of the soils are granite gravel loams which are ideal for grape growing. Gravel also features in the soils of Bordeaux.

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The Albany Highway is a good road, two lanes but lots of overtaking lanes. The scenery is easy on eyes: undulating green, lots of trees, rolling hills. Mount Barker is about 400 kms south of Perth. It’s a real country town where wine takes a back seat to sheep and cattle. Let me rephrase that: wine is almost invisible among the Elders rural supplies, the Mitre10, the butcher and the IGA.

Jason’s restaurant The Happy Bull is an oasis where good coffee is served, and good honest food. Steak is a specialty. Our temporary home is a historic homestead in Porongurup range, described as the oldest mountain range in the world, 20km east of Mount Barker. There are 3 wineries nearby: Xabregas, Mount Trio and Castle Rock, which takes its name from a huge boulder balancing on a tiny footprint. The view from the rock across the plain to the north is worth the 3.3km hike.

Our first night was freezing, and we ended up piling more and more wood on the fireplace and later, more and more blankets on top of the bed. It was 2 degrees the next morning, which saw us racing around and flapping our arms to get warm. We didn’t until we jumped into the car and got the engine warmed up.

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