MICHAEL FRIDJHON: Wine sales and hype are a perfect package deal

It’s impossible to separate the sale of fine wine from the art of puffery. Much of what drives the high-end wine market is the brand story. While this is more evident in the New World wine trade, where there is a faster and more visible churn at the apex of the pyramid, it’s increasingly evident in European wine regions.

The hierarchy of the Medoc was pretty much set in stone with the 1855 classification; there’s little chance of Chateau Palmer displacing Chateau Margaux on a permanent basis in the lifetime of anyone reading this column. A few new names have entered the pantheon in the past half century, driven mainly by New World wine consumers besotted with shortage of supply. But even the Le Pins and Valandrauds are merely the exceptions that prove the rule.

In Napa and the Cape, South Australia and New Zealand a wholly different dynamic applies. Very few of the names that were considered indispensable luxury purchases in the 1990s occupy the same position today. Newcomers with a better story, more opulent packaging and less evident availability have usurped the old gods. The message inherent in the image is often the same as the one that brought the fallen leader to power: location (my dirt is better than your dirt), climate (our site is cooler than your site) or cellar techniques (our tanks/barrels/amphorae are better than yours).

In a way, there’s nothing wrong with this. Like candidates seeking election, what works is what the electorate wants to believe. The true test (tasting blind, without the label to “tell” you the producer’s sales pitch) is never applied by punters who want to believe what they’ve been told.

Two recent product launches highlighted the importance of brand message. Both producers are widely recognised as among the best in the game; both have become key players in less than two decades. Chris and Andrea Mullineux have brought their eponymously named enterprise to the pinnacle of the craft wine business by focusing on site-specific syrah, chenin blanc and straw wine. Their low-volume, high-end releases, whose names draw on the geology of the vineyards, drive the price-positioning for a larger volume of wine made from mainly the same varieties selling at a lower (but still quite elevated) price-point.

In early March they launched the latest vintages of this more affordable segment: R450 a bottle for the Old Vine White and the Swartland Syrah and roughly double that for the Straw Wine. They used the occasion to show “library” vintages of the same wines — a way of illustrating age-ability (the ability to survive the passage of time) as well as age-worthiness (the ability to improve over time). The 2024 Old Vine White is still in its infancy; the 2019 presented a convincing case for what to expect of it five years from now. The 2022 Swartland Syrah was already remarkably accessible; the 2018 was perhaps a little more harmonious, but the case for ageing it seemed less evident to me.

The second launch was Thys Louw’s latest Diemersdal sauvignon blanc creation — a single-site wine fermented and matured in 220-litre glass containers. Called The Globe and selling for R750 a bottle (for the 2023 vintage) it’s opened new price territory for Cape sauvignon blanc. No doubt this is part of Louw’s strategy: his entry-level sauvignon blanc (he’s already selling the 2025 vintage!) is on shelf for less than R100. Then there’s the Reserve, a single-site wine (called Eight Rows, and in fact from the same vineyard that provided The Globe’s fruit), the wood-matured MM Louw and several other cuvées besides. Each has its place in the hierarchy, but all have bumped against sauvignon blanc’s pricing glass ceiling.

In this sense, The Globe is certainly a game-changer. Whether it passes the blind taste test remains to be seen. It’s certainly not likely to be subjected to such rigorous examination. Beautifully made and perfectly packaged, it’s an object of beauty, not a poolside quaffer. 

This column originally appeared in Business Day.