ATLANTA NO ATLANTIS FOR OZWINE ENTHUSIAST

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The Non-existent Presence

Interview by PHILIP WHITE – Winestate June 1983

Frank Stone loves wine. A softly-drawling Georgian, he is headmaster of a body called the Wine Academy of USA, and is also president of the Society of Wine Educators in America.

While he talks, Stone pulls wine marketing and import/export statistics from his memory with an uncanny flair, and he pauses now and then to ensure his last gentle barrage of figures and ideas has properly settled on his listener.

Also a merchant, Frank owns Skinflints, a chain of six supermarket-sized bottle shops in and around Atlanta, Georgia. These shops specialise in quality wines, and they turn over $25 million each year. That’s quite a lot of wine. Frustrated with the difficult task of getting solid and up-to-date information about the Australian wine industry, Stone eventually made time to come and find out for himself.

Philip White intercepted him in the middle of Victoria, and found an interviewee fired with enthusiasm for what he had so far found, and similarly fired with criticism of Australia’s bumbling in the international marketplace.

How do you see the Australian wine presence in the USA?

There’s virtually not a presence. It’s a non-existent presence. Currently, Australian wines are usually put in the “all other wines” section. Perhaps merchandised along with wines from Jugloslavia; less prominently than Hungarian wines; next to Chile and Turkey.

Partially, my criticism is for the really piss-poor PR that your wine marketplace has generated for itself, both within and without the country.

Has anybody ever been to talk to you about it?

No. Not one. Nobody. Not one wine shipper has been to Atlanta Georgia and seen me. Let me tell you even worse than that – much worse than that: as the president of an international wine education association with 1,600 members who teach in universities and colleges, adult education and trade education course – get it: I am the clearing house for all wine information for that group, and have subsequently regurgitated a catalogue of every piece of information available on the subject of Australian wine, and every other wine – do you know how many times I’ve been contacted by anyone from Australia? Never.

Can you make some comparisons between what Australia’s doing and what other countries are doing?

Aw shit. As an example, let’s talk about France and Italy. For the last five years, the French wine imported marketplace has been taking it in the ass in America – at the expense of expanding market share for Italian wines, OK? The French are selling the same amount of wine, with proportionate increases each year, accounting for inflation. However, on the other side of the scale, the Italian wine-producers and importers are accelerating their rate of growth and their market-share percentage by tenfold extrapolated over the French.

Five years ago, 9% of the wine consumed in the United States was imported. The Italians’ share of those imports was less than 11%. Today, imports account for 24% of consumption, and the Italians’ share of that is 67% okay? From 11% of 9% to 67% of 24 – that’s quite a jump in four years! And you know how they’ve done that? First, a media program that’s second-to-none. Advertising, point-of-sale material, maps, charts, books ... they run five trips a year to Italy for wine writers, all expenses paid. All you gotta do is show up at the airport. Five trips a year for forty people apiece! That’s 200 writers a year, every year for the last five years, taken to Italy. OK?

Let’s take Marquis Antinori. You know him? He owns Villa Antinori. Seven years ago, he was shipping 40,000 cases of wine, total. Last year he shipped 2,500,000 cases of wine. Let’s talk about Villa Banfi. Seven years ago they didn’t exist. Last year they shipped 17,000,000 cases of wine. That’s just the States. 17,000,000 cases!

Could they have done that on the quality of the wine alone?

They didn’t do it on the quality at all. They did it by marketing. There’s this body of merchandisers who have been put in New York City. They opened a wine-tasting room, just for the media and the trade. They had an outreach and hand-holding program that went to every village and every city, starting at the population centres and working out like tentacles, making friends, giving tastings, holding seminars and holding classes; correspondence courses.

Last year, imported wine constituted 7% of America’s total balance of trade deficits. Now ponder on that.

The word is that Australia, and Australians, are all fairly popular in the USA at the moment. Is that true?

Absolutely. There’s a very strong kinship with things Australian right now. The phenomenal success of the films is evidence of this. Gallipoli, Breaker Morant, and The man From Snowy River – I’ve seen all three of those, and I think the reason Australia has some fascination for Americans is that’s it’s a resemblance of the old west tough-guy-strikes-out-against-all-evil mentality. It’s been so well-received over the years. But more than that: there’s a philosophical, maybe an emotional endearment to a people who speak the same language, and have the same developmental processes, as the Americans have had.

So in terms of potential adaptability to the marketplace, it couldn’t be better than it is right now.

Are there many similarities between the Australian and American wine marketplaces?

God, there are so many. It’s easier to talk about the differences!

