Big brands and terroir

Two means to getting South African wine taken seriously internationally

From Business Day, 2 July  2008

It has become almost fashionable to denigrate the French approach to vineyards and vines, partly because doing so has suited a New World agenda, partly the so-called French view, taken to the extreme, has been so easy to ridicule.

I remember Robin Day — the head winemaker of Pernod Ricard’s Australian operations — bringing an Antipodean view to his address to the Nederburg auction some 15 years ago. Speaking to the key players in the South African winemaking community at the time, he urged them to keep away from the Old World trap of terroir. “Don’t let yourselves get suckered into selling the specifics of place,” is the paraphrase of what he said. “The broader the picture, the greater your choice of site and the less you are compelled to do business with greedy or uncooperative growers.”

This was a message of great musical weight to the ears of the nation’s wholesalers. Here was the man responsible for producing Jacob’s Creek (at the time one of the world’s biggest-selling wines) telling everyone that you could make the process of sourcing the raw materials remarkably simple. It’s not about site-driven nuance, he seemed to be saying. It’s about consumers accepting simplicity of procurement above authenticity of place.

Day wasn’t wrong, of course. A significant percentage of the market wants reliability before vintage variation and method before provenance. The downside of his proposition is that the rules governing brands (rather than wine) soon dominate who you are and what you do. As all social tennis players know, if you live by the poach, you die by the poach.

No one really knows why a pretty ordinary (but well-made) Australian table wine suddenly became one of the wine world’s biggest brands. It’s easy to say that this was the genius of the Pernod Ricard Group’s route to market. But it doesn’t explain why Jacob’s Creek’s sales are off the boil (together with SA’s internationally successful Kumala brand) while Casella’s Yellowtail became the fastest-growing wine brand ever without any of this.

One part of the Cape wine industry wants a brand-driven solution to its relationship with the market, while the other half wants to obtain the critical attention of consumers — certain that its wines will stand up to rigorous scrutiny. Both these hopes are misguided, but for completely different reasons. The former is doomed — at least for the present — because no one with the means to create an international brand through trade relationships has access to enough quality fruit.

Those who think that quality alone will do their marketing work for them assume that the virtues of a fine wine will immediately shine forth. There are no absolutes when it comes to determining a wine’s potential: even those products which win widespread approval (through shows, competitions, social networks of the proprietors and so on) are not guaranteed commercial success. The race — as Proverbs reminds us — is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong.

Still, it is clear that site-specific viticulture has the long-term advantage of becoming the product’s unique selling point. This is where the French approach to terroir makes so much sense — especially when at least some of the assertions can be vindicated. The fact that the top sites have been the source of a region’s best wines for many years provides some empirical evidence in support of the claim. Soil science and climatological studies can then be used in an attempt to understand why this should be so.

The South African wine industry could certainly profit from a couple of big brands in world markets — if only to get the Cape winelands closer to front-of-mind among international consumers. But it will be individual producers — who understand their properties and can communicate the essential points of difference — who will finally persuade serious wine drinkers around the world to take SA seriously.