Page 21 - Food & Drink Business Magazine March 2019

PACKAGING
CASK wine has long suffered a bad reputation in Australia, thanks to a perception of poor quality, bad hangovers, and the questionable Hills Hoist game Goon of Fortune. But now, one Aussie company is looking to start a more positive conversation about cask wine, and – more than that – about art.
Pord – the name applies to both the company and the product – has teamed with prominent Australian artists and a Victorian winery to bring to market limited-edition, eight-inch aluminium wine barrels that contain four bottles of wine.
The idea for Pord had been rattling around in co-founder Chloe Streich’s head for a good five years, harking back to a scenario that she saw repeating itself time and time again.
“My girlfriends would go into a boutique wine store looking for a nice bottle of wine and seek out an employee’s help. He or she would spend 10 minutes telling them about the wine, only for them to walk in the other direction and gravitate to the most beautiful bottle they could find,” Streich recalls. “They’re suckers for packaging, as am I. And I found it quite bizarre – that we fall in love with the packaging, have it for maybe three or four days, then throw it away despite the very reason we bought it in the first place!”
Streich knew there had to be a solution.
ART AND WINE
That solution, it turned out, involved another of Streich’s passions – art.
“As a European, I grew up going to art museums and galleries – it’s an integral part of the German culture,” she says. “When I moved to Melbourne, I found that they’re incredibly passionate about the footy... not about art. They’re hesitant to talk about art for fear they might get judged or that they don’t know enough; they see it as an elitist thing. We want to shatter this perception; we want them to talk about art.”
So, Pord partnered with a number of Australian artists as well as Victoria’s Mitchelton winery to create decorative wine barrels filled with quality wine, launching in July 2018. Currently, the Pords are available featuring one of three artworks: Sorbet by Evi O, The Last Resort II by Hannah Nowlan, and Ancient Lines by Filippa Edghill. As for the wine, Mitchelton has exclusively crafted three varietals for the Pord brand: a white (Pinot Grigio), a rosé, and a red (Shiraz).
Given cask wine’s less-than- flattering reputation, Streich was initially unsure about associating Pord with the infamous goon bag: “I pushed back on the idea that we were reinventing cask wine,” she says. “But yes, it’s probably true.”
Now that she’s embraced the
association, what does Pord mean for cask wine?
“I’d like to think it’s a huge game-changer,” Streich says. “It’s such a brilliant concept. Cask wine has always been bad in the past. We are working really hard on educating a nation.”
Producing Pord involves quite a lengthy timeline, says Streich. Once Pord commissions the artwork, it gets wrapped around the 100-per-cent aluminium barrels. The winery transports the wine to a third-party company that fills the easy-to- load, custom-designed bladders that fit inside the barrels.
“Then we wait a month,” she says, “for the wine to settle.”
MAIN IMAGE: The wine in the Pord barrels doesn’t oxidise as quickly as bottled wine. Instead of three or four days, the wine is still enjoyable from four to six weeks after opening it.
ABOVE: Currently available in three designs from Australian artists, Pords also offer a choice of three varieties of wine including a Pinot Grigio, a rosé and a Shiraz.
www.foodanddrinkbusiness.com.au | March 2019 | Food&Drink business | 21