To begin, the marketplace is relatively embryonic in terms of marketing positions and in terms of packaging. It’s fairly sophisticated in the sense of wine technology, and the development of new types and varietal characteristics.

I think the technology’s very high here. The experimental things I’ve seen here have been very interesting, but the really good wines I’ve seen here are really one step beyond experiments, and beyond the hobby – I call them gentlemen – winemakers.

Another thing is that Australian makers have a very introspective perception of the marketplace: they can barely see past their sales room or customer list. From what I’ve seen they don’t have much sensitivity to what’s happening outside their own region. They have very little sensitivity to the world marketplace other than for comparative analysis of their own product.

What are the differences in the customer’s approach to the wine store? Do Australians expect anything that Americans don’t?

Well, they’re telling me that the Australian consumer buys low-price, high-volume goods in great numbers and that you have no market for super-premiums. But see, then when I ask ‘OK, where are the super-premiums?’ they’ve sold completely out, and they’ve got a warehouse full of low quality – I’m sorry – low price, high volume goods left. So maybe it’s the numbers that on paper reflect an avalanche of consumption of high volume and low price, but the synergism in the marketplace is for the unique and the high quality, which supports my allegation that although they say there’s no place for it on the market, it keeps disappearing off the shelves.

What I have noticed with striking similarity is the polarisation of the elements: the consumer element; the retail element; and the wine-producing element. They seem to be at odds with one another about their common interests.

At the producer level, they seem to be hell-bent on distribution at all costs. “We want penetration. We want depletions”. And at the retail level they’re caught in the syndrome that more boxes beget greater market share. They prostitute profits.

At the wine consumer level you seem to have an element who are drinking wine as an alternative to beer, or soft drink, or water. Then you have another element who have developed a cognoscenti of wine snobbery. I don’t like to use the word “snob” though ... let’s say “enthusiasts”. You have these enthusiasts who support the expansion of the super-premium wine market. They do it by wine-tasting clubs, wine-buying schemes, wine-drinking organisations, and then, to a lesser extent, through the restaurant trade.

The most unique character I’ve seen so far is in the restaurants. The restaurants here have a better grip of what’s of what’s happening in the regional marketplace. Much better than the retailers I’ve seen. Now maybe it’s because the marketplace is structured differently here than it is the States, but almost every restaurant I’ve been in has had a pretty active wine-marketing program for that region.

Which Australian wine products would suit the American market?

I don’t think all the products that are made here could suitably be exported and marketed successfully in the United States. I came over here looking for very specific types and kinds and qualities. Specifically, premium reds. Cabernets and shiraz. Some very high quality ports, which is a surprise to everyone that I’ve talked to, and sherries. There is an absolutely insatiable market in the United States for quality port.

You can tell from the auction prices in London that there’s a world demand. Look at the Decanter index! The port index is up higher than the Bordeaux prices! The numbers speak for themselves.

Best of the things that I’ve seen, there are least a half-dozen that I’d be proud to sell, not as an Australian wine, not as a wine from another wine-producing region, but a god-damn good seven dollar bottle of red wine! That’s the crux of the thing: I’m dealing in goods that are international in scope. And I’m looking to supply our market with the best quality, within the price range, from anywhere in the world. I don’t give a shit where it comes from. And my customers don’t either. I used to think they were hung-up, but they’re not. They’re buying what I tell them is the best value for money. That’s how I built my business.

Here’s an example: a year ago I went to South Africa, and became enamoured with the Zeonnebloem cabernet. One particular vintage out of the eight I tried was outstanding. Stylistically, it’s a non-typical cabernet style for America. It’s got a good presence of colour, a good complexity of flavour, long in the mouth, with no astringency and no tannin – it’s as if somebody clipped off the bottom half of the glass.

Slippery, wonderful taste. And I also tasted the same wine-style that they’d been making over the last thirty years. They were that old, and they still had fruit in the glass! I couldn’t believe it! If I hadn’t tasted them myself, I would have thought that that wine would have been over the hill and in the salad dressing within five years. It has a structure unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. It’s because of the climatic growing conditions. You can read about it, but until you see it, it’s an absolute anomaly.

I took a shipment of some of these wines back, along with some Edelkeur, which is a botrytised dessert style white. I took 200 cases back to the States, and I sold it faster than a cat could lick its ass. You know why? Because it’s light, it’s got good colour, good fruit. People can drink it like a Beaujolais. Drink it chilled – not cold – as a complement to food: a wonderful food wine. We don’t have a wine made in America that’s like the wine I’ve just described.

Anyway, 200 cases was my first shipment last March. Before the end of December this year we’ll probably do 80,000 cases.

