Celebrating the Jimmy Watson Fiasco

The more notorious it becomes, the more publicity it gets, and the less likely it will ever change. That is the Jimmy Watson Trophy, the highest-profile award on the Australian wine show circuit. Trouble is, it is also the most flawed. Furthermore, recent events only serve to illustrate what a farce it has become.

Given to the wine selected as the best one year-old dry red entered in the Royal Melbourne Wine Show, the Jimmy Watson Trophy was devised by the family and friends of legendary wine bar host Jimmy Watson as a memorial to him after his death. It made regular headlines when Wolf Blass won it on three consecutive occasions in the 1970s. The rest, as they say, is history.

The Jimmy Watson Trophy for 2002 was awarded to a wine entered by Hill of Gold Vineyard, a name associated with a brand of wine with specific regional and vineyard links to Mudgee in New South Wales. This seemed apparent to the Royal Agricultural Society of Victoria who made this connection, for they distributed a press release saying that a Mudgee wine had won the award. Consequently, the early publicity, which included several reports in the national press the following day, justifiably focused on the theme of a Mudgee wine winning the Watson for the very first time. Andrew Koerner, Hill of Gold’s winemaker, punched the air as he went up to collect the trophy.

And that’s where the wheels began to fall off this years’ Jimmy Watson presentation, highlighting yet again several of the inbuilt procedural weaknesses inherent in the Australian wine show system. For at times one could have sworn this year’s script had been written by the team responsible for Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Hill of Gold is the name given by Rosemount Estate to a substantial new vineyard development in Mudgee, and to its range of varietal Mudgee wines which will ultimately largely be derived from this vineyard. But before Andrew Koerner could complete his acceptance speech, he was tapped on the shoulder by Charles Whish and Matt Koch, winemakers at Rosemount’s McLaren Vale outpost, who had followed him onto the stage.

After what must have seemed an interminable discussion between the three winemakers, Charles Whish was then declared by Andrew Koerner, the original recipient, to have won the Jimmy Watson Trophy. One can only imagine what must have been going through the minds of the organisers by that time. It turned out that the winning wine is actually Rosemount Estate’s Traditional Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot blend, which has as much to do with Mudgee as the Jimmy Watson itself has with credibility.

So how did this very public debacle occur? Who is in the wrong? What needs to be done?

Despite some half-hearted attempts by the wine industry and various show committees to limit the number of wines entered by individual wineries to two entries per class, it simply isn’t occurring. All it takes to get around the rules is to own a different registered company name, transfer the ownership of the wine to that company, and it can then enter wines of its own accord.

Huon Hooke referred to this last year when discussing the ‘carpet-bombing’ approach of the sparkling wine classes undertaken by BRL Hardy to ensure they won the trophy for Best Sparkling Wine at virtually every major Australian show. They enter as many entries as they want, but under a series of different registered names. Even small vineyards were using this approach at this year’s Melbourne show, but it’s the large companies who have turned it into an art form.

Someone within Southcorp decided to use the Hill of Gold Vineyard as the registered name responsible for the Rosemount Estate wine from McLaren Vale. Oddly, the show catalogue lists its address as PO Box 21, Nuriootpa, South Australia, smack in the middle of the Barossa Valley, the address for most Southcorp entries. Dubious, perhaps, and confusing, certainly. While it certainly breaks the spirit of the feeble regulations designed to prevent its occurrence, it doesn’t break the letter of the law. So neither is Southcorp strictly wrong; nor is it alone in this regard.

Where Southcorp does have a case to answer is in the way it failed to cover its bases. It did not make adequate communications provisions for the organisers of the Melbourne wine show or the media at large to prevent the ensuing debacle from taking place. It will have won very few friends amongst those who were misled into publishing stories about the Jimmy Watson going to Mudgee, and some in the media have very long memories. And ever since the hullabaloo was discovered, its strategy has been to bury its head in the sand.

I, for one, am tickled that all this has taken place. It exposes the show system for being entirely unable to achieve its own objectives or to deliver a transparent outcome. It also throws a question at the various committees responsible for the wine shows themselves, since they are the ones who profit from the wildly excessive number of entries permitted at wine shows in this day and age. They receive the entry fees around $30-50 per wine, and they take ‘duty of care’, if that is indeed the expression, for the huge number of untasted samples submitted at great cost by the Australian wine industry.

Southcorp and the Royal Agricultural Society of Victoria played the game by their own rules, and the entire show system and all who participate in it have ended up with egg all over their faces. Perhaps this, finally, will provoke those responsible for the management of the various Australian wine shows to take the hard decisions necessary to restore credibility in the show system and in the results it generates.

Meantime, it will be very interesting indeed to watch the fate of the wine that actually won the Jimmy Watson Trophy. I doubt very much if any mention of Hill of Gold will appear on its eventual label, and I know of at least one person who will be very keen to follow up on this score. His name is Stephen Henschke.

For what it’s worth, here are some thoughts, some of which are not original, that would improve the Australian wine show system.

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