Pretending to be a maker of natural wine is what a German wine journal seems to be suggesting about Australia’s Treasury Wine Estates.
Treasury Wine Estates Goes Natural is the headline. “Natural wines were, for a long time”, its story says, “associated with individual, iconoclast producers who saw the corporate wine giants as the enemy. Now one of those giants has moved onto their turf.”
“The suits and been-counters behind the multinational industrial concerns” are described as being hated by the real ale and natural wine fans. And then details of the threat to one of the philosophical tenets real ale and natural wine fans hold that natural wine should be produced by small, ideally family-owned, estates from vines grown and hand-tended on their own land:
Now however, it looks as though one of these – the devil incarnate – has just arrived with its Sherman tank. Treasury Wine Estates, the Australian giant behind the Snoop Dogg-promoted 19 Crimes range of decidedly UNnatural wines is, it seems, launching an eye-catchingly-labeled set of wines called Second Glance, including an ‘Amber Wine, ‘Chillable Grenache’ and a ‘Pet Nat’. The red is described – by Treasury – as “picked early and naturally fermented for extra freshness and swagger. Brimming with juicy raspberries and whiffs of berry-sour confection and herbal notes, it’s lightweight, zippy & made for chilling on those warm days.”
The Treasury Wine Estates public relations team certainly have not trumpeted their new wine label. I could not find a reference to it on the company website.
And the only stockist I found is Vintage Cellars where it is being offered at a normal, outrageous natural wine high price of $30. No description of it being “natural” which is just as well for the back label admits the wine contains sulphites. That’s a no-no for the zealots in the Adelaide Hills who claim to make proper natural wines.
Surely it won’t be long before they come storming down to picket the Treasury bottling plant in Nuriootpa
