A vine idea
The unseasonable rain had a profound affect on the vines shipped in by Australian wine company McGuigan for a Central London initiative earlier this month.
They were only really supposed to perform a display purpose at the City Vineyard, a temporary installation near Liverpool Street set up to promote Australian wine to the public and help in the training of more than 100 barstaff across the three days it was there. But the British weather made the greenery flourish in much the same way as it would in a muggy Hunter Valley rainy season.
McGuigan hopes that the City Vineyard itself had a similar effect on customer and trade interest in Australian wine, nourishing their interest to sales fruition.
The unintentionally jungle-like foliage made a good place to explore the progress of Australian wine and get McGuigan's view on how the category can be pushed.
The company, whose pub-focused range Black Label is distributed through WaverleyTBS in the UK, launched new lines at the event - Grey Label and Discover. They include shiraz, merlot, chardonnay and sauvignon blanc varieties, aimed at capitalising on what McGuigan sees as an evolution in consumers' tastes.
"Thirty years ago we were producing wines that had a lot of sticky tannins and bottle maturation was all-important," says Neil McGuigan, general manager for production and wine supply.
"In the 1980s, we discovered even more lashings of tannin. The 1990s were fruit-driven. Wines became varietally obvious. If it said shiraz, then it looked and smelt like shiraz."
This point is an important one. It's often said that New World wine is far more accessible to the consumer because the labelling tends to stick to grape varieties and has been modernised to include bite-size information.
Old World wine companies, on the other hand, have stubbornly stayed away from these tactics.
You can see signs of some French and Italian players recognising this now - the launch recently of Constellation's heavily-branded, heavily-marketed Bordeaux Enchanté, for example.
More length, more spine
New World wines, though, are moving to stay ahead of the pack, says McGuigan. "People are looking for fruit but also for wine with more length, more spine," he explains. That is what his colleagues have tried to achieve with Grey Label and Discover.
McGuigan says there is demand for lighter, more subtle and more drinkable wines. He considers the City Vineyard to be about "Australia first and the brand second", and there is clearly still plenty of the old Aussie rivalry with the New Zealanders. According to McGuigan, many drinkers find heavier New Zealand wines flavourful but too much after one glass. Australian wines are different, he claims.
To this end, McGuigan has reduced the ABV of most of its products over the past year, most of them by around 0.5 per cent.
And the best way to get customers trying these easier-drinking wines? Offer try before you buy, by-the-glass serves and merchandise well. All of this was the subject of training at the City Vineyard.
"The best advert for wine is to get people to get it down their throats," says McGuigan.
A typical Australian sentiment if ever you heard one.
Wine flights
Why not make wine tastings more interesting by giving them a theme? One way of doing this is to organise "wine flights", something that Neil McGuigan says is big in Australia.
This involves offering customers a series of wines from different regions of the country accessible
