The Prospect Wines Range

The "cleanskin" wine market has come a long way since we revolutionized wine retailing. A "cleanskin" is simply a bottle of wine without a label. Retailers have been selling cleanskins for years; every local bottle shop would have a red & white cleanskin. And it was always a bit of a gamble; sometimes you got a good wine while sometimes you got garbage.

We've changed all that!

Our wines in fact are not cleanskins. We source wines from around Australia and buy them unlabelled, however all our wines are sold under the Prospect Wines label. We tell you the vintage, grape variety and region along with all the legal requirements. We are proud of the quality of our wines and are happy to offer a money back guarantee. When you buy from Prospect Wines you get value, quality and reliability.

Some wine critics don't like us. They earn money by selling their articles to newspapers or magazines, or by selling their own publications. Some of them earn a lot of income from the same wineries they are reviewing by charging to have a photo of the label in their publication. How often do you read an article by a wine critic which actually gives a bad review of a wine? Not often! Sure we like publicity but we don't belong to the system; we don't play their game. We don't send out lots of free sample bottles looking for a good review. The public are our reviewers. They are able to taste our wines in a friendly relaxed environment in our shops and we welcome all feedback.

We think that critics of new retailing methods like ours don't understand the industry. Figures provided to us by the major wineries show that the largest 20 wineries in Australia control about 92% of the bottled wine market. That leaves about 1700 wineries all scrambling for 8% of the market, and you don't have to be a rocket scientist to work out that there is just not enough of the market left for everyone to be profitable. Now some of those wineries make stunning wines; they just don't have the sales & marketing expertise to knock off other wineries who have secured a spot on the retailers shelves. As the supermarket chains gobble up the opposition they are putting more financial demands on their winery suppliers to drop margins and subsidize the retailers advertising. Woolworths latest attempt to take control of the Queensland based hotels of ALH by spending $1 billion is another example of their planned dominance of the retail liquor market. It has been reported in the press that Fosters (owners of Mildara-Blass) is concerned at the possible impact that will have on Fosters pricing by giving Woolworths more bargaining power. If it's going to be tough for Fosters, just imagine what it's like for a small winery.

A lot of Australian wineries have been successful in the export market. But that also requires a major commitment in time, effort and money and normally involves hiring an experienced consultant and a broker/wholesaler in the importing country. It involves packing the wine and leaving it unlabeled in the winery waiting to get the order and then specially labelling it for that particular export market. So what happens if the export sales don't happen? The wineries have a cellar full of wine and need to move it.

We come to the rescue.

When we talk to winemakers out in the field we quite often are told that they are winemakers who always dreamed of owning their own business and making their own wine. They are passionate about it. They just didn't realize how hard it is to sell wine out there. It's a real jungle. The cellar door sells 4000 cases a year, but they produce 12,000 cases. They approach brokers/agents who all ask for 30%, with the main problem there are not many good agents and they already have a full list of wines on their books, and why would they take on an unknown wine regardless of how good it is. Good agents will only take on one winery from each wine region. The next vintage is coming on; the wine in the tanks needs to be bottled to make way for the new crops; and they still have 8000 cases from the previous year.

We come to the rescue.

There are lots of other reasons why wineries have top quality wine available for us to buy unlabelled.

• Wineries have financial problems and we buy the wine from the liquidator
• Experimental wines in small batches not worth labelling
• Left-overs from a large bottling run and no more labels
• Wineries not happy with their brokers/agents poor sales
• Cash flow problems
• Poor budgeting and planning by the winery simply leads to making more than they can sell.

Whatever the reason we come to the rescue.

You can understand that if a winery is selling the same wine to us unlabelled at half the price of the same wine with a label on it, they will not want their name to be mentioned for fear of upsetting their mail order/cellar door clients, or their other wholesale customers. They can afford to sell the wine to us cheaply unlabeled . They can't afford to discount their label as it will destroy their image and reputation.

Some of the small wineries we deal with have told us that we are the best thing to happen to them. They've been selling juice or wine in bulk to the major players and every year they complain of getting screwed. While they still need to deal with the big companies, they are able to keep aside a portion which they can bottle exclusively for us. While the profits on the wine they sell us are still low, it's much better than selling it all to the Penfolds/Orlando/Hardy's etc. We are now providing them with an alternative they never had before. We are now sitting down with these winemakers and making a commitment to next years vintage. It's a real win/win situation. We get great wine at a great price; they get a guaranteed sale they can forecast around plus better profits.

The customer wins by getting great value wine.

In our business one of the vital ingredients to making it a success and offering such bargains to the wine drinkers of Australia, is to keep our overheads and expenses down. We don't employ a team of sales representatives, we don't need the services of a marketing department, we don't have a complex system of wine brokers and distributors all taking a commission or handling fee. The wine goes straight from the winery to Prospect Wines. Our retail shops all run on very low overheads, having a much smaller retail space than a normal liquor store.

The one area we do spend money on is opening lots of bottles for tasting. Every day in our shops is tasting day, not just on Friday nights or some other designated time that doesn't suit customers. Shopping at Prospect Wines is fun relaxed way to buy wine. Research shows that in a standard liquor store customers are bamboozled and in awe at the mass of labels on the racks fighting for their attention, but they get little or no advice from the staff so they make a selection based on guess work and get out of the shop as quick as possible. At Prospect Wines we encourage customers to have a sample of our wines and chat to us about our range. It's just like going to a winery cellar door, only it's closer to home and we have a bigger & cheaper variety.

At Prospect Wines we know that we do not appeal to all wine drinkers. There are a lot of label drinkers out there. We just offer an alternative. Value quality and reliability.

Of course with our success comes the copy-cat retailers who are opening up cleanskin shops around Melbourne. They've seen how well we do it and decide that it's easy to do on your own. After opening they find out the hard way it's not that easy. With Prospect Wines we offer a full franchise with all the back up support you expect from any successful franchise. We do all the buying in bulk into a central warehouse which allows the shops to get regular deliveries as required. We provide advertising, signage, web page, newsletters, shop design, computer systems, loyalty programmes, uniforms, labels and lots more. The Franchises are proving to be very successful.

Several of the copycats have already closed and we expect that trend to continue. Prospect Wines will continue to expand into more sites in Melbourne, regional Victoria and interstate.