Decanter co-publisher/editor, the fearless Australian Tony Lord, photographed - enjoying a Seppelts Flor Fino Sherry - by the author in Chesser Cellars, Winestate July 1982
Sometime around 1982 Robert Hesketh, then chairman of the
Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation, strode into my office with Mark Swann,
his partner in a wine broking business, both grinning impishly. They’d invented the critter label.
They plonked two bottles of what turned out to be eminently
forgettable wine on the desk. Koala
Court, a white, bore an image of a giant koala hugging a wine barrel. The red I think wore a kangaroo leaping over
a barrel. It was called Roo’s Leap. No
attempt was made to explain the varieties within.
The big idea was export.
Australia
was awash with wine: discounting was rife: you could buy a bottle for a buck.
In 1977/78, Australia had
exported 11,000 cases to Britain;
in 79/80 it hit 48,000 cases. But in
80/81 it was back down to 33,000.
For perspective, we sent the Brits the equivalent of
27,588,888 cases in 2011. Increasingly,
this is exported in enormous bladders fitted in shipping containers and then
pumped full, to be bottled in the foreign marketplace. In other words, it’s
bladderpack quality in bottles.
One of the most discussed wine articles of 1982 was my
interview with the ravening Tony Lord, the Australian editor and co-publisher
of Decanter. I asked him what the
Brits wanted to see on our labels.
“Well, the varietal name,” he said. “Area definition, and perhaps a little back
label information about the product.
It’s getting to the point now with these bloody EEC bureaucrats that by
the time you’ve actually got all the crap they want on the label, you’re lucky
to be able to fit the producer’s name.
Fundamentally, what they want is attractive labeling, and like every
other market, there’s just – well, you take a Wolf Blass label: there’s
eye-catching shelf appeal, with the varietal name, and the area information and
the vintage.
“Varietal name and the vintage are the key things at the
moment because they imply immediately that this is a quality wine,” he
continued. “It doesn’t necessarily follow through in the bottle, but, at the
moment, anything that hasn’t got a vintage date or a varietal name in Britain is
considered real cheapo junk.”
It’s important to emphasise Blass’s influence on labeling.
In the ’seventies, Jim Ingoldby (left) in McLaren Vale had followed the Burgundian
example, and pioneered the listing of even the grapegrower on his delicious suite
of vineyard-specific reds, but this did not catch on for at least a decade. It
was Blass’s robust insistence on variety and region that forced many others to
follow. He’d been influenced in turn by
the man who first brought him to Australia: the great Ian
Hickinbotham.
When he was MD of Kaiser Stuhl, Hick (left) even went to the extent of
blending big volumes from different vintages, and listing them
prominently. I have a bottle of his
Kaiser Stuhl 1954 Claret, which bears a neck tag proudly announcing “Vintage
1954 with 30% 1957”.
Many modern wines would be better drinks if winemakers were game to try such blending adventures and honest labeling now.
Another honest man and generous mentor, Colin Gramp, was
fastidious in accurate labeling at Orlando,
a corporate philosophy long ago diluted by the world’s biggest creek.
Regardless of their true meaning, Blass’s brilliant
promotion of trophies and medals gave his wines huge authority in the quality
stakes: his rivals were envious, and had no choice but to climb aboard. This led to the explosion of Australian wine
shows, which multiplied exponentially, eventually making the medal practically
worthless.
Sorry, but there's not much resolution here: wartime photograph of the young Wolf Blass (with space-age vegetable-oil powered tractor) and his ground crew.
It’s hard to explain how primitive the general attitude was
to truth in labeling, and how confounding the whole deal was for the
consumer. In those days, the most
popular white in Sydney was called Traminer
Riesling, which was usually a sickly-sugary blend of greasy Muscat and battery water Semillon.
It was largely the Blass drive to more honesty that forced
the change: to be credible, people had to follow. When I asked one bright Hunter-based
promoter, Richmond Grove’s Mark Cashmore, why he’d changed the name of his
blend of Chardonnay and Semillon from Richmond Grove Pinot Riesling to Richmond
Grove Semillon Chardonnay he famously explained:
“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.”
It may not quite look like it, but Cashmore was telling the
truth.
Lord also delivered a warning that too many producers still
fail miserably to consider.
“The only thing that you don’t want to happen is to go to
the Californian extreme where they literally tell you what socks the winemaker
was wearing when he made the wine. I
think that’s the sign of a fairly unsophisticated wine-drinking market.”
Typically, when Zar Brooks worked for d’Arenberg in the
’nineties, he ignored this advice as brazenly as possible, and invented the fly
spot label, with entire bloody novels filling the back label in fonts that look
like microscopic speckle to ordinary eyes.
When I suggested this was pure sophistry, as in a generally fallacious
method of reasoning, Brooks promptly had his business card changed to include
the title “Chief Sophist”. He still uses
this to considerable effect, while d’Arenberg has gone on to extend the Brooks
back label style to incredible lengths, providing a perfect example of unsophisticated
actually meaning the opposite of what everybody thinks.
This brings to mind the recent publishing fad where
photographs of the winemaker’s dog seem to have become an indicator of
quality. Nothing new in this, however:
the perfectly mad Richard Beckett, writing under the pseudonym Sam Orr in The Nation Review in the early
’seventies used a dog index to rank wine quality. As in “good enough to drive a brown dog to
drink,” “rough enough to kill six black dogs”, or “likely to make a cattle dog
lie down and cry.”
David Wynn, son of Sam, founder of Wynn's Coonawarra Estate, with the legendary food critic, John McGrath, and the author at Wynn's epic Mountadam in the early nineties.
