AUSTRALIA: What’s the story?

In a bid to boost its premium winemaking credentials, Australia’s new  promotional campaign focuses on the backgrounds to the country’s brands. It’s a smart and apt approach, reckons Penny Boothman.

When it comes to marketing premium wine, we’re used to hearing about terroir, the age of the vines, the history of the winery and the winemaking know-how – not so much about the winemakers themselves. But a couple of new initiatives from Australian producers are changing all that.

Australia made its name on the international wine scene as a fun place full of wine-loving eccentrics who didn’t take themselves, or their wines, too seriously. Different, irreverent, taking wine to the masses. As brilliantly as this worked for the popular premium sector, it didn’t fit comfortably with the push to high-end premium that inevitably followed.

Unfortunately, once Australia started trying to sell sensible, premium wines, it quickly began to look a bit boring. The challenge now is to get Australia’s image back, without losing the premium positioning.

A “regionality” initiative was a logical next step – an attempt to remove Australia’s image as a source of homogeneous, high-volume, multi-regional blends and drive home the genuinely unique characters of the country’s many, and varied, wine regions. The snag is that some of Australia’s best wines are multi-regional blends – Penfolds Grange, for example – which blurs the focus a bit.

One thing Grange does have, in common with all other great wines of Australia, is a personality behind it. There can be few better-known figures in the wine world than Peter Gago. From Chester Osborne to Charlie Melton, Peter Lehmann to Bruce Tyrrell, pretty much any winery you think of has an entertaining and articulate winemaker somewhere behind the scenes. These are just a few of the names that are already well known in the UK market; you’ll be meeting many more if the latest Australian campaign delivers half of what it is promising.

There’s been a shift in thinking when it comes to marketing premium Australian wine. The marketing brains have realised that quality should be a given and is no longer enough to sell wine – not for Australia, and not for anyone – so they now have to redefine what makes their wines worth buying. And this is where “A+” comes in.

The “A+ Australian wine – every one has a story” campaign was launched in June this year. The promotion uses short, catchy tales of good times, high achievement, and humour about Australian winemakers to remind consumers of Australia’s fun side, and tempt them back to the wines. Participation in the web-based initiative was free for wineries, just as long as they had an engaging enough story to tell.

People power

Lucy Anderson, marketing and communications manager at Wine Australia, explains: “Over the last five years I’ve had the opportunity to meet wine professionals and consumers from around the world, and what they love most about Australian wine is the people and their stories. In marketing terms this is our ‘key attribute’ and something that can be communicated in a number of ways, but A+ has been developed to take this message to consumers in an aspirational and engaging manner.

“Fine wines are made and enjoyed by people around the world. Where Australian fine wine is different is that you can meet the winemaker, they are happy to share their story and will always enjoy a glass with you.”

Penny Boothman, September 2010

By making the campaign about the people themselves, A+ avoids the problem that most winery stories are crushingly boring – old vines, unique dirt, non-interventionist, yawn. Generation X and Y consumers are much more likely to check out a bite-sized feed about a winemaker who surfs 20-foot waves and wrestles crocs in his spare time, it’s just so much more… Australian.

“The heartbeat comes from the people – winemakers, grape growers and historical mentors – of the industry,” says P-J Charteris, winemaker at Hunter Valley winery Brokenwood.

“If someone researches a site, plants a vineyard, suffers the pain of seasonal variation for 10 years establishing the vines, watches them mature for 10 years then spends another 20 years defining the wine style, they are doing it for good reason. And it just so happens that Australians like to talk about what they have been up to.

“In the last 20 years Australian wine has grown so fast that many people involved have forgotten about that pulse and some don’t even know it existed. Fortunately, some good people have got the defibrillator out.”

The taglines “Every one tells a story” and “Join the conversation about Australian wine” certainly encourage a bit of consumer interaction. The australiaplus.com website is very good: lively imagery, fun to read, not too much info – and of course they’re backing it all up with plenty of Tweeting. “Phase two” of the project hopes to create an online community, encouraging consumers to interact and share experiences.

The power and premium credibility of this campaign is in the calibre of names it has behind it. Tom Carson, of Yering Station fame and now winemaker and general manager of his new Yabby Lake project, was one of the winemakers touring for the initial launch of this global campaign, in China.

“I think it is a bold, but well overdue initiative, that we present and discuss the great wines of Australia as our front line,” says Carson.

“On the basis that A+ is a selection of the best wines from Australia, then to personalise the wines and provide the depth to how, why and by whom they have been made completes the story. It’s about providing authenticity and integrity so that if you scratch the surface of what’s being presented then there is real heart and soul to the wines.”

That other exercise in premiumisation, The Landmark Tutorial, is on again this year. The tutorial sees 14 lucky participants flown in from around the world to taste and be schooled in the very best Australia has to offer, and – you guessed it – meet many of the winemakers. Then they are sent home again to spread the good word, which last year they certainly did.

Another interesting move to bring Australia’s premium wines into the spotlight is the Australian First Families of Wine initiative (AFFW), which was launched by a group of longstanding, family-owned wineries a year ago and premiered in the UK this May. This is an example of a collection of well-respected, mostly medium-sized producers differentiating themselves from the masses by lining up their multi-generational involvement in the wine industry and quality-producing credentials.

Big names

Using 12 of the most celebrated family names in Australian wine (the usual suspects really: Brown Brothers, Campbells, d’Arenberg, De Bortoli, Henschke, Howard Park, Jim Barry, McWilliam’s, Tahbilk, Taylors, Tyrrell’s and Yalumba), the AFFW hopes to engage consumers and trade across the globe about the “real” character of Australian wine.

Obviously, not all the wines produced by all the wineries rank as premium, but each has at least one top-tier brand, and the initiative as a whole shines a nice warm light on all their wines, premium or otherwise. Once again, it’s all about telling the story; however, with 12 long-established regional wine producers on board, the AFFW also nicely dovetails with the regionality idea.

“It has to work alongside regionality – they’re integrally linked. All the families reflect the best of the regions they’re from, as well as their family story. We’re all attached to the land and between us we cover a large chunk of the most significant winegrowing areas in the country,” says Ross Brown, CEO of Brown Brothers and current chairman of the AFFW. Brown is a firm believer that communicating the stories of the families behind the brands positions the wines as premium products.

“[The stories are] one of the few tools we’ve got! Either you’re a faceless public company or you’ve got all the family stories and passion coming through. You’ve got to have truth. Once you’ve got truth coming through it’s easy to convey the quality of the wines.”

Of course, the story angle still requires the hand sell, which isn’t easy in today’s retail market – but Brown believes all this could be about to change with the growth of mail order and internet shopping, where you can convey just as much information as the consumer is willing to read.

“We’re finding a few changes in the UK,” Brown continues. “Since First Quench got broken up at the end of last year, a lot of smaller groups are now buying up the stores – and that makes a really good target for us because these independents are looking for wines with stories behind them, because they can hand-sell the wines.

Oddbins has gone back into family hands so they’re also wanting to go back to more interesting wines. Gastropubs are another good target for us and there’s a lot of positive growth coming out of mail order because of the way their offers are communicated in that they have the opportunity to tell the story.

“There’s plenty of wine out there you can buy, but if there’s no story behind it then there’s not much to it, is there?”

Positioning the premium wines of a country that also needs to be fun and approachable isn’t an easy task, but in a way they’re already halfway there – few people could name five Chilean winemakers, for example, but Australians? Easy. Focusing on the people who make the wines sets Australia apart from everyone else in the market. The wines, incidentally, are better than ever, but for the moment at least they’ve got better things to talk about.