And there is nothing really new about the issues. They sort of rinse-and-repeat in cycles. One such rebounding issue is the lamentation of why South African wines aren’t more successful in international markets.
I witnessed this topic being debated again on Twitter this week, specifically around the role of massive retailers in the UK. The inimitable wine marketer Emile Joubert kicked off the proceedings by quoting a tweet from British wine expert/TV presenter Joe Fattorini, that showed an image of Graham Beck on sale in UK retailer Waitrose. Joubert poked fun, calling it “British retail’s greatest contribution to the wine industry: the rock-bottom promotion”.
You can follow the thread here but essentially Fattorini suggests that poor wine marketing and ineffective branding might be more to blame for the low pricing than the actions of the big UK retailer. Greg Sherwood MW waded in to point out that you can’t really claim that Graham Beck are guilty of either of those, and Fattorini never clarified who he did mean was doing poor marketing and ineffective branding, but he does suggest that there is more to it than simply lazy retailing.
He then directs the conversation to The Wine Show (without mentioning it by name) and says that the hope is by putting “great producers like this in front of 10’s of millions of TV viewers” encourages people to buy better wine and improve margins at big retailers.
There were more tweets and a few others joined the conversation, but in this flurry of exchanges, I was looking for the elusive truth bomb.
The matter here seems to come down to one of our favourite old chestnuts – the image of South African wine abroad. Tweets Joubert: “This I fail to comprehend: no other New World wine country gets as much PR, publicity and hype as South Africa. Why no improved image?”
The answer seems to be two-fold.
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