‘Wine regions work’; that is the message that came across loud and clear from the winners of the Wine Australia ‘Regional Heroes’ programme this year in UK & Ireland.

The dozen top-performers from the twelve-week promotion of Australian regionality have just returned from an all-expenses paid visit around vineyards and wineries in Australia, as their prize for triumphant initiatives that saw the sale of Australian ‘Regional Heroes ’ wines escalate by as much as 200% in the participating businesses.

One of the winning companies was Chester based wine merchants, Corks Out, who ran in-store events plus a series of corporate tastings on the subject of wine regions of Australia.

Said, Ruth Yates, owner of the wine store group,
“I must admit that our sales are normally heavily weighted towards the Old World, but our lively programme on Australian wine was inspired by the training and insights from Wine Australia which created a real buzz in our team. We now all know our Coonawarra Cabernet from a Cabernet from the Margaret River.

We have begun to see customers get more excited about regionality rather than just the grape variety. Tom Scargill, our winner, and a Francofile I may add, has not stopped waxing lyrical about Australia since he returned from his trip. We will be putting his knowledge to good use to help continue staff training and carry out focused regional tastings rather than more generic Australian events.

Yates continued:
“Once trade incentives finish, we usually see sales take a dip then return to normal, but not this time. We have seen a continued, steady growth in this section with sales still up by 80% since the promotion finished. Why?: staff training and customer confidence.”

The trade incentive ran in parallel with an on-line consumer competition that saw 2,600 people participate in a virtual tasting game; where they had to identify the flavour characteristics of their chosen regional wine. London radio stations ran on-air tastings with daily prizes of mixed cases of wines and on-line communities took up the message which brought nearly 20,000 consumers into the game. The virtual tasting challenge is now a permanent part of the educational offering from Wine Australia, within the ‘Australia: world class’ DVD and online at www.wineaustralia.com/regionalheroes.