Anders Josephson
Although James Halliday says Anders Josephson is rapidly making himself a part of Australian wine history, Josephson wouldn’t mind me saying he is yet to become a household name in Australian wine. While he might be remembered in his native Sweden for the scale and success of his entrepreneurial business affairs, his talent at the serious end of a trumpet or at the steering wheel of a sports prototype racing car, you have to know your wine in Australia to recognise him here.
Anders Josephson is a vital, energetic young man of fifty-nine who has taken to Australia and its wine like a cow to pasture. He prefers the space and the climate – political as well as meteorological – and is crazy about the taste of Grange Hermitage.
So who is he and what has he done? Is he a vigneron or winemaker? An exporter?
Neither. Anders Josephson is a buyer and seller of the best Australian wine. What stands him apart is the entirely unprecedented scale and depth of his activities. With a cellaring system that anyone ever to have been stimulated by the taste of mature wine would surely envy, he has secretively accumulated something akin to the national oenological crown jewels – the world’s largest and most valuable single collection of premium Australian wine. This vast collection, which cost at least $4-5 million, comprises several hundred thousand bottles of classic Australian wines, quietly attaining their the peak of their powers and pleasures in perfectly controlled conditions.
Back in Sweden, which must feel a lifetime away from the present day, Josephson used to be a big wheel in luxury resort development, textiles, fashion and haberdashery. ‘How boring!’ he jokes today. After a profitable self-employed career he was given the chance to purchase his family’s business which his great-grandfather created in 1885 which, as its sole owner, he increased in size and value five-fold.
Always prepared to give good time to his pleasures, he is a former jazz musician, holder of six national Swedish sports car titles and has owned one of the largest cellars of French wine in Sweden. So having discovered Australian wine, he says it was only natural he should elect to cellar it.
When he arrived in Australia, Anders Josephson could not believe how little we Australians appreciated our own indigenous wines. We sinfully drank them all within forty-eight hours, he says, and our restaurants didn’t give a hang what year they listed the vintage of their wines as, given that they listed a vintage at all.
That was back in 1983, when Josephson and his wife, Ann, made an exploratory trip to the country that Josephson had dreamt of living in since the age of 20. Attracted by Australia’s ‘Noah’s Ark’-like multiculturalism and repelled by the latent and still unsolved problems of the European political map which are still being realised in happenings such as the Bosnian civil war, the Josephsons quickly overcame the reality that they didn’t know a soul out here apart from a single colleague in the fashion industry.
Although both were immediately won over by the space and the lifestyle, it was his first taste of Grange Hermitage – from the classic 1971 vintage – that effectively turned Anders Josephson’s life on its head. ‘I couldn’t believe my tastes!’, he declares. ‘I had stumbled onto the Chateau Petrus of Australia. It was just a fantastic positive surprise to find this wine. Nobody in Europe was really aware of the outstanding quality of some Australian wine.’
Deciding to stay, the Josephsons had soon rented a furnished house, bought a kingsize bed and invested in a case of 1971 Grange. Within two years, they had applied for Australian residency Anders is now applying for Australian citizenship, purchased the house they were renting and returned to Sweden to initiate the complicated process of dispersing Anders’ entire business interests in Sweden. According to Swedish law, people leaving the country permanently are unable to continue any ongoing business there. Once having given the Swedish business and banking communities a shock they surely still remember, it took Josephson four years to finally clean his Swedish slate to the satisfaction of the authorities.
In 1985 Anders purchased a 24-hectare property at Gwandalan, an otherwise small and unspectacular township on the picturesque beachy shores of Lake Macquarie. Fully constructed and known as Gwanda Bay Manor, it is today a gloriously landscaped and laid out estate on which Josephson began that year to build his first large wine cellar, digging into a hillside and installing equipment to maintain a perfect humidity and 14oC temperature for the storage of wine. A second cellar is presently being constructed alongside.
Ten years later, Josephson has left the door of his cellar slightly ajar, enabling some of the trinkets inside to trickle slowly and profitably onto the tables of those most likely to enjoy and afford them.
Between 1985 and 1993, when he became a licensed wholesale and retail distributor of wine, Josephson cornered the national market for Grange Hermitage. Incredibly, he would buy his wine as anyone else would – straight from wine retailers, with no favours asked. Always negotiating anonymously, or through a spreading nationwide network of friends, he would frequently take an extraordinary share of the Grange allocated not only to Sydney, but to interstate markets such as Perth and Melbourne as well.
