Australia’s Gowrie Mountain Estate is preparing to release wine in cans to the US, UK and Japan. While there are many practical benefits to the idea – no spoilage, no need for bottle-openers, no need to finish a bottle – its success depends on good weather, and consumers being prepared accept the iconoclastic notion of wine in ring-pull cans.
The idea sprang from the observation that, in Japan, one can buy almost anything in a can – except wine.
While many observers would conclude that this was a natural and unsurprising state of affairs and decide to leave well alone, the entrepreneurs behind Gowrie Mountain Estate wines see a yawning gap in the market and have moved to fill it. As innovations go, this one seems particularly outlandish – established convention states that wine comes in bottles (half-bottles at a push) and lager (as favoured by ‘salt of the earth’ Australians) comes in cans.
The issue is convenience and the sad fact is that wine bottles are not terribly convenient. In the home, there are no problems but outside the home – on a picnic, at an outdoor concert or even a football game – bottles are considerably less practical. Bottles may break in transit, there may be more wine than people wish to drink, and they cannot be bought on impulse as a bottle opener is required. Cans suffer from none of these problems.
In Australia, where ‘bring your own’ restaurants are common, and the weather is sunnier for longer, latent demand for ‘on-the-move’ wine is likely to be quite high. In the UK, where summers are shorter, cooler and more unpredictable while ‘bring your own’ is a much rarer phenomenon, the chances of success are significantly reduced. But the major barrier is simply an instinctive negative reaction to the concept of wine in cans. As with cardboard cartons and plastic bottles, the perception, based solely on the packaging, may be that the wine is bound to be of poor quality.
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By GlobalDataRelated Research: Datamonitor, ” People On-the-Move ” (DMCM0083)
