Wine group Ehrmanns' to use daring ads

One of the supermarket trade's biggest wine suppliers is turning its attention to pubs with the launch of marketing campaigns for three of its leading brands.

Ehrmanns is probably best-known for Blue Nun, recently repackaged and now available in 185ml single-serve bottles, and from next month it is also pushing Jindalee Australian chardonnay and shiraz and Infierno Spanish merlot.

This represents a serious assault on the pub market from a company which has previously concentrated on the take-home trade.

Its new five-strong on-trade sales team is led by former Carlsberg-Tetley wines chief John Coakley and will be targeting pub groups over the coming months. Keith Lay, responsible for the UK launch of Grolsch in the late 1980s, has returned to the drinks business after a decade in dentistry to head the Ehrmanns marketing.

The adverts for both Jindalee and Infierno were designed by agency Design Alliance. They claim to bring a daring irreverence to wine marketing, the former sending up stuffy wine snobbery with captions to some bizarre archive photography and the latter choosing sexual innuendo and the copyline "oral satisfaction" to appeal specifically to women.

Australian wine maker Bill Mithen summed up the company's approach to Jindalee. "We want to break down the tossy, swirl and spit part of wine," he said. "At the end of the day it's grape juice and you drink it."

"We are adding humour, which is a powerful marketing tool, and making use of the positive images people have of Australia, the lively irreverence and the sense of opportunity," Mr Lay added.

The Infierno strategy, which will play down its Spanish origins, is compared by Mr Lay to Wonderbra's infamous "Hello Boys" campaign: "sexual, but appealing to women because of its confident imagery".

"Wine is often presented in a staid way, but why not have some fun with it?" he said.

Infierno is also linked with the fight against breast cancer with adverts appearing in the campaign's Pink Ribbon magazine.