WINE EXPO'S WAR WITH GLOBALISED SWILL

COULD YOU BUY A GLOBAL WINE FROM THIS MAN? UH-HUH ... NONE IN THE SHOP. ROBERTO AT WINE EXPO IN SANTA MONICA

Barraged By Forces Of Evil Food, Drink, And Arsewipes Coles Duo Sees Light Down Under
by PHILIP WHITE

In the great Harry Dean Stanton movie, Repo Man, the punk Emilio Estevez works in a supermarket whose shelves are stacked with cans labeled only “FOOD” or DRINK”. I thought that was funny in 1984.

Unless you have been trapped in the yuppie ghetto of Port Willunga, where winemakers concentrate at times like this, to perve on each other’s partners and pass Burgundy and Ribero del Duero around the Star of Greece while their own vineyards roast, you’ve probably learned a lot about the blander corners of your Coles or Woolies grogfloggery. As the holiday moneys wane, the cleanskins and bladder packs look more savoury.

Until the winelake seeps through the community kidneys, we’ll see again how oversupply leads to a sickening slump in quality. The wine industry trains its customers to accept and expect plonk of ever-diminishing provenance. Soon, what we drank at the end of the holidays becomes acceptable day-to-day. We learn what our great wine industrialists expect the rest of the world to drink.

EMILIO DUMPS GENERIC BEER IN REPO MAN

Flick for an illo to Wine Expo, Santa Monica, California: a liquor store with sassitude, customers to match, and a battle royal against “globalised wine”.

“Once you guys succeed in making all wine taste the same, what will you do for a living?” Manager Roberto demanded in last week’s newsletter. He complains of being “absolutely barraged by the forces of evil (well, severely misguided, focus group driven winemaking and marketing at least) ... It seems the consensus ... is that Americans want wines from all over the world with fanciful names and long histories as long as they all taste the same and don't have any disconcerting ‘ethnic’ character.

“So, do we just give up and roll over? NO!!!!!!”, he concludes. “We continue to champion wines with true personality, regional style (or even outright idiosyncrasies) and a distinctive point of view while reminding those in the supply chain that those wines are huge crowd favorites at OUR ‘focus groups’ where we offer true diversity instead of merely different brands of the same old things.”


Australia’s two supermarketeers - count ’em, one, two - rank communities on their spending power, and stock the shelves accordingly. The McLaren Vale Coles is in the same district as the perverse villa rash of the down-at-heel coast, for example, so its shelves are stocked to suit the battered Datsun drivers, who outnumber the 4WD Benz and Bimmer blomos who get their fromage at Blessed Cheese, their fruitaveg at the Willunga Market, and their lovers next door. So stuff like my favourite biscuits, Vita Wheats – hardly a posh gastronomic investment, but mostly free of sugar and fat – gradually work their way to the bottom shelves as their space is taken by Coles crap, and eventually they disappear.

I learned this whilst editing Wine and Spirit Buying Guide in Sydney in the early ’eighties. Australia’s leading wine magazine, it had been bought by John David, so he could corner the Australia distribution of these new things that were called boutique wineries. John and his brother and sister owned David’s Holdings and Australian Liquor Marketers, huge, hyper-efficient trucking businesses that specialised in supplying supermarkets with food and booze. The three of them turned over a billion dollars the first year I worked there. This was partly due to their invention of the virtual Black and Gold brand. The staircase outside my office was always jammed with furtive lugubrious swarthies trying to sell shiploads of unlabelled canned beans, spaghetti, soup, lavatory paper and whatnot so Davids could wrap it in their handsome black and yellow livery and take up shelf space by undercutting hard-working Australian suppliers who branded their own products and tended not to leave too many band-aids in the beans.

While I was laughing at Estevez, this was happening under my nose.

There’s a bright duo at Coles who are bravely fighting to reverse this trend in their Vintage Cellars and 1st Choice stores. True wine lovers Jeremy Stockman and Grant Ramage scour the world – and, increasingly, Australia - for inexpensive wines with personality, regional style, outright idiosyncrasies and distinction. These offer a bright contrast to the endless shelves of crap which might just as well be labelled Dan Murphy’s DRINK or Black and Gold DRINK. Go, peruse.

