Herald Sun, Citystyle
There’s a new generation of discerning drinkers, writes ED CHARLES
ANDY Roche had never bothered with red wine until last year.
The 26-year-old fashion designer had found his niche with white wines, specifically semillons or sauvignon blanc semillons, his favourite being Evans & Tate.
But last winter became an odyssey as he discovered the range of flavours of pinot noir and occasionally, the boisterous shiraz grape.
“I hadn’t really had it before,” he says.
That was until he attended V-Know, Melbourne wine and networking events for 25 to 35-year-old professionals.
“I decided lighter styles of red wine like pinot were the ones I liked. Since then I have been enjoying it with dinners and out after work and at home,” Roche says.
“It’s also given me an interest into going to wineries and seeing the process of making wines.”
V-Know is the brainchild of marketing consultant Rory Kent, 28, who started the events because he was passionate about wine, but frustrated by friends knocking back the good stuff in restaurants through ignorance.
About 300 people have paid $100 to attend V-Know events such as the Young Gun of Wine Awards and Wine, Women & Song (celebrating women and opera) held at the BMW Edge. Experts are mixed into the crowd to offer helpful advice.
“It’s about making wine cool,” Kent says.
Typical of Kent’s approach is Wine by Design on Thursday. It will raise $25,000 for Make Poverty History by auctioning wines with one-off labels designed by artists, designers and fashionistas.
Fashion designers Akira Isogawa and Alannah Hill, artists Joost Bakker and Ben Frost are creating labels, as is wunderkind chef George Calombaris.
Kent isn’t the only one finding a new generation of wine lovers. Students at wine courses are getting younger, too.
William Angliss’s Leigh Baker sees Roche’s journey from white to red as typical for many wine drinkers.
“It’s a typical cycle of the educated palate,” he says.
“You come in really sweet. You go a little bit drier and then you go really dry. It’s very unusual for people to go straight into reds.”
Now Australian winemakers such as Jacob’s Creek, who have a history of producing big knockabout reds and oaky whites, are making easier drinking wines, European in style, partly to attract new drinkers.
Foster’s, which is as big in wine as it is in beer, has found that the new generation of drinkers will pay up to $25 for the right bottle. Typical of these wines are locally made rosé, pinot gris and sangiovese.
Moscato, a low-alcohol, slightly sweet, slightly sparkling traditionally Italian wine, became a hit during summer.
Innocent Bystander in the Yarra Valley wasn’t the first winery in Australia to make Moscato, but it was the first to feel the full force of the Matt Skinner – Jamie Oliver’s wine guy in London – effect.
In 2006, Fifteen London ordered the last 100 of 700 cases of Innocent Bystander’s 5.5 per cent blushing pink Moscato, which costs about $12.50 for a 375ml bottle.
Word got out and the 5000 cases made in 2007 quickly sold out and every winemaker seemingly had their own version (moscato is quick to make).
Just before Easter the winery released 15,000 cases of the wine for 2008.
As The Prince Winestore’s Alex Wilcox says about Skinner: “What he (Oliver) did to food, Matt did to wine.”
These types of wines are appearing across Melbourne’s most fashionable wine lists in cool bars and restaurants.
They feature prominently on the wine list at Brunswick St’s latest cool restaurant and wine shop, St Jude’s Cellars, an offshoot of the fashionable Panama Dining Room.
The wine list was devised by Jane Thornton, one of a new generation of unstuffy wine buyers.
For a soft spicy vibe, the tempranillo graciano grape was chosen for Kid You Not, a $22 wine aimed at people like its makers, six children of the Brown Brothers winemaking tribe.
Caroline Brown, at 23 the second youngest of the Brown children, says the wines were about being enjoyed with food.
“We wanted to really focus on the concept of getting together and having a good time, rather than talking about the snobby wine hoo hah that some people like to talk about, but not many people really care about.”
Over at Foster’s, a barrel full of marketers are sizing up wine drinkers young and old.
General manager for wine Simon Marton is talking up European styles aimed at people starting out in life rather than nearing retirement.
He wants to sell wine to the people who drank Barcardi Breezers and Smirnoff Ice in the 1990s and is doing this with the company’s latest invention, Rosemount O.
This is a low-carb, low-alcohol wine seemingly inspired by Moscato.
It doesn’t have the fizz of the Champagne-style bubbles in Yellowglen and is designed specifically to taste better in a tall glass with ice.
“I think the key has been for these consumers that the physical taste of chardonnay or red wine, shiraz in particular, is quite a change to what they have been drinking,” Marton says.
“The opportunity was to create a bridge to get those people into wine. They wanted to get into a more sophisticated premium drink and wine does the job.
“But it needs to be of a taste that allows them to get into it.”
Caption: Wine wise: Andy Roche and Rory Kent toast to reds.