Have you seen any wine in Australia which excites you so much?

I don’t want to be patronising or partial, but so far the most unique thing is Hickinbotham’s Anakie Cab Mac. It’s exactly the type of wine I’m talking about. Forward, and fruit-like, with not a lot of complexity to it, and easy ... a fun wine to drink!

But that’s coming from one of the smallest wineries in the country!

Well, what can I tell you?

Well, what else can you tell me?

I don’t think the chardonnays I’ve seen have sorted themselves out in a way comparable or similar to the Californians.

But I’ve seen some cabernets and some reds from Coonawarra that are very nice. They’re wines that I have an interest in. I did see a couple of things in the Barossa that were interesting. The Hill Smith outfit has a couple of wines that I’m really partial to. In the McLaren Vale I found a couple that caught my attention. The most interesting thing I found there was Hardy’s Show Port.

We were hoping you’d never discover that! What about riesling? Are we ever going to sell it in the States?

No. We’ve got plenty of that now. The botrytised wines are a definite, although there are a lot of attempts at botrytised wines here – they don’t have the depth or the apricot flavours that I’m looking for yet, but they’re certainly getting there. You’ve certainly got the areas for it.

Can you make just a short comment on what Australia should be doing?

Australian wine products are not recognised in America. By and large, Americans don’t even know that Australia is a wine-producing nation, and that the wines that are being made here are serious efforts towards making universally-accepted wine products.

The way I propose to expediate the development of that awareness is through education.

Last year, the Society of Wine Educators provided wine education for over 600,000 people in America. OK? That body is currently in the process of developing a core educational program for every wine-producing country. This will be disseminated to the Society’s members on, say Italy, or it could be France, or Germany, South Africa, Australia, or Chile. Slides, transparencies, maps, production data, crop information and statistics, contact points, where you get tasting samples ... OK?

You take all that and you get it to 1,600 wine teachers and you start communication.

Another obvious thing would be for your wine-producing areas to collectively develop what I call educational tasting tours through the States. Hit the eight or nine major markets. Put on educational tastings. Invite the trade and the press. Get twenty wine producers to go through the United States on a ten-city tour. A goodwill media blitz. Tastings. A coupla lunches and some breakfasts, handing out maps and charts and photographs. God-damn, you’d get $500,000 worth of publicity out of a trip like that, and they don’t cost that much. Those are the things that are proven ingredients. They’ve worked very successfully for other producers. I’ve talked to dozens of people from here who say “we need a good export scheme”.

You don’t need a good export scheme. Shit, you don’t even export yet. Well?

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Men of Category

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SPEECH to the SOUTH AUSTRALIAN WINE PRESS CLUB at the EXETER HOTEL

by PHILIP WHITE – Wednesday 27 March 2002

I want to read to you the opening passage from One Man’s Ambition,the introduction to Wynn Winegrowers Diary, 1970, written by the late Walter James, who was a great and humble winewriter in Melbourne.

"When you choose to direct your life to the task of making money you may be sure that your success will arouse the admiration, and the envy, of a vast army of men who have had similar aims,” he wrote. “Should you set out not to make money but to make something really worthwhile in itself, your success will with equal certainty be rewarded with the admiration, and the goodwill, of men who really matter - men of category, as the Spaniards call them.”

He continues: "In some fields of productive endeavour, of course, you cannot achieve much without substantial means; it is only a little sad that so many men of ability as they reach for success and meet it are beguiled into allowing the means to submerge the aim and in the end are content to do, adequately enough, no more than a hundred others around them are doing equally well. Their obituaries describe these people as successful businessmen and they pass promptly into oblivion."

Among the businessmen who will pass promptly into oblivion in the near future are many of those we see running the great Australian wine industry.

And not to be unduly cynical, it IS a great wine industry. Again.

Just last night I was ploughing through some old Winestate and Wine and Spirit magazines, from back in the days when a Petaluma chardonnay was $7 and we’d give you a free bottle of Grange if you bought a $12 annual subscription. Australia hadn’t discovered shiraz then.

I read an interview I did twenty years ago with Frank Stone, a wine merchant from Atlanta. He was a man of category. He cursed Australian winemakers because he had never had one Australian wine shipper bother to visit Skinflints, his six wine supermarkets in Georgia, that were turning over $25 million a year of premium wine. He was also the President of an international wine education association with 1600 members, and he’d never once been contacted by an Australian winemaker or promoter.

Frank told me of the phenomenal success of the Italians in the United States, quoting figures like Villa Banfi, who’d gone from shipping nothing in 1975 to 17 million cases in 1982, and how the Italian government had got behind its winemakers and got some order into their promotion and made sure they went and visited blokes like Frank.

