Australian Wine in Europe
I am currently traveling Europe and while Hamburg is not known for its brilliant summer weather, I have arrived here with clear blue skies and a nice 26 degrees today. No time for a visit to nearby tourist attractions, I have a meeting with Eckhard Supp, publisher of German wine blog ENO Worldwine and himself a fan of Australian wines.
Eckhard has spent many months traveling down under and asked me a few months ago, whether we could provide some background info to Australian wine developments for his blog. With the decision of the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation to close its German office, news on wines from down under is scarce: it is a real pleasure for us to help Eckhard and his team out.
Australian $3 wines in German supermarkets
We discussed at length how Australian wine is perceived in Germany and its problems with an image of cheap and cheerful, mainly distasteful supermarket wines. It is on us to change this perception as downunderwines aims to bring across that there is so much more to wines from down under than $2-cheapies.
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Gestern habe ich bei herrlichem Hamburger Sommerwetter (ja so etwas gibt es tatsaechlich!) Eckhard Supp getroffen, seines Zeichens deutscher Weinjournalist und Verleger.
Er selbst ist ein grosser Kenner der australischen Weinszene und somit entsponn sich ein langes und intensives Gespraech ueber die Qualitaet und den Anspruch australischer Weine.
Kennengelernt ueber Twitter, inhaltlich ueber die beiden Blogs verbunden und nun auch persoenlich in Kontakt, die grosse Welt des Web 2.0 macht es moeglich – hat Spass gemacht und macht Lust auf mehr.
Ihr Michael Brecht
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Michael, the pleasure was all mine.
Looks very sad, indeed, for the position and, in particular, the reputation of Australian wines in old Germany. Image building seems a term not known to the Aussie marketing organizations, they have always and nearly exclusively focused on the trade channels, the big volume-buyers.
I think it will need long and hard labour to reconstitute the prestige of the past, private export-marketing initiatives and groupings, promotion of origins instead of global brands and cheap varietals. It’s Clare Valley and Margaret River and Hunter River and Adelaide Hills that people ought to know.
Australia is the no. 1 “dream destination” of German vacationers, thus “wine and traveling” will have to be one of the top issues of this renewed marketing.
Completely abandoning Germany, one of Australia’s biggest export markets in the world (no. 2 in Europa), was one of the worst mistakes of your marketing organizations in the past years.