When Mother's Milk goes sour - Bad taste in the wine industry
I remember the initial audience mutterings followed by a rather stunned silence even 30 years after the event. It was a speech to a who's who of the Australian wine industry in a posh hotel dining room. I had dared to begin: "Fellow drug pushers ...".
It was a concept quite alien to these alcohol manufacturers; that being legal was the only thing differentiating the product they made, and I sold, from other things that you could end up in jail for being associated with.
That government granted privilege of being a legal drug has slowly dawned on many in the wine industry since then. When my brother and I started putting "drink in moderation" on our Farmer Bros wine labels back in 1982 we were considered odd-balls. Such slogans are now mandatory.
But not everyone has got the message that being a drug seller carries with it a responsibility to act with some restraint when it comes to marketing. Those canned vodka and fruit mixtures come close to being targeted at children even if not as blatantly as Lindemans did back in there 1980's with its Tropicana in little Tetra packs complete with a strawer. [For those of you too young to remember that particular episode I have reprinted the original story on my Wine and other alcoholic things Facebook page.]
A blatant current example:
Now this Mother's Milk is a Barossa Shiraz and the bright young fellows at First Drop probably giggled when they named it. And even though it's not to my sense of humour I guess I could tolerate the bad taste of the name if they had left it in the bottled form that the Dan Murphy chain saw fit to stock.
It was a concept quite alien to these alcohol manufacturers; that being legal was the only thing differentiating the product they made, and I sold, from other things that you could end up in jail for being associated with.
That government granted privilege of being a legal drug has slowly dawned on many in the wine industry since then. When my brother and I started putting "drink in moderation" on our Farmer Bros wine labels back in 1982 we were considered odd-balls. Such slogans are now mandatory.
But not everyone has got the message that being a drug seller carries with it a responsibility to act with some restraint when it comes to marketing. Those canned vodka and fruit mixtures come close to being targeted at children even if not as blatantly as Lindemans did back in there 1980's with its Tropicana in little Tetra packs complete with a strawer. [For those of you too young to remember that particular episode I have reprinted the original story on my Wine and other alcoholic things Facebook page.]
A blatant current example:
Now this Mother's Milk is a Barossa Shiraz and the bright young fellows at First Drop probably giggled when they named it. And even though it's not to my sense of humour I guess I could tolerate the bad taste of the name if they had left it in the bottled form that the Dan Murphy chain saw fit to stock.
In the mock milk bottle form it is just too clever by half and makes a mockery of the wine industry's pretence that it takes drinking in moderation seriously.
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