The people who’ve put Australia there beside the Italians might have taken twenty years, rather than seven, but they’ve done it - they’ve achieved some very grand things indeed, but even many of those will pass into oblivion.

Writers pass into oblivion, too. I remember Richard Farmer, the political journalist and major Canberra liquor merchant standing up in Len Evans Bulletin Place restaurant in 1984 to address the New South Wales Wine Press Club. “Fellow drug dealers”, he began, addressing an issue that has never really been faced since that day. Then he wheeled into a loud warning about Australia’s wine explosion being the result of the product being tax free, and said loud and clear that unless the industry got its shit together and grew up and lobbied, it would of course be taxed.

Now, thanks to the lobbying efforts of Brian Croser and Ian Sutton, we have an absolute dusie of a tax, but we don’t hear much from Richard since he penned Bob Hawke’s immortal line that by 1990 no child in Australia would be living in poverty. As a fellow writer, I think I know the sort of personal oblivion that might eat Richard right up....

In the same year - the apocryphal 1984 that my generation of bookworms thought we’d never ever reach - Nathan Chroman, wine writer from the Los Angeles Times was here, saying he didn’t think anybody in the world needed to make better wines than our best shiraz.

Gerard Jaboulet was here in the same week, handing out glasses of his La Chappelle Hermitage (1976 - $16!), from the French vineyard which is the very source of that shiraz, totally disbelieving that we were spending taxpayers’ money to uproot our best and oldest shiraz vines, not to mention nearly all of our ancient grenache. There was hardly a vine of cinsault or carignan left after that exercise. These just happened to be the varieties Gerard coveted from Chateauneuf-du-Pape, the district which McLaren Vale now seems determined to emulate.

Funny thing about these “new” rousillon varieties, viognier, marsanne and roussane, that they’re madly planting to get more South-of-Francey: they were all down there growing brilliantly in the Vales when Ebenezer Ward was writing The Advertiser wine column in 1862.

Gerard Jaboulet has tragically and prematurely returned to the great silence, but I don’t think we can say he’s gone to oblivion. I don’t know about Nathan. He’s a writer. And so was old Ebenezer, who shared one or two of my human tendencies. He got his tab in the Yorketown pub up to 50 quid in 1880, perhaps because of his derision of the quality of the local fizz, and his irritating habit of calling repeatedly for Krug.

Coming a bit closer to today’s men of category, one chubby fellow who was on the National Wine Centre board buttonholed me and boasted of how he would win his Order of Australia Medal for getting the Centre up against all the odds and dangerous detractors like me. I thought immediately that he was a man who had become “beguiled into allowing the means to submerge his aim”. He will pass promptly into oblivion.

Mark Cashmore, the great Hunter winemaker and marketer, is a name we don’t hear too much of any more. Before he sooled his lawyers on me for calling him Mark Morecash in 1983 I asked him the following question: “Why have you changed the name of your blend of chardonnay and semillon from pinot riesling to semillon chardonnay?”

To which he honestly replied: “Pinot riesling doesn’t mean very much at all. Chardonnay’s not pinot chardonnay and I don’t think riesling in the context of pinot riesling means very much. I mean riesling is semillon and pinot is chardonnay, and we have more semillon in the wine than chardonnay, so it should be semillon chardonnay.”

Not to put too much of a mozz on the Hunter, but the notorious Murray Tyrrell beat that hands down when I rang him for a comment on one of his habitual imbroglios: “Philip”, he roared like an old Chev blitz starting up, “what these fellers in the press are saying about me is completely unfalse!”

But that’s enough of that. I know what dear Walter James and David Wynn were thinking of when they conspired to write that paragraph I read to begin. They were talking of the true cycles of wine, and how so few of us ever really get to see it properly, gloriously, wholesomely occur; if not our very short lives, at least our concentration is too short to plan a flavour, and spend a year or three selecting the ground which will deliver it, then another one preparing it for the action. We might endure the few years it then takes for a crop to appear, or even stick around for another four or five so the fruit begins to show some complexity of flavour, but will we still be paying attention when those wines reach their maturity another ten years on?

How many decades of close attention does it take for a true believer to feel knowledgeable and comfortable about his terroir?

I interviewed M. Derallier-Dubrez once, and thanked him for the beautiful colour advertisements he’d been placing for his Quelltaler Estate, which was part of his Remy Martin empire. But I also voiced concern that the stylish ads were too subtle for Australians, and asked him how long he thought they’d take to reflect real change in his sales. This was in 1983, and he was nearly eighty.