This is not the time to sacrifice your last cubic centimetres of functioning liver drinking supermarket plonk for Australia. If you’re feeling nationalistic, take a drive to the Barossa, Clare or the Fleurieu and fill the boot with premium stuff from your favourite honest strugglers. These guys are doing it really tough. But shop for your daily drinkers in the imports section of VC and 1stC, and join my campaign to force, as part of the planning approval process, all new supermarkets make their roofspace available for free community vegetable and herb gardens. More of us may then tend to stray into their rotten cavernous rip-off acres of FOOD, DRINK, and arsewipes.

THE CONSTANT TEMPTATION FOR AUSTRALIA'S INDUSTRIALIST WINEMAKERS IS TO ATTEMPT TO EMULATE EVERYTHING EUROPE HAS TO OFFER. SOMEBODY SHOULD TELL THEM ABOUT THE DESERT.

CHAMPAGNE RIVALS GALLO IN COCKY GALL

STUART AND KYRA HOLLEY OF BUBBLYTOGO

Gallic Squirts And Gallos
Go Nuts On Nomencalture
Dumb Fizzmongers Squabble
by PHILIP WHITE

STOP! Before you open another bottle of grape-based ethanol with cavities from the Champagne region of France, spare a thought for just how bloody minded those Gallic squirts have become.

The Brisbane Courier Mail yesterday reported the matter of two committed adherents of the cause of grape-based ethanol with cavities from the Champagne region of France who have been quite simply shafted by residents of said region and wighats acting on their behalf. It’s quite sick.

Kyra and Stuart Holley run a little gift shop with an Australia-wide delivery service. One of the luxury products they sell and deliver, right to your bed, is grape-based ethanol with cavities from the French region of Champagne.

They called their business Champagne Messenger. Straight away those wighats representing the makers of grape-based ethanol with cavities from the French region of Champagne whacked ’em with a stack of threatening paperwork disallowing this, demanding that they should also change their trading name and their internet address.

"The lawyers said we would damage the reputation of the name of champagne in Australia, which in turn would damage the commercial interests of champagne makers. The irony is that in selling champagne, we're increasing their sales," Kyra told The Courier Mail. “So we’ve called ourselves BubblyToGo”.

This frogfizz pip-squeakedness is matched only by our favourite Californian Latinos, the Gallo mob, who sell grape-based ethanol with or without cavities which probably doesn’t come from the Champagne region of France, but, you know. Who knows where they get their ethanol from, or where they procure their cavities.

STEVE WINSTON IN HIS SPANISH TABLE STORE, SEATTLE

Meanwhile, Steve Winston’s in food writer Nancy Leson’s Seattle Times column reporting how the Gallo ethanol roosters have sooled their lawyers on him for selling pasta. Steve runs a neat grocery on Western Avenue at Waterfront Park, called The Spanish Table. One of the many lovely Spanish things he sells is pasta made by a fifty-year-old Spanish company called Gallo, which means cock.

So what happens? The Californian ethanol-flogging Gallos whacked Steve with a cease-and-desist letter. “He told me to write him a letter saying I'll never sell this pasta again,” Steve told Nancy. “I was too busy filing my taxes last week, so I didn’t and he went ahead and filed."

THE GALLO FAMILY WHICH DOESN'T MAKE PASTA

Nancy suggests Steve should clear his shelves of the US$13.99 Martin Codax Spanish albarino he’s been selling and send it all back to its distributor, E & J Gallo, because it’s not made by the pasta producer.

ROBERTO

DRINKSTER called our favourite Californian vendor of all sorts of lovely drinks, Roberto, at WineExpo – Champagne World Headquarters, in Santa Monica, to ask whether the makers of that grape-based ethanol with cavities from the Champagne region of France have noodled him for his use of the name of their joint.

“Yes, we DO have a big sign out front with that on it and EVERY Champagne producer who sees it loves it,” he reported. “If they think Kyra and Stuart have been bad, what would they think of THIS?”

