The Ace of Spades….

Motorhead is such an iconic rock band, their sound is unmistakable and what you see is definitely what you get. I last saw Motorhead when they toured Australia with Motley Crue, back in maybe 2005/2006. They were then and are to this day the loudest band I have ever heard. Straight up rock n roll, Lemmy is GOD!

Late last year Motorhead Shiraz was launched across Sweden and the rest of Scandanavia and has been very succesful to date. As of this past Friday, there has been a major development for that wine, that I’m very excited to say I have a part in. I can’t give to much away right now, but watch this space for future announcements.

http://boozinfoodie.com/2011/05/26/motorhead-wine/

The Wine Importer

So far in my blogging journey while I’ve touched on the wine side of Distorted Beverages it has really only been in passing. I love wine. It was the first real alcoholic beverage, or any beverage for that matter that I wanted to learn about and better understand. I’ve spent years, literally, tasting, reading, talking about and most importantly listening to the thoughts of others about wine. It is a complex and intricate subject.

Lately, however I’ve had a problem. I have found that my interest and excitement for wine has been replaced by craft beer. Now, this in itself is not the problem. The problem is that for quite some time, at least the past couple of years wine to me has been boring. Worse than that though I’ve become truly tired of pretentious wine drinkers and commentators. I don’t care how many bottles are in your cellar, how much you paid for that bottle of Grange or what wine scored the highest points in some critics new edition of their book. It doesn’t matter. Wine is the pure expression of the conditions in which it was grown, a great wine makers job is simply to harness that and do their best to stay out-of-the-way. Sadly many wine makers and so-called experts have become blind to this.

It was refreshing then and to be honest a relief that I came across this great blog by Joe Dressner, The Wine Importer. Joe has a very honest and down to earth opinion on wine and the way in which the wine industry has gone. In this particular blog post there is one paragraph that I would like to highlight that I was so happy to read.

Because the wine is not about me and not about my palate. Wine is not a vehicle for egomania, boastfulness and self-promotion. All the great “tasters” I have known are able to submerge their ego and understand what is in the bottle. Where it came from and where it is going. And they’ve done that without charts, tasting wheels or tortured prose likening wine to 57 different fruits (the Heinz Variety Tasting method).

Trust me when I say that this entire article is definitely worth reading. I interpret its point as simply being, “Ignore the clutter and noise, forget about trying to impress and enjoy the wine in front of you for what it is.”

Amen Joe.

Don’t mention Slayer on the first date

Getting a product to market is quite a difficult process really, everybody thinks that once you have made your new product that creating interest and then getting it to those people is easy. Throughout the creation process we have gone through with our Slayer wine, foremost in my mind was not branding or actually having the wine made, that to me was the easy part relatively speaking. The biggest challenge is in actually getting a wine made in Australia to Europe and the USA and then making that wine available so people will hopefully buy it. America is a great place, home to some of my favourite bands but they do make it rather difficult to distribute alcoholic beverages. Wine cannot be sold directly to consumers, there is the three tier system that is in place to allow for control of alcoholic beverage sales. Our business model is based on selling direct to the consumer, which in Australia is a straight forward process but requires a bit of outside the box thinking in the USA. Enter wine fulfilment companies. They allow wine producers and retailers to get their products to end consumers through mail order or online sales.

Just like on a first date where you don’t want your date to think your the guy in this video, I’ve discovered that mentiong the band on first contact produces some interesting results. Over the past few weeks I have been sending emails to several companies that seem to offer the services we require and I have had mixed results. I’ve been listening to metal for so long, going to shows and now that I’ve met a number of my metal heroes it is just “normal” to me. I sometimes forget that there is a good possibility that not everyone else thinks the same way and that some people may have a rather negative view toward this band and indeed heavy metal and rock music and its so called evil lyrics and imagery. I’m still surprised when people I know have never heard of Slayer, that it is so far outside their own experiences that they truly have no comprehension of what they are or represent. It should be no real suprise to me then that some companies will look at our project as crazy and want nothing to do with it, but I think the smart ones, the right ones will recognise the opportunity as we do. It is just another aspect of this whole journey that makes it fascinating and exciting.

