Winemakers Must Have Hoarded This Red To Drink All By Themselves

Sydney Morning Herald

Wednesday June 12, 1991

HUON HOOKE

BEING a wine writer in a recession isn't easy. About 90 per cent of the tastings and new-vintage launches I'm invited to, the printed information that clogs my letterbox and the sample bottles that darken my doorstep is concerned with wines priced over $10. Most are over $15.

But they're not the only wines people want to read about.

It's the pricey wines that need the push. Pricey wines must be promoted. Wine is like any commodity. Everyone needs toothpaste, but not many bother with the electric brush. Lots of us drive cars, but we don't all buy BMWs. The basics sell themselves.

Expensive wines are selling more slowly than usual because you, the public, have "traded down". You're buying $10 wines instead of $15, $6 wines where once you paid $10.

When you want to hear about cheaper wines, I'm getting my arms twisted to write about expensive ones. It's as though no-one wants to admit they make cheap wine.

It's all to do with image, I guess. Promote the top-shelf booze and the bread-and-butter will trail along in its wake.

Well, here's one you can't afford to miss. The irony is that it's a brand that's been hidden away for years. One wonders if it wasn't the winemakers themselves at Tollana who kept the stuff concealed from the public. Perhaps they wanted to drink it all themselves, greedy devils.

I can see them now, prowling the cellars, sampling the barrels, deciding which will make it into the final blend of Tollana Eden Valley Hermitage, and squabbling over who's going to get the most bottles. Then sabotaging the promotional budget around the boardroom table.

Maybe that's why Tollana has been the most under-promoted fine red brand in the country.

Try the 1987 Tollana Eden Valley Hermitage ($7 to $8.50) and you'll see what I mean. It's got all the pepper, spice and dark-berry aromas that hard-core shirazophiles dream of, as well as the middle-palate flavour, richness and flesh that dyed-in-the-wool red drinkers simply must have. A rich beef casserole would do it proud.

The other tactic the originator of the brand - Tolley, Scott and Tolley -employed to keep its reds from us was to give them a bad name.

I was working in a pub bottle shop in 1972 as a student, and well remember the sales rep coming in with the first Tollana wines, made by the youthful Wolfgang Blass.

"Tollana?" I said. "Sounds like a car. It'll never sell." And the label looked like a cigarette packet.

Sure enough, it took off like a stone. But I'll bet Wolfie's cellar, and those of all his successors, are packed to the gunwales with the stuff.