Only our very large companies can hope to position a range of products in all the wine market segments. Small to medium sized companies must be much more selective and specialise in a smaller number of market segments. Its surprising how many never seem to work out which segments they should be in.

The medium sized company Brown Bros is trying to cover many of the market segments and is steadily building its range of premium wines, sparkling wines and of course historically is associated with premium fortified wines.

Their greatest achievement though is the extraordinary success they are having with a range of sweet wine styles which is a special market category and one that the large companies have either abandoned, like the Hardy Wine Company or have failed to exploit such as the Fosters group.

It is a characteristic of family businesses that they are prepared to try ideas that may hardly seem sound at the time but open up and expose the business to unexpected opportunities.

The desire or the need to offer something different to the large companies can be a deciding factor for innovation though the effort to put something different in place and get it to work can be a long, lonely road.

Yalumba planted their first viognier vines in 1979. They no doubt experimented with many varieties though they persevered with this variety and the company is now identified with viognier as its signature wine. This presumably helps the sale of other wines in the portfolio. The unexpected came from the belief by some wine consumers that the blend of shiraz and viognier is vastly superior to basic shiraz and the blend has been selling for fancy prices. This allowed Yalumba to enter the market in 2006 with a cheap shiraz-viognier blend because they have the grape resource to do so.

Brown Bros is a most interesting company and of all our medium sized companies had what seemed for a long time the oddest sales-marketing approach though one that is now giving them a edge which will be hard to copy.

Brown Bros has a long history of innovation in the area of promoting unusual varieties. Many wine companies talk about the next variety that consumers will embrace and it is a question frequently asked in the wine trade. Most large companies are very reluctant to take risks in this area. Small amounts of experimental varietal wine are released but to attempt to interest consumers in new varieties-no thank you.

Brown Bros has blissfully continued down this path and now have a portfolio that contains the following varieties: sangiovese, tempranillo, dolcetto, tarrango, pinot gris, orange muscat, flora, crouchen, durif, graciano, lexia, moscato, lagrein, petit verdot, barbera, zibibbo, and cienna. Many of these wines sell in quite large quantities.

The company has also been remarkably disciplined in resisting label changes, a common itch that marketing people show. This steady image may well have assisted the growth in the unusual range offered. An innovative and expensive marketing programme that featured conservative but unusual food graphics was the spearhead in the 1980’s and 1990’s and suited the conservative but distinctive labelling.

Brown Bros also resisted for a very long time the idea of giving large retailers discounts and attempted to sell at the same price to all. They have since changed but have avoided the worst of brand destruction that can result from dealing in an uneven manner.

Early on they also learnt that many people have a sweet tooth. From memory the first sweet wines they released were the Orange Muscat and Flora – now at 124 gm/litre of sugar, Crouchen Moselle now called Crouchen and Riesling, and Spatlese Lexia. They now offer five sweet white wines and an amazing four sweet red wines of which one the Dolcetto has an eye popping 76 gm/litre of sugar.

The temptation of most companies would be to brand this range of sweet wines in a different manner to the conventional dry whites and reds and part of the great success of these wines is that they let the consumer decide whether they like them. By not branding them differently they avoid saying to the customer you are different. Many companies do just this and the branding often says to customers, you are a joke.

For Brown Bros they are all serious wines and this consistency in branding and varietal labelling speaks across to the customer not down to them. They have been consistent about this for decades and it is now paying off.

While the company has been quite innovative in opening new vineyards, such as Whitlands, high in the King Valley, they are content to differentiate themselves by a varietal image rather than the more common district of origin. With their marketing consistency which starts at the cellar door they show a cleverly thought out strategy that has allowed them to dominate two unusual categories, sweet wine styles and unusual varieties, and all at high margin selling points.