“Aaaah M’sieu”, he said from his wheelchair, “I am planning for the year 2020.”

Remy foundered with its debt after buying Cointreau, and Derallier-Dubrez, who is still a man of category, sold Quelltaler to Wolf Blass, who sold it to Foster’s, who shut it down, ripped its tanks out, then put them back and opened it again. Perhaps their new 75,000 tonne wine percolator at Bilyara’s not big enough. Whatever will the shareholders think?

Since our staunchly anti-gambling Prime Minister has insisted on Australians becoming the world’s biggest investors in the stock market, the popularity of wine as a sheer investment property has boomed. I don’t mean the idiots who buy the stuff like gold bars at auction, and lay it down and wait til it’s too old to drink, at which point they sell it on at a grand profit to some other dunderhead who’ll repeat the dumb cycle - I’m talking about the nature of a wine industry which has become dependent upon short-term investors for its survival.

What happened to Seppeltsfield without its family? Why are our heritage wineries, like Saltram and Quelltaler, under constant threat of closure in the name of shareholder interest? How could empires like that one which the Wynns built, over three generations and a whole century, continue to survive this deadly slow cycle, if their sole duty was to return value for money to their impatient but faceless shareholders, who are scattered about the globe avoiding tax?

The two systems, on the face of it, seem totally mismatched. To me, a wine which is good value for the shareholder is a terrible wine to drink, and, conversely, as Richard Farmer said on that tumultuous day in Sydney: “Small vineyards are a rich man’s hobby.”

How can shareholders imagine or learn or care that their fast buck comes at the expense of salinated soil and buggered river systems, somewhere else, and how can their managers afford to let on? How can they possibly conceive of the patience required, the foresight and drive to establish a vineyard like Coonawarra?

Of course the sad truth is that Coonawarra had already passed into oblivion when David Wynn bought the old Riddoch cellars and vineyard land there for £22,000 in 1952. One year the farm’s being sold on its value as sheep grazing land, the next Wynn and his winemaker, Ian Hickinbotham walked in and by 1954 they were directing the first deliberately induced and managed malo-lactic fermentations on earth. I’ve tasted that wine many times. It’s still delicious, and the Frogs still can’t believe it.

Like Wynn, I don’t think Hickie will be in oblivion when he goes. They’re what those Spaniards call men of category.

And so, I believe, might the Oatley family be. The plans Philip Shaw unveiled for the replanting and refurbishment of Coonawarra in my piece in today’s Advertiser are unlike the sort of thing you hear from a publicly-listed company. The previous regime was certainly less likely to chop yields and short term profits so dramatically. What will make the Oatleys serious men of category, who will not pass quickly into oblivion, would be to see them carry on with the plan I like to imagine them following. Like frighten the investors off, get the price down nice and low, then buy the whole thing out and delist it. I’ve done my bit.

South Australia was enjoying a spectacular wine export boom exactly a century ago. Ernest Whitington, writing in The Register of 1903, reported:

“At present time the vintage is in full swing .... new, clean and up-to-date appliances have taken the place of old-fashioned and dirty methods, and the results in every case have been most gratifying”. He went on to explain that the state’s wine production had gone up fourfold in the previous decade, and the export trade had “gone ahead by leaps and bounds. Wine has grown to become one of the staple products of South Australia”, he wrote, “and there is no knowing what dimensions the industry will develop. The possibilities are almost illimitable.”

But within thirty years, the war, the wowsers, changing public tastes, stupid government intervention, and a wave of investors who knew nothing about wine, at both the British and Australian ends, saw that boom go a complete gutser.

Our sale of strong alcoholic wines to fatten up the ration-starved Poms after the next war worked for a while, and we enjoyed another boom. “McLaren Vale furruginous wines” were pumped for all they were worth: smooth and alcoholic, and yes, in some instances, even grown on ferruginous soils. But suddenly the English felt they’d put on sufficient condition: they’d had enough, and flocked, en masse, back to the lighter, more accessible, less heady stuff from just across the Channel, and Australia’s great wine business belly flopped again.

Men of category are what we need more than anything, right now. The wine industry is suddenly in the hands of a generation which has experienced no surplus, no collapse, and indeed has faced very little inclemency at all in this golden age. All its investors are fairly new; many of them are in it only to avoid paying tax.

What we need is people who are determined and wise enough to make something really worthwhile in itself, people who will not let the money submerge the ambition. Because there are plenty of people who really do matter in Australia, people of true category, who will reward such enlightened endeavour with extremely valuable admiration, delight, and goodwill. And you never know: their children, and their grandchildren, might even drink.

Thankyou very much.

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