Wine was made to be drunk, they say, but not some wines and not in this country. First it was Wild Duck Creek; and now Three Rivers has joined in, pricing their most sought-after wines out of reach of virtually any Australian who wants to drink them. Unless you’re plutocratically wealthy or else terminally addicted to these wines, if you’re Australian, you won’t be uncorking them. As you’d expect, messrs. Anderson and Ringland have copped their share of criticism for pricing their wines the way they have, but are they really to blame? Or by blaming them, are we just refusing to look at the bigger picture? My wine book sells for around $25 per unit. If, for some reason its production was limited to present levels and its demand was such that it was immediately traded on purchase, with original buyers fetching up to five or six times its original value in a matter of weeks, there’s no doubt in my mind that The OnWine Australian Wine Annual would quickly become very much more expensive. So I can’t see any reason why Wild Duck Creek and Three Rivers can’t put any price they like to on their wines. Nobody is forcing anyone to buy them. And if they’re eventually going to end up in the hands of wealthy subscribers to American wine periodicals for astronomic sums, is there any real problem if these people buy direct from the winery for the price they’d happily pay anyway? The only downside is for those with a history of buying these wines but who can no longer afford them. Just as the winemakers have the right to charge whatever they want for their wines, so do these people have the right to share their feelings with the makers concerned. Into each life, they say, some rain must fall. Again, I wonder aloud how many of us, if faced with the same situation, would let short-term speculators whose contribution to wine is absolute zero make many times the profits we would, having created a sought-after international product from scratch? Even the most altruistic winemakers, and I continue to count Giaconda’s Rick Kinzbrunner and Steve Henschke in this regard, simply consider themselves foolish to allow others to profiteer from their own talents this way. Good luck to Anderson and Ringland. If their approach succeeds, they’ll make buckets; if it fails, they’ll have something unpleasant fall all over them. But if they really succeed for longer than just the immediate term, their wines will promote the image of all Australian wine and their elevation in price will create untold opportunity for others in the expansive vacuum beneath to strive for quality and excellence and to add more value. And that is in the interests of everyone associated with Australian wine.