When Brian Croser, Karl Seppelt and David Wynn followed
Colin Gramp’s Steingarten example and battled intensely to plant vineyards at
the highest possible altitude in the ’seventies and ’eighties, ridge wines
became the norm. Every vineyard, it
seemed, suddenly lived on a ridge: a claim of greater altitude became a quality
indicator. Everybody had a Something
Ridge: but for export, of course, where the claim could never be checked. Most of these wines really came from Australia’s flattest
deserts, or, if you were lucky, the vast flatness of Riverland South (Padthaway),
but this never mattered to the marketers.
At about the time I joked with the fine wine dealer David Ridge
about his failure to release a Ridge Ridge, another grog-flogger boasted of
gracing the cheapo shelves of Blighty with eleven different ridges,
simultæneously.
If the truth be known, they were probably all the same wine.
This doesn’t apply, of course, to McLaren Vale’s respected
DogRidge, one of the first brands to adopt the irreverent post-modern attitude
to punctuation when it fused the two buzzwords and kept the cap R. DogRidge at least has exemplary red – check
out their Grenache –AND a hill, where I witnessed d’Arenberg wine-and-wordsmith
Nick James-Martin perform a deadly flying tackle on an actual dog which had run
off with some poor kiddy’s teddy.
I’m sure this smœrgasbœrd of evocations will find its way
onto a bottle of d’Arenberg eventually.
Chester Osborn, hair of d'Arenberg, left, dressing up with a coupla mates - critter label evolving? Three Blind Mites?
Which brings me to the post-modern fad using numbers or even
digits in branding. This one’s really
friggin’ annoying. It was that prime
sophist, Toby Ralph, who first thought of this when he was aiming for a
lucrative consultancy at Tolley Stott and Tolley in about 1980. “I’ve thought of a great name,” he whispered
at dinner. “Eleven Shadows.” While I think that failed to eventuate, and
TST vanished, soon we had these weird number brands all over the place. Open the Australian
and New Zealand Wine Industry Directory and you’ll smack straight into 201,
Two Dorks, Two Figs, Two Furlongs, 5th Chapter Estate, Five Oaks, 572 Richmond
Road, 181 Wines, Three Willows, Three Wishes, 3WITCHES, III Associates, 5 Blind
Mice, 919 Wines, First Drop, Five Geese, Quattro Mano, Ten Miles East, Ten
Minutes By Tractor, Two Hands, 3 Oceans, 3 Drops, Estate 807, Fifth Estate,
Seven Ochres, Vineyard 28, et cetera, ad
infinitum …
While this doesn’t give real places like Severn Brae or Leven Valley
much of a chance, it leaves me dumbstruck wondering how in the names of Bacchus
and Pan they imagine anybody’ll find 201 or 572 or 3 or whatever in a directory. But there you go. We can’t all be in MENSA.
As the French are now feverishly copying our critter labels,
it’s the perfect time to dump them. The American market which slurped them up
this last decade is quite wisely beginning to regard them with disinterest verging
on revulsion, as it develops a distinct interest in better, more expensive
wines. Which quality eludes many of the
critter wine creators, just as it seemed beyond the reach of the ridge raiders
before them.
Since their sales are, shall we say, not quite so fluid as
they had been, I would have asked [yellowtail] to discuss this, but where would
you look for that number? Under “brackets”?
Wikipedia, just by the way, lists 78 different types of fish
called yellowtail, but no kangaroos.
TWO COMMENTS WHICH CAME BY E:
(1) Whitey, the 11 Ridges were all the same wine - but were
not my creation. The English wholesalers thought them up. (Name withheld to protect the innocent.)
(2) Philip, I very much enjoyed your article “Time to dump the
critters’
Having designed [yellow tail] and been on the receiving end
of a number of awards for it, Just Add Wine went on to be sought out worldwide
by those “me too” producers seeking their own future [yellow tail] on what
became a veritable tsunami of critter label requests at that time.
But back at the outset, in a perfect sliding doors moment in
time at the Sydney Qantas Club, Casella’s very talented John Souter, then
International Brand Manager had the good sense to spot something different.
Combined with some talented winemaking matched to good
market research, some intel, quality marketing skills and a lot of investment,
the Casella’s turned a kangaroo label, albeit somewhat more sophisticated in
styling than just a picture of a kangaroo leaping over a barrel, into a
phenomenal success story.
And the rest as they say, is history, and well deserved to
them all too!
And yes, then came the run on numbers, but at least some
offered creative opportunity, other requests just left us scratching our heads!
All the best to you and keep up the great articles.
Lorenzo Zanini
photo MILTON WORDLEY
The genius David Unaipon (left) worked there in the
cellars; his fellow Ngarrindjeri helped pick.
But by the time Harry's daughter, Nora, came home from studying law at
the Sorbonne and impressionism at the Louvre the vines had had enough. Dead arm and white ants and no rain and
brutally barren rock had worn them out: the yields no longer reached half-a-ton
to the acre. So Nora chopped them in the
'thirties: old vines in their eighties.
Romantic to the odd eye, but no good to the vigneron or the drinker.
It’s important to emphasise Blass’s influence on labeling.
In the ’seventies, Jim Ingoldby (left) in McLaren Vale had followed the Burgundian
example, and pioneered the listing of even the grapegrower on his delicious suite
of vineyard-specific reds, but this did not catch on for at least a decade. It
was Blass’s robust insistence on variety and region that forced many others to
follow. He’d been influenced in turn by
the man who first brought him to Australia: the great Ian
Hickinbotham. 
When he was MD of Kaiser Stuhl, Hick (left) even went to the extent of
blending big volumes from different vintages, and listing them
prominently. I have a bottle of his
Kaiser Stuhl 1954 Claret, which bears a neck tag proudly announcing “Vintage
1954 with 30% 1957”. 