Stay tuned over the next few weeks because hopefully I will have an new company logo to show everyone or at least a good prototype. i’ll be posting it and I encourage everyone to give their feedback and opinions. Till then, stay metal and horns up!

Luke

Chief Distortion Officer

Some history is required Part 2

Slayer and Megadeth were touring together in October of 2009, it was the must see show for any self-respecting metalhead. However, the day of the show I hear that Tom Araya has voice problems and that Slayer won’t be playing, this is confirmed at the venue, so we get a local metal band and an extended Megadeth set, which I still really enjoyed. The next day at work this guy comes into our tasting room, turns out it’s Slayer’s manager, Rick Sales. We get talking I show him around, talk about the show and the bands he manages, he has a good time and leaves. A few weeks later I get a package from him with some CD’s and t-shirts and I think what a great guy! Fast forward almost a year and Rick comes back to Adelaide with Bullet For My Valentine, we catch up again at their show, hang out, have some drinks and are fast becoming friends. Closer to Christmas of 2010 Rick calls me and he has this idea of making a Slayer wine, he wants to know if it can be done and would I help him out in putting it together. Of course I say yes, we talk for a while and I suggest that we can do a lot more than just a one-off vanity product for one of the greatest metal bands in history.

This, right here, is the start.

From there as time goes on over a few months and we talk more exchange emails and information we start to form this concept of what I call Distorted Beverages. But, there is another side of this story. Whilst all the preceding events are going on over an 18 month period, I’m fast becoming very into home brewing and craft beer. I’ve won a few awards at local, state and even a national second place for the beer I’ve made and I’m dreaming of a way to tie together my experience in the wine industry and new passion for good, craft beer and my love of all things heavy metal.

Where this all ties together is Soundwaves festival in March 2011. Rick arrange passes for my friends Christian and I and we take down some good wine and a also a few bottles of my home-brew, which I had made specially for BFMV and Slayer. The lads from Bullet really like the beer and are dead excited about the possibility of having their own brand of beer, I also meet Rob Zombie and all his band, a great guy, very approachable. His manager Andy Gould is a close friend of Rick’s and he introduces me to Rob and we talk about the Slayer wine concept and expresses interest as well, I suggest beer too, and he says “Yeah, definitely. That would work!” It is really at this point that I start to realise that my dream has a very real chance of actually coming together.

This brings us to the present day….. almost. There is the Disturbed angle which I’ll go over next time, oh and I met Metallica.

Some history is required

To get a good handle on what this blog is about it is important that I provide some backgorund to my new venture. I’ve been involved in the wine industry since 1996 in both Tasmania and South Australia and for the last 6 years in the Barossa Valley. Over the past 3-4 years I have also been an active homebrewer and craft beer lover. I have reviewed over 340 beers at ratebeer.com and enjoyed countless great wines from around Australia and the world. When I was a teenager, around 14-15 I discovered Guns N Roses, this changed my life forever. Suddenly music evoked a lot of emotion in me and I found that I could turn to music to find solace in my teenage angst.

From then on it was a constant rollercoaster of musical discovery, I found bands like REM and Aerosmith then the heavier bands like Metallica and Pantera.It was also at this time that Grunge really took off and I fell in love with Alice In Chains and Soundgarden. Grunge was my new musical taste and I couldn’t get enough of it. However, my heavier side never went away and I was discovering Slayer, Machine Head and others at the same time. Fast forward about 10 years from then andn I was attending every metals show that was touring Adelaide; from Mastodon and Slayer to Machine Head, Trivium, Slipknot and Arch Enemy. One day whilst working at Rockford Wines in the Barossa Valley I met a guy who changed everything.

To be continued…..