The Boutique Wine Lover's Wine Reviews and Wine Related Stories

There is an interesting article in "The Age" newspaper of 28/3/06 that really describes well how if we shop at bottle shops and liquor outlets, we are starved for choice. There are so many "brands" to choose from, BUT over 90% of these wines are owned by the top 5 wine conglomerates, giving us the illusion of choice.

Here is an excerpt...

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.... Maybe being part of a big company like Foster's means these brands are no longer wines, but rather products.....

..... Rell Hannah is the corporate affairs director for the Foster's Wine Group. She says:
"In aggregate, for total wine (off-premise), our volume share is just over one-quarter, so our retail shelf space share for each customer tends to be in that order."....

.... I like drinking distinctive, subtle wines, but can they only be made by small family-run wineries? Well, yes, mostly. Or is that just another form of wine snobbery?

For a list of the brands owned by Foster's, visit www.fosters.com.au (BTW note: Foster's owns about 42 Australian brands).

Industry's big brothers

FOSTER'S is not the only big brother watching - or selling us - wine. With Beringer and Southcorp merging to form Foster's we now have the big three: Foster's, the Hardy Wine Group and Orlando Wyndham.

· Hardy's joined forces recently with Constellation in the US. Locally, it runs the following brands: Hardys, Banrock Station, Houghton, Stonehaven, Leasingham, Yarra Burn, Tintara, Nobilo, Omni, Barossa Valley Estate, Starvedog Lane, Chateau Reynella, Kamberra, Moondah Brook, Reynell, Bay of Fires, Brookland Valley, Redman, Savy, Berri, Four Emus, Stanley, Kellys Revenge, Knife and Fork, Emu Wine. A spokeswoman for Hardy's reckons its market share - for wine sales within Australia - is about 26 per cent.

· Orlando is run by the French powerhouse Pernod Ricard, and is responsible, among other brands, for the following wines: Jacob's Creek, Wyndham Estate, Poet's Corner, Richmond Grove. At least it still uses possessive apostrophes. That being said, it has a dimmer view of media relations, with no information forthcoming at the time of this article's preparation.

Factor in the bigger family-owned companies such as McWilliams and Casella, and market retail shelf share in Australia among the big players starts to stagger more hedonistically towards 90 per cent or more.

There's nothing like choice and a free market.

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