“Let’s not forget Australia is still number one in the off-trade,” says Laura Jewell, Wine Australia’s director for the UK, its biggest market. The country that achieved the unthinkable in 2003 and toppled French wine from its centuries-old pinnacle, remains the best seller in retail. And yet the glory days of Aussie wine when it burst out of Oddbins into every supermarket in the 1980s and 90s feel like a distant memory.
The Australian wine boom was sustained on the back of the bogof, or ‘buy one get one free’. This did wonders for volumes, but not for the bottom line. Last year it was reported that just 15% of Australian grape growers made a profit. The industry had been crippled by the strength of the Aussie dollar and a glut of unsold wine that was ruthlessly exploited by Britain’s big buyers.
Among them was Jewell herself who, before her current job, spent four years at Tesco as product development manager where she looked after own-label wines. These included Tesco Finest, which has proved a great way of introducing new grapes and regions. Although she managed to smuggle a few own-label goodies onto the Australian shelves including the excellent Tingelup riesling, most of the space was gobbled up by brands.
With four big brand owners pumping out 80% of production, and four UK supermarkets controlling a similar share of the trade it seemed a perfect fit. Instead it compounded the mass-market image of Aussie wine and, more to the point, it was all rather boring. For years we have been offered the same old brands like Hardy’s Crest for a fiver in crazy, half-price deals, never to be repeated until next week.
Yet Jewell’s enthusiasm is infectious when she talks of the smaller producers and the quality of their dry, cool-climate chardonnays for example. It was chardonnay, picked ripe and drenched in oak, that built the ‘sunshine in a glass’ reputation of Australian wine and then sent it crashing to the floor.
Producers stopped making that sweet, oaky style many moons ago, but the damage was done as we raced to embrace Italian pinot grigio and New Zealand sauvignon. To add insult to injury the latter became the biggest-selling white wine in Australia. Jewell admits her toughest challenge will be restoring the image of Aussie wine, but at least the Aussie dollar has softened.
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