Case Studies
Issue No. 9 - February/March 2003
Angoves Wines
family vision
Angove’s Wines is an anachronism, a company that has survived since the dawn of time, in Australian winemaking terms. The Angove winemaking history goes back to 1886 when ship’s surgeon Dr W.T. Angove came out to Australia from Cornwall with his young family. He established a medical practice at Tea Tree Gully and commenced cultivating the vine and making wine.
Headquarters is still there, but the Tea Tree Gully vineyards have been swallowed by suburbia and the wine industry has moved through vine pull to billion dollar export eras. Through it all, Angove’s has avoided acquisition, bankruptcy and walked the tightrope as a solidly successful family business.
The resulting product mix includes state-of-the-art Australian table wines—Sarnia Farm (Padthaway), Angove’s Classic Reserve, Bear Crossing, Stonegate and Butterfly Ridge ranges—and some historical icons that have been on Angove’s books since the ‘Vineyard of Empire’ days.
Today Angove’s is ranked as the 10th largest winery in Australia and the 9th largest Australian wine exporter by volume.
Perseverance, persistence and conservatism—“only biting off what you can chew”—are the principles that guide the present (fourth generation) managing director, John Angove.
“We have to balance that conservatism with vision of the way forward,” John says. “Deliberation cannot be endless; on some issues it comes down to a sense of ‘we do need to bite this bullet’.”
Angove’s has bitten several in its long history. In the mid-1980s John took a momentous decision to terminate his distributors and bring in-house the enormous job of marketing and distributing Angove’s products. It took several years and substantial cost to bed the infrastructure down, “to get our reps and ourselves up to speed”, as John puts it.
Why take it on at all?
“We felt we were being sized by what our distributors wanted t...
