Glaetzer to release wine to rival Amon-Ra

While he refuses to put the price up of his popular old vine Shiraz, Amon-Ra, winemaker Ben Glaetzer is to release a bespoke bottling to rival his top drop.

Ben Glaetzer is to release a wine to rival his top old vine Shiraz, Amon-Ra

Speaking to The Drinks Business during a visit to London this week, he said: “I’m thankful that Amon-Ra has developed a massive following as it sells out pre-release each year – 2017 is already fully allocated and I haven’t even harvested the grapes yet.

“I released the inaugural 2001 vintage at AU$100 and haven’t put the price up since then despite people telling me that I should due to its popularity, limited supply and huge secondary market.

“I think AU$100 is expensive enough for anyone. I don’t see the need to put my prices up. I made a pact at the beginning to keep them consistent. There’s always the temptation to do it but you lose customer trust that way.

“What I am planning on doing however is releasing two barrels of a single parcel of old vine Ebenezer Shiraz from the 2016 vintage because it is incredibly special and deserves to be released as a standalone expression.

“It won’t go on sale until 2018 and I don’t think it will have a name or an image on the label – just a black label with ‘by Ben Glaetzer’ at the bottom.

Amon-Ra features in The Drops of God

“It’s a brooding style with amazing depth of flavour. It’s like a black hole as it goes on and on. Every time you come back to it you find something new. It’s a wine that has a clearly defined personality and tells the story of the 2016 vintage.”

Glaetzer admitted that he finds the prices Amon-Ra commands on the secondary market “frustrating”, given its $100 release price.

“I saw the 2003 vintage at a US retailer recently on sale for US$1,500 and they had apparently sold four bottles of it in the last six weeks. I walked out of the shop and cancelled the retailer’s allocation,” he told db.

“The beauty of restaurants is that the wine will naturally be marked up but it’s a transparent mark up,” he added.

The old vine Shiraz grapes used in Amon-Ra are grown on white sand in the Ebenezer sub region of the Barossa Valley, and yield less than a tonne per acre. Just 1,000 cases of the wine are made each year.

Amon-Ra, which features the Egyptian eye of Horus on the label, has developed such a following it appeared in Japanese manga comic The Drops of God.

“I didn’t want Amon-Ra to be a wine you could stand a spoon in. I don’t like making or drinking those kinds of wines. I want to harness the wine’s concentration but also to make elegant, approachable wines,” Glaetzer said.

He admitted to db that the 2011 vintage in the Barossa had generally been a write-off due to heavy rains but that he managed to make 250 cases of Amon-Ra. “I’ll sell the wine eventually as it stacks up beautifully with the rest of the range,” he said.

Glaetzer is hopeful about the future of Australian fine wine as export markets are being given more exposure to terroir-driven wines made on a small scale.

“The white noise surrounding Australian wine, from the cheap stuff at the bottom end to the thick, gloopy muck at the top end has largely disappeared,” he said.

An in-depth look at the growing thirst for Australian fine wine in the UK appears in the September issue of The Drinks Business, out now.