Last Days of Iconic Wines

WINE companies don't kill brands; they retire them. They pack them off to the aged care home where they spend their remaining days watching sharper, smarter brands speed by, wooing more drinkers, making bigger sales, stealing younger hearts.

That these wines are followed into their decrepitude by the people who once drank them is just a sad fact of life. Guess that's why I'm in a nostalgic mood.

Foster's, in a wide-ranging review of its wine operations, has announced it is cutting the cord on 37 wine brands. It won't comment publicly on the names of brands to be retired (apparently that can stop some of us from continuing to buy them) but some names have been circulating.

Some like Early Harvest, one of the new breed that plays upon our fear of getting fat by promoting less calories, and Mount Ida Heathcote shiraz have been stand alone wines in the past but now come under the auspices of other titles. Lindemans takes Early Harvest and Seppelt incorporates Mount Ida.

Blues Point, a wine whose strongest defining feature appeared to be its cobalt blue bottle, gets no such lifeline. No great loss there.

But also on the list for the chop are some familiar names, familiar that is to anyone who still remembers The Beatles on vinyl, black and white tellies and transistor radios.

And that means fond memories and enough sentimentality for some of us to mark their passing: Ben Ean, Kaiser Stuhl, Liebfrauwine.

Ben Ean is the figure-head, the one that got so many of us hooked on wine back at the start of the Australian wine boom in the late 1960s. For more than a decade it was our biggest selling white and even after it bowed out, overtaken by Wolf Blass "Rhine" riesling and Jacob's Creek claret, continued to do solid business.

A Sydney wine list that came up for judging last year in the Wine List of the Year Awards featured the wine, an oddity these days to be sure, but there it was at about $12 a bottle. The accompanying menu had lots of spicy Asian influences, just the thing for a wine with a heart of sweetness in a style many of us remember as "moselle". Someone clearly still sees the need for the wine.

Lindemans Ben Ean moselle - its original name - was the creation of one of Australia's great (and largely unsung) wine men, Ray Kidd, who was the managing director of Lindemans in the 1960s. Kidd had been a cellar manager with Lindemans and had seen for himself the "Barossa Pearl" effect on Australian wine drinkers. He predicted that the hugely successful fruity carbonated sweet Pearl wines would lead drinkers to demand still table wines with the same features. So he struck early, creating Ben Ean. Originally a blend of Hunter semillon and verdelho and named after one of Lindemans' Hunter vineyards, the wine went on to become as big a star - if not bigger - as its inspiration, Orlando's Barossa Pearl.

It reached its peak in 1979. It is around that time it is estimated to have held more than 20 per cent of Australia's bottled white wine market.

When drinkers wanted a change from what was becoming an almost exclusive diet of Ben Ean, Lindemans went into bat again, creating Leo Buring's Liebfrauwine. It, too, went on to become our biggest selling still white table wine.

Kaiser Stuhl is mostly associated with cask wine these days, hence the reason behind Foster's pressing the delete (sorry, retirement) button. The big Australian is moving out of the unprofitable cask wine sector and with that decision goes the Kaiser Stuhl name from the shelves (although what is to happen to Kaiser Stuhl rose remains unclear).

It was one of the great success stories of Australian winemaking, a grapegrower-owned co-operative that was born in the Barossa Valley during the 1931 Depression and went on to produce innovative, fresh, fruit-led wines like Sparkling Rhinegolde and Summer Wine (the biggest selling local wine in 1984). Under manager Ian Hickinbotham (who took the name Kaiser Stuhl from the then-named highest hill of the Barossa Ranges) the company brought out from Germany a young white winemaker called Wolf Blass. Such is the stuff of wine history.

The life-span of a wine brand is only as good as the brand's ability to to adapt to changing tastes and times.

Clearly, a wine like Blues Point was created to capitalise on a fad for cute-looking blue bottles. Its lifespan was always going to be short.

"We shouldn't bemoan fad brands if they use up surplus wine and meet a consumer need and pass on to another fad brand," says Professor Larry Lockshin, professor of wine marketing at the University of South Australia.

"I think consolidation has forced these large companies to have huge portfolios of brands that they just can't cope with and they can't spend the money and time to upgrade them."

He points to Rosemount Estate (also part of Foster's) as a prime example of a brand that is trying, desperately, to remain relevant to drinkers with a new bottle, a new advertising campaign and even a new purpose as its tries to attract novice drinkers with its O sparkling wine (for having "over" ice).

It must be noted that Foster's does not see its brand retirement program as one of any great scale and in an internal memo reassured staff that it does not signal "major" change in the Foster's portfolio or sales plan. Which means that brands such as Rosemount, Tollana and Seppelt don't have to pack their bags for the retirement home just yet.