GRUNTY PARKERILLAS CRASH WITH DETROIT

Roberto at Wine Expo more gallons per smile

No Fish Eye Merlot At Wine Expo

By PHILIP WHITE – a version of this story appeared in The Independent Weekly 05 DEC 08

Australia’s invasion of the USA wine gullet was always Quixotic as much as chaotic. Other than the $1000 per bottle gobstoppers like those wine shipper Dan Phillips delivers to Robert Parker Jr., who loves them, the bulk of our ordnance has always been industrial plonk lobbing at the price of bottled Italian water. I’ve left a lot of good work out, but you get my drift.

When capitalism fell over the other day, the Australian blokes responsible for both horns of this wine dilemma, and their bank managers, went out and got cactus, were awful to their wives, and contemplated suicide. The smarter ones then took a tablet, begged their wives for forgiveness, hired a lawyer, and sued their American distributors for payment.

“Expensive Wines Rot On LA Shelves”, Jerry Hirsch trumpeted in the LA Times. “Sales of high-end wine are plummeting ... the Wall Street meltdown is rippling across the alluvial fields of Napa Valley to the chalky limestone vineyards of Champagne in France...”

Note: Jerry has to explain that Champagne’s in France. Either the location of Australia is obviously too difficult to explain (so we missed out), we just don’t count, or American distributors owe Australian winemakers so much money they’ve rubbed us off the map.

Ridiculously expensive wines – even Bob Parker’s personal favourites - are certainly taking the biggest hit. Mouton-Rothschild ’05 has slumped 50% to $549 per bottle in a few months.

“People are still drinking wine”, Jerry continued. “They are just spending less”. He listed a few examples of people who have cut their wine budgets from $20-$30 bottles to $10 jobs, and quoted the owner of a posh wine shop who went to a the supermarket and bought a big swag of commercial cheapies from which he selected two dozen to “offer in the store as ‘recession busters’ starting from $5.99 for a Fish Eye Merlot ... he then demanded a price break from his distributors so that he could match supermarket prices and still make a profit”.

Jerry quoted another favourite retailer whose sales “were off 28% in October compared with a year ago. November sales are running 16% below last year's figures, even after factoring in a bump-up around the presidential election earlier this month ...”

Wondering about all this, I called my maestro, Roberto, Wine Director at Wine Expo in Santa Monica, who was introduced to me by his former neighbour, Dan Phillips. (No expensive gobstoppers or River cheapos at Wine Expo, though. Roberto won’t stock them.) The LA Times generally raves about him and his store, which you should visit on www.wineexpo.com.

”They interviewed me for that story but I guess I was not telling the story they wanted to write this time”, he said. “We are selling MORE bottles to MORE people but at lower price points.

“Those in the Carriage Trade are getting to eat the cake they baked themselves and finding it is frosted with rat poison”, Roberto said.

“Those of us that have ALWAYS been about alternatives and value for money, travel the world and buy direct, are down somewhat, but not out by a long shot. We want you to be able to buy twice as much wine but spend half as much money with NO compromise in quality and we believe this is not only possible but that it is a lot more fun as well!

“Curiously, with all that ranting about Champagne being dead, we still sell boatloads of high quality farmer fizz in the $40-60 range”, he added.

Australia would have done better selling water to America.

Just one little desal plant, and we could tip the whole of the Gulf St Vincent into California. For a start, they’re short of fresh water. Then, Vince is the patron of schoolgirls as well as viticulturers, and you don’t strike too many California schoolgirls without their bottle of designer water. Call it Great Southern Ocean water. Great Australian Bight Water. Desert Water. Clean Water. Cool Water. Whalesbreath. Shark Bay. To keep ’em thirsty, we could also sell ’em the designer salt we took out of the water. A marketer’s dream!

All the money we wasted on the wine industry – pipelines, perma pine, wire, petrochemicals and refineries - could have gone into maintaining the River.

But we buggered the River by tipping it on the desert sugar quarries we call River vineyards, added some ground-up American oak, some cream of tartar and concentrate, dressed it up in fake aboriginal art, called it something really bloody stupid, and flogged it to America at the smallest margin possible. Brilliant.

There’s a serious challenge here. If our lads can’t tip our bursting wine lake into the USA before the Aussie dollar returns to equity, then they might as well regroup now for the second mighty wave when we flog America our water, unadulterated. I’ll bet Dan Phillips could sell water at $1000 a bottle.

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