Been reading A Concise History of Australian Wine by John Beetson. A much more enjoyable way of tracking Australian history than sheep population numbers and self-serving revisionism. Although I know progress is never an unbroken march, this stunned me (slightly edited):
The wraps were off it was now time to reveal the product to the Sydney "cognescenti". They were horrified. Reactions in Adelaide we're no better. Comments varied from 'crushed ants' to 'aphrodisiac'.
Schubert was mortified and received the final blow when the board asked him to cease production just before the 1957 vintage. For three years it officially did not exist. It was a 'non-wine', condemned because it was unsaleable and also because this lack of acceptance and the criticism thus generated was deemed harmful to the company's reputation as a whole. The tide of public disfavour began to ebb and 'the prejudices were overcome'.
The wine? None other than the Kooba Estate Fruity Lexia .
Nah, not really. It's this tidy drop