Austrian Government Wine Marketing Board
Euro Strategies was appointed in 1993 to be the London representative office for Österreichischer Weinmarketing. Our task was to re-establish the image of Austrian Wines with the UK wine trade and UK consumers following the ‘antifreeze’ scandal in the late 1980’s. It was agreed that ‘Quality’ was the key word that had to be stressed rather than quantity.
As the budget was small and stockists of Austrian wines in the UK very limited, we started by targeting opinion formers - particularly wine correspondents of the leading national newspapers. A programme of visits to Austria was organised to see how the strict new wine laws were being enforced and how the quality of Austrian wines had improved.
In addition we arranged with the publishing house Mitchell Beazley to publish a hard-back to previous page illustrated book ‘The Wine & Food of Austria’ written by Giles MacDonogh of The Financial Times. This, the first book in English about Austrian wines for over 13 years, became a key part of spreading the message.
To emphasise the key points we were able to select a number of top-quality wine producers to be the ‘flag-bearers’ for the campaign. These wineries were encouraged to enter their wines into the International Wine Challenge organised by Wine magazine and the rest is history. Austrian wines now win more medals each year (pro rata for the number of wines entered) than any other country. Names of the new generation winemakers, such as Bründlmayer, Feiler-Artinger, Kracher, Lang, Opitz, Stiegelmar & Umathum are now revered by wine connoisseurs around the world.
Our press relations campaign resulted in compliments like these:
‘Come back Austria, all is forgiven’ - Joanna Simon, Sunday Times.
‘The best Austrian wines are certainly a match for any opposition’ - Tim Atkin, Wine magazine.
‘Austria produces some very fine, world-class wine indeed’ Jancis Robinson, The Times.
‘..in Austria... where some of the finest Rieslings in the world, namely those from the Wachau...’ - Anthony Rose, Decanter.
With the strength of these regular compliments in the press, we were then able to develop distribution of Austrian wines by targeting wine buyers and influential bodies like the Institute of Masters of Wine and the Wine & Spirit Education Trust. Visits to the wineries for groups of buyers were organised and an annual scholarship for graduates of the Wine Diploma was established.
By 1995 the campaign had achieved its objectives. In that year UK sales increased by 60%, there was a threefold increase in the distribution and in total over 300 Austrian wines were on sale in specialist retailers, restaurants and supermarkets in the UK.