My View: Jago's comments should not be seen as unpalatable |
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| Friday, 07 December 2007 | |||||||||||||
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Last week Dan Jago, category director for beers, wines and spirits at Tesco?s, spoke out at the Australian Outlook conference.  Bruce Tyrrell He expressed a desire to see more personality, freshness and lower alcohols in many of the Australian wines on the UK market. Being from the Hunter Valley, I found myself very much agreeing. Jago ably described the wines of our area and my personally preferred styles. However, it is difficult to generalise about Australian wine. Our country is larger than Europe and has a vast diversity of areas, altitudes, soils and weather patterns. Therefore we make a wide range of wine styles, which will be the basis of the industry's message going forward. Jago ably described the wines of our area and my personally preferred styles. I believe our strength in the daily drinking market has been to deliver consistently well-made wines that both look and taste good. The drought conditions and quick harvests of the past five years - and particularly the last two - have made it difficult to produce lower alcohol styles.
But lower alcohol for its own sake can lead to flavourless wines that have simply been picked too early. Such wines lack mouth, feel and weight. Consumers want clean well- made wines with real flavour and balance; if this can be achieved at moderate alcohols levels then so much the better. I must applaud Tesco for beginning to make a broader range of Australian styles available. That is where the future of Australia lies. Bruce Tyrrell is managing director or Tyrrell's Wines.
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Comments (3)
Chris Day
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Dear Editor Thank you for the balancing of the unbalanced Sun-Herlad article of last week. As an attendee at every Wine Outlook conference since inception, I thought Dan Jago was an excellent key note speaker at the 2008 Wine Outlook Conference. Everyone I spoke was happy to take onboard some of the advice given in his talk. Also, Bruce Tyrell is an Australian industry icon and would not have commented like potrayed in the newspaper article. His comments above sound much more like him. Australia is proud to work with the English wine trade and looks forward to satisfying customers preferences and demands for the next 50 years. We all know that anything to do with fashion will change and the good go with the fashion. |
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Craig Markby
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Dear Editor It's a pity that 'journalists' can print 'stories' based very loosely on what is actually said, and the 'subject' of the erroneous piece has to defend themselves. Perhaps the writer should confer with the source prior to publishing or perhaps before a publisher engages a writer/journalist, they be subjected to a basic comprehension test. I think that this piece from the evidence here could only be described as mischievous. Craig Markby |
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Professor Emeritus Robert White
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I must confess to being very surprised when I first read the story on Dan Jago's address in the Daily Wine News (attributed to Mark Ritson of the Melbourne Business School) - a summary no doubt. So I was interested to see the rebuttal published in Harpers. However, my experience with media articles is that they are generally about 50 percent correct - the problem is, if you are not very familiar with a topic, to know which 50 percent is right and which is wrong. My conclusion is that there was some truth to the reported comments made by both Bruce Tyrell and Rick Burge, and that some form of damage control is now underway. However, the take-home message should be - the Australian wine industry can not afford to dismiss the comments of a person such as Jago lightly. I am sure whatever they really were they were offered in good faith. |
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