The Hard Sell: Jacob's Creek

The Hard Sell Jacob's Creek
I'm getting antifreeze with a hint of ethanol. Illustration:

What does your poison say about you? Advertising will tell you. Guinness and you're incredibly patient; Orangina and you're a horny pole-dancing fawn; WKD and you're a practical joke-fixated goon who will die a virgin. But wine is much more aspirational. Jacob's Creek's reaction to this truth has been to launch its "True Character" campaign, in which it seeks to single out its wine as uniquely "unpretentious". We see cackling lifestyle supplement-reading Aussies filming themselves drinking plonk at a lunchtime roast hosted by Dan, a know-it-all, wise-cracking smartarse who declares himself "the world's most important wine critic". The advert concludes with "True Character" and a bottle of Jacob's Creek appearing on the screen over a smiling Dan (he's thinking about one of his jokes that just went down well).

There's an ethanol whiff of smug off this advert so powerful you could perform minor surgery on anyone in its path and not hear a peep. Pretension isn't killed by this campaign – it's canonised. It's an open secret that every bottle of wine costing over £3.50 tastes exactly the same to 99% of people, yet we continue to conspire in the myth that wine and our copy-and-pasted-from-the-newspapers opinions about it matter. They matter less than Rob "Turnabout" Curling. Slappable Dan could be the most unpretentious man in history and it wouldn't matter. Jabber on about branding and aspiration all you like, we will keep returning to one immutable fact: all alcohol tastes rubbish, and nobody in their right mind would drink it if it didn't get them pissed.