Wednesday, August 6, 2014

Who owns what, redux. This time in Australia.

By far the most read post on this blog is "Who Owns What-A Guide to Wine Brands," in which we revealed the corporate ownership of many wine brands (to the best of our knowledge, in 2009).

Today we stumbled upon an article about an Australian winemaker, Sarah Collingwood, who has published a similar list, listing all the brands that are actually the products of two grocery store chains, Coles and Woolsworth.

Since few of our readers live in Oz, our readers are unlikely to encounter these wines, but I thought the list and the animus behind it were both interesting. The lists are incredibly long, for one thing. Those grocery stores must have big marketing departments.

Ms. Collingwood appears to consider these brands fraudulent, in that they appear to be the products of small, family-owned wineries like her own when they are not.

Of course, US grocery stores and others around the world do similar branding of wines and other products. What do you think are the stores' ethical responsibilities to reveal the true ownership of the brands?

 
Wine Blogger Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.