‘My friends and I would buy up substantial quantities of the wines I wanted – two or three cases here, five cases there, but we kept it very discrete. I was a ghost figure for nearly ten years’, he says. ‘People ask me how Penfolds could have allowed me to do it, but they didn’t know. They only enter the story once I received my licence.’
Grange Hermitage is carefully allocated to wine retailers by Southcorp, the present-day owners of the Penfolds brand. The more ‘lesser’ Penfolds wine they sell, the greater their allocation of Grange. It’s a quid pro quo, a real incentive for the trade.
Josephson would manage to determine the size of a retailer’s allocation, and frequently buy the entire amount. ‘Shop owners were often prepared to do a deal’, he says. ‘I knew how much they paid for the wine and would normally negotiate to pay the full price instantly, plus an additional incentive on delivery. Many were hungry for business.’
Although it’s unquestionably the backbone of his cellar and he has more of it than anyone including Penfolds, old Grange Hermitage is by no means the bulk of Josephson’s investment. He has accumulated an entire folio of what he has selected as the best Australian wine, chosen from most premium regions and many of our smallest high-quality producers.
Josephson looks for wines with ‘potential to develop, harmony, fruit and acid balance'; made in ‘innovative, new styles’ which meet the ‘international taste’ he is looking for. While not everyone will agree with all his choices, and given that his background in Australian wine only extends back twelve years, he’s not made a bad fist of it, quickly identifying many of our stand-out labels and vintages.
The only proviso is that except for his purchases of old Grange, Josephson will only buy wine immediately on release directly from their makers to personally and precisely control their cellaring.
There was naturally gossip and intrigue in the wine trade about ‘the Swede’ or ‘the Scandinavian’, but it wasn’t until August 1993 that Josephson shed his somewhat mysterious and shadowy image to come out of the cold. At an exclusive auction in Sydney conducted by Andrew Caillard for the revered London auction house of Christies, Josephson was simultaneously able to launch himself onto a market rife with anticipation for his wine and also to test the market for the prices he should set.
‘It was unbelievable, a huge success. The sale brought in around $130,000 at a margin of around 30 and I was able to get up and say “I’m Anders Josephson”,’ he says. That’s no exaggeration. Everyone was taken aback by the prices the auction achieved, in many cases for wines released only two or three years before.
Now that he is a licensed trader, Josephson is understandably coy about how he continues to purchase very significant volumes of Grange, whose burgeoning international reputation is putting more and more pressure on Penfolds to sell more of this scarce, but prestigious resource overseas. ‘I can only say from now on that as wine merchant, my sources and my way of working have to be my trade secret’, he says.
Theories abound, but an educated guess might be that Josephson has, with or without Penfolds’ cooperation, established a sort of secondary options market on Grange Hermitage allocations, enabling him to bid for and collate individual retail allocations across Australia. If something like this were the case, most retailers wouldn’t be too upset, since their tiny Grange allocations barely touch the floors of their shops anyway before someone would come in and swoop on the lot.
Josephson has created two systems to sell his wine. Over the last two years he has worked closely with what he believes are the best and most exclusive restaurants, to establish a concept whereby his wine assumes either part of or else the entire wine list the restaurant may present, under his logo and identification.
Successfully trialed at Bilson’s, Josephson’s wines, each tagged as having come from his cellar, are listed at the Rockpool, Manfredi’s, Kables at the Regent and Level 41. Before introducing the idea interstate, Josephson will move into the Asian market, beginning with Raffles at Singapore.
For each of these restaurants, Josephson’s business will deliver and refill stocks every week, maintaining minimal stocks at the restaurants themselves. ‘I’d lose the element of exclusivity if I ever did the same in a retail shop’, he says.
Josephson has also established his own society, the ‘Friends of Anders Josephson Private Wines’, through which corporate and private members can share in the rewards of his expense and patience. Potential members should write to Anders Josephson, Gwanda Bay Manor, Gwandalan, NSW, 2259.
Josephson is coy when it comes to the issue of the potential market power he might come to wield. While he illustrates that he is only interested in the top 1 by volume of the Australian wine market, he concedes he’d like to play a dominating role in that percentile, quickly qualifying that comment by saying that he’s not simply out to dominate it for its own sake. ‘In your niche you must be important’, he says. It’s clearly better business to do so.
Given that he’s running the business with minimal staffing overheads and without too much credit, Josephson says that in strictly business terms, he’s already more than breaking even. Consider that when he bought a wine like the 1980 Grange it cost him around $36 a bottle, but today he could sell each bottle for $145, he is correct to say it’s, ‘not too bad a business to be in’.
It’s difficult to argue with that.
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