Is This Bottle Corked__ The Secret Life of Wine - Kathleen Burk [58]
For many of us, Mateus Rosé was last seen being wielded by the ghost of Manuel in a sort of revenant Fawlty Towers, where the Dining Experience was summed up, in one episode, by a man trying to change his dinner order only to be told by Sybil, “I’m afraid it’s a bit late; chef has opened the tin.” We moved on, and Mateus Rosé (one always mentioned the Rosé part, as if there were many other forms of Mateus to choose from) stayed behind.
For the economist, influential blogger, and self-confessed head of the shadowy international scandium oligopoly Tim Worstall, who lives in Lisbon, Mateus never went away:
It’s simply one brand of the rosé version of one of the great Portuguese traditions, vinho verde, meaning green wine, or young wine. White, red, rosé, dry, semi-dry (and very rarely, sweetish), great racks of the supermarket shelves are taken up with it … and, yes, the Portuguese really do buy it. It isn’t just some crud whipped up to sell to the ignorant Brits.
Not that we wish to accuse Worstall of being disingenuous or overloyal to his adopted country, but there is a little more to it than that. The truth is that Mateus Rosé is almost entirely the creation of a marketing genius, Fernando van Zeller Guedes, who founded the Sociedade Comercial dos Grandes Vinhos de Mesa de Portugal in 1942 (now in third-generation family ownership and known as SOGRAPE Vinhos SA). What Guedes was after was a wine with a clearly Portuguese identity but which would appeal to an international—and not necessarily wine-drinking—market. He was, in a sense, trying to scoop up the beer drinkers from one side and the soda drinkers from the other. And he succeeded. Mateus Rosé achieved an almost unheard-of brand recognition, and this before the days of sophisticated demographics, computerized market research, or any of the other tricks of twenty-first-century branding.
What he did have (apart from a fairly average vinho verde made from red Douro varietals such as Baga, Tinta Barroca and Rufete) was image. The bottle—lifted from the traditional Franconian Bocksbeutel—was simultaneously unlike any other mass-market wine bottle, but with the odd familiarity of the military water canteen. As for the label, it does indeed show the Casa de Mateus, but the stuff has never been made there. The current count’s grandmother made a shrewd deal with Guedes, allowing him to use the Casa on his label in return for a supply of grapes for fermentation and resale, an agreement that lasted until Portugal’s April Revolution of 1974.
But like all brands unless carefully nurtured, Mateus Rosé fell into the abyss of unfashionability. For anyone passing as a sophisticate in the 1980s, to order—or even acknowledge the existence of—Mateus meant instant loss of credibility. A publican in the family told us that he had visited the Mateus winery. “Not to buy,” he said hurriedly, “just to see. And what I saw … I made a solemn vow I would never speak of it.” Pure bravado, of course, but it showed how déclassé Mateus Rosé had become. The wine remained the same, but the image had failed.
And there was worse to come. On the Whisky Magazine Web site for December 26, 2006, one “daisy12chic” posted a message headed “Mateus Rose” (sic), whose text would have made Guedes’s hair stand on end. “We have a bottle,” the message read. “I am including the image. Not sure what it is—might be wine. Thanks!”
How are the mighty fallen. Yet the company is not giving up the struggle. The Mateus Rosé has been reformulated, the bottle redesigned, and other wines—an Aragonês, a Shiraz, a Tempranillo, and an unspecified Mateus White—have been added to the range.
Who knows