This was published 12 years ago
Burgeoning empire
One of the Barossa Valley's quiet achievers is still doing it his way - and doing it very nicely.
By Huon Hooke
Imagine you're a winemaker, proudly based in the Barossa Valley, and you want to expand by producing popular grape varieties that don't grow well in the region.
Sauvignon blanc and pinot noir are the big growth varieties in question, so Grant Burge's answer is to source them from New Zealand - both from Marlborough.
Grape mind ... Grant Burge.
The brand is Drift. The sauvignon has been so successful Burge expects it to be among the top-10 selling sauvignon blancs in Australia by next year. Drift sauvignon blanc is $15 and pinot noir $25, and neither mentions the name Grant Burge on their labels. Burge reasons his name is so closely associated with the Barossa, it should appear only on Barossa wines.
Burge has done it without fanfare. He is a quiet achiever. In the past five years, a time of great difficulty in the wine market, he's doubled the turnover of Grant Burge-branded wines. This excludes the Kiwi wines. The big movers are Burge's mid-priced Barossa Vines wines, priced about $15; and the $40 Filsell shiraz, sourced from the same old vines at Lyndoch as his flagship $155 Barossa shiraz, Meshach.
Burge believes Filsell is his best value-for-money wine. ''It's a third the price of Meshach but it's not a third of the quality,'' he says. The current release, 2009, (Cellar Talk, August 30) won the judges' shiraz award at the recent InterContinental/Advertiser South Australian Wine of the Year Awards.
Meshach is Burge's most concentrated, powerful and complex shiraz. It's a blockbuster that ages well but it's never had an over-the-top style. It never hits the extremes of alcohol of some compatriots but holds its structure and balance.
The 2011 Barossa vintage was very difficult due to rain but a 2011 Meshach will be issued. In other words, there was more top shiraz harvested at Grant Burge in 2011 than in 2007 or 1997 when a Meshach wasn't issued.
Burge is happy with this year's vintage, widely deemed the worst in the Barossa since 1974. ''My winemaker, Craig Stansborough, reckons the cabernet is the best he's ever seen,'' Burge says. Cabernet did well because it has thick skin and is more resistant to moulds and mildews than shiraz or grenache. And Barossa cabernet makes its best wine in cool seasons - the region is probably too warm for great cabernet most years - and 2011 was cool.
What went wrong for the region in 2011, Burge says, is that some grape growers didn't spray at the right times - and they needed to apply far more sprays than in a normal season: about 12, and up to 16, times. Some couldn't afford the cost of the chemical and some tried to skimp, with disastrous results. ''We sprayed everything at least twice as much as I've ever sprayed before,'' Burge says. The pay-off came with plenty of sound fruit.
He is in a good position to control his fruit quality. He owns 300 hectares of vineyards and controls most of the grapes he uses.
Burge recently sold his former cellar door sales building, on Jacobs Creek, to Orlando.
It didn't make sense that Grant Burge Wines was running three cellar doors - at the Illaparra winery in Tanunda (formerly Basedow), Jacobs Creek and Krondorf - so he will cut back to two and fix up the Krondorf winery, which sorely needs renovation.
Burge makes wine in two wineries: whites at Krondorf and reds and fortifieds at Illaparra. He sells a vast amount of fortified wine through Illaparra and anyone who drives through Tanunda has seen the sandwich board outside, advertising bulk port for sale. He says fortified wine sales are very healthy, partly because ''everyone else except Seppeltsfield and McWilliam's have basically abandoned it''.
But that's Grant Burge, a great survivor and opportunist. Way back when Mildara, under Ray King, sold its vineyards, Burge bought them inexpensively and built his formidable land holding. Now he's sitting pretty.
Another reason Burge does well when many others do not is the separation of his wholesale activities. Sydney wholesaler Young & Rashleigh sells to the restaurant trade, while Grant Burge Wines has its own sales force to handle the retail trade, warehousing with ALM.
Burge was managing the retail side from the Barossa until he had the good fortune to hire Brian McGrath, a former Orlando man living in Sydney. ''Brian convinced me to set up my own sales force in NSW, which he now manages, and it works beautifully,'' he says.
To complete the team, he hired Nick Doumanis as sales director, based in Sydney, who ''has the advantage of coming from a non-wine background and looks at everything with a fresh set of eyes''.
''The Grant Burge brand is as big as Peter Lehmann now,'' a proud Burge says.