Hunter Valley winemaker Andrew Margan bemoans the spectacular fall from grace of Australian fine wine in the UK.
Just finishing up from a month of travel through the UK – England, Wales, Scotland and both Irelands – and eaten in about 50 different restaurants.
Plenty of high end but also plenty of middle ground and even the odd service station.
I started writing this before the last WBM newsletter but I deleted the email.
Who wants to hear how badly our industry has wrecked the amazing position we made for ourselves not so long ago.
I was flying winemaking back in 1987 before the term was even coined and everyone I met in the world of wine in France asked how long Australia had been making wine for.
Five years later and they were circling their wagons against this New World force.
Now they must be laughing at how badly we have wrecked our brand.
I could count on two fingers how many wine lists I saw on my travels that had a decent Australian coverage.
Generally there was no Australian wine, or if there was it was a made-up brand from nowhere in particular.
And that is who we have become.
A commodity with no integrity, no authenticity, no story and no relevance.
Exactly what the opportunists and big companies want us to be because it sells their wines rather than the true wines of real Australian winemakers.
Because we don’t like to look like whingers and all we want to do is roll up our sleeves and dig in, we aren’t screaming from the rooftops that our brand has been wrecked by these supposed brand champions.
These brand champions that run our international marketing and use their external financing to purchase shelf space, on-premise group preferential supplier schemes and fill the airports of the world with an homogenised brand concept that has ruined who we actually are.
We need to start yelling it from the rooftops.
The people ruining our industry are in charge of it and it’s a bloody disgrace.
Wine Australia is a bloody disgrace (not the majority of people who work there).
Stop giving opportunistic parasites living off the cheap bulk wine market licences to export.
Skin in the game and investment in assets from actual residents of the country should be a non-negotiable for an export licence to start with.
The rest of it is a massive problem that will take generations to change if we start now.
The inflated and eventually illusory promise of China is much to blame for the demise of many Australian export industries, especially wine. Too much attention was paid to what some wine businesses saw as a market where they could sell overpriced wines that weren’t necessarily bought because of the consumers’ love and appreciation of the product. As you say, that was totally the opposite in the UK from the 1990s, when Oddbins was a massive advocate and seller of Aussie wines, and the tireless Hazel Murphy raised the flag for the Australian wine industry in every location she visited. I don’t see the same passion anymore, and in the last decade or so, many new (and existing) European sources and South Africa have taken our market share. And for those who think, “It doesn’t really matter, China will be back” – they won’t, or at least not for a very long time.