The trigger for this short post was Huon Hooke’s post headed Penfolds Grange La Chapelle attracts critics. In that post he quotes a colleague who said: ‘The luxury goods wankery is super-sized here…’
To which Brian Miller replied:
‘Provided it is not illegal, immoral or fattening, I have no problem with any product being sold at any price, if the producers can get away with it, or think they can. Look at Barbie, Bitcoin, or Basquiat.
My point was that this extravagant publicity stunt is not news and should not be front-page news; which it inexplicably was. Coverage of this costly transcontinental concoction should be relegated to Billionaire magazine, the Robb Report, or the Bitcoin Bulletin.
If a wine writer gets a column a week, that’s only 50 a year, so don’t waste one on a wine that is of no relevance to anyone outside of a private privileged oligarchy.
Exceptions are allowed if the writing is funny or is the reason for reading the article. Jeremy Clarkson reviews a $900,000 Lamborghini and is published in the mainstream press; but not as a consumer guide for potential car buyers. Only because his eccentric writing style has a large popular following. Same with A. A. Gill on exclusive restaurants, and Anthony Lane on obscure films. Mark Shield on wine follies and foibles, when he was with us.
A friend and winemaker with many trophies to his name figured out that, for $3,500, he could buy a bottle of Grange and a bottle of La Chapelle, blend them together, giving him two bottles instead of one, and still have enough money left over for a knee operation.’
Tyson Stelzer responded:
‘Whenever I visit Paris, I love popping into all the fashion boutiques on Avenue Montaigne to stare starry-eyed at their glamorous new collections. Like most of us, I’ll never afford their most exclusive offerings (but their exquisite designs do provide wonderful stimulus for the cover and packaging of my Champagne Guides!).
There is tremendous inspiration in the finest and most daring of creations in every pursuit, and there is a rightful place and a strong demand for the most exclusive pieces of high fashion, as there is of fine wine.’
To which I replied:
‘It seems to me that Penfolds can produce any kinds of wine – think of the G3, G4 and G5 – as long as they promise serious pedigree and exclusivity at ludicrous prices. Penfolds partisans will pay all kinds of money to buy them. And to get some bottles of G5, you had to go through an expression-of-interest process with Penfolds, where you might score a bottle or 2 if you were fast enough.
As John McEnroe yelled at the umpire: ‘You cannot be serious!’. I suspect the Penfolds partisans have no idea that they could’ve bought 5 pitch-perfect Granges such as the 1976, 1986, 1990, 1991 or 1996 at auction for a total of $3500, the same cost as one bottle of Grange La Chapelle.
Then I quoted Andrew Jefford: ‘Wine becomes just another vacuous totem of wealth’ he wrote and compared creations like the Penfolds ampoule to ‘pointlessly complicated watches, tank-sized vehicles for urban use, houses which are never lived in, and boats which spend the year bobbing about on their moorings.’
He added that he takes no issue with market forces that make rare wine unaffordable to many drinkers but takes exception to marketing initiatives that ‘look so obviously like the fantasy of pale people who have spent too much time locked up in a room with glossy magazines.’ (Is that a polite English reference to what we call wankers?) He also makes the point that ‘they [the pale people] are hilariously alien to the great Aussie traditions of piss-taking and pretension-popping,’ and adds that turning fine wine into artificially exclusive luxury goods damages the brand.
‘No First Growth in Bordeaux or top Burgundy domain would contemplate anything this silly,’ he argues, ‘they leave that kind of ludicrous marketing excess to the bubble-brained Champenois, where form regularly eclipses content.’
Since TWE established such a lucrative market for their pricy Penfolds concoctions, we can appreciate why they’ve lost interest even in illustrious labels like Wolf Blass. The reality is that Penfolds exited the wine business many years ago, and made itself a new home in the luxury goods business