Remembering back to those days of wine and RosŽ

Date Published: 18-Apr-2012

There was a time – and really it’s just a few short years ago – when selecting a wine involved a straight choice between Blue Nun, Black Tower and Jacob’s Creek. Now, with all due respects to them, you’d sooner be seen drinking petrol from your shoe.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with a good bottle of reisling or Liebfraumilch – apparently those new hybrid cars go like the clappers on a litre or two of it – but sometimes your brand is inexorably associated with a different era. And, as in this case, that’s not always a good thing.

Mateus Rosé represented the height of sophistication, coming as it did in a bottle which could later be revitalised as a lamp stand if you get shells and a heavy paste with which to stick them to the empty bottle.

However the brains behind the brand could probably have lived without the disclosure that Mateus Rosé was amongst the brands said to be stockpiled in the vaults of Saddam Hussein’s palaces. It seems there is such a thing as a bad endorsement, after all.

Such is the baggage attached to Blue Nun, which was itself rebranded and remarketed a year or two ago, that it no longer describes itself as Liebfraumilch at all – which is a pity really given that this is a German word that literally means ‘beloved lady’s milk’.  

To be more precise, Liebfrau is the German for Virgin Mary. But, that said, milk – from cows, containers or even beloved ladies – never tasted like the sickly-sweet stuff that marked the darker days of our youth.

And even allowing for the combined efforts of the world’s top wine marketing gurus, we ain’t going back there; no more than the next generation will be passing round the Buckfast at a dinner party in 20 years’ time – no matter how much of it they now drink at the back of the handball alley or down by the Spanish Arch.

The irony is that Jacob’s Creek is an Australian wine and was the original in the Barossa Valley region, dating back to 1847, but these days the off licence shelves are groaning with Aussie wines – and Jacob’s Creek doesn’t seem to be at the forefront.

Bizarrely, it is just a year ago since the BBC ran a story where hundreds of fake bottles of best-selling Australian wine Jacob's Creek were seized by trading standards officers in England and Wales.

Apparently they were made in China and according to Pernod Ricard spokesman Simon Thomas: "This counterfeit product is of very low quality and substandard taste.”

You’d imagine it must have been difficult to spot then – apart from a tell-tale misspelling on the label on the back, where Australia is spelt Austrlia.

But you’d have thought that, if someone was going to the bother of brewing dodgy wine, they’ve have aimed higher up the grape tree in the first place.

There are memories of our formative days that are worth reflecting on with some fondness – guilty pleasures like Abba or Duran Duran, mullets, stonewashed jeans, Pacman – but others are best consigned to the era from whence they came.

In fairness to the good folks at Jacob’s Creek – now part of the Irish Distillers Pernod Ricard Group – they’re not about to give up easily, and they’re currently engaged in a marketing campaign that actually hits Galway this week.

The idea – some might say last desperate throw of the dice – is blind tasting to prove that it’s only your imagination that’s telling you that Jacob’s Creek is to wine what Bertie Ahern is to bank accounts.

Which is why 50 blind tasters – that means blindfolded as opposed to blind drunk – are gathering at the Galway City Museum tonight see if they can tell the difference between prize wines and plonk.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.