Of all the souvenirs of Soviet ineptitude, few are more enduring than the Trabant. While Germans on the western side of the Berlin Wall were cruising around in everything from Volkswagens to Porsches, their counterparts in the east were putting their names on waiting lists for an uncomfortable, smoky, slow Trabi, the last of which was produced in 1991.
The Trabant is just one of a long list of dead brands that were once an important part of the landscape. Wine has its own brand cemetery too, in which you’ll find wines like Hirondelle or Don Cortez wine.
Alongside the dead brands, there are brands that enjoy a kind of half-life on their way to the grave. A perfect example of a zombie brand is Liebfraumilch which – in the 1970 and 1980s, before the arrival on the scene of Australian Chardonnay and New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc – was one of the most popular beverages in the UK. Named after the Liebfrauenstift (Church of Our Lady) close to the city of Worms on the Rhine, its origins stretch back to 1910 when the Worms Chamber of Commerce ruled that the name of Liebfraumilch could be used by wine ‘of good quality’ from the Rheinhessen region.
In the years after WW2, as its popularity grew, Liebfraumilch degenerated into a light, undistinguished, semi-sweet wine with up to 18g per Litre of sugar, and made largely from Müller-Thurgau. The sugar, light ’Lieb’ was a mainstay of the British food and drink scene, such that by the end of the 1980s, more than 100m Litres of Liebfraumilch were produced. Today, it’s just 15 m L. Today in the UK, Liebfraumilch is generally seen as the preserve of the poor and the old. Supermarkets stock it in the same way and for the same reasons that they stock ‘British’ sherry-style fortified wine, and cheap, high strength beer.
Across the Channel in Germany, however, as a packed audience on the Meininger Verlag stand at ProWein learned, some industry members believe that it is time for a Liebfraumilch revival. At a session moderated by Weinwirtschaft editor-in.chief Dr Hermann Pilz, a gloriously bearded hipster called by Christoph Hammel, the eighth generation winemaker at his family estate, poured samples of his ’new’ Liebfraumilch. Tasted alongside a set of UK supermarket examples, it was deliciously fresh and decidedly commercial. Hammel is not alone; not only have a few other small producers followed his example, but Volker Wissing, the Rheinland-Pfalz Minister of Commerce and Wine Affairs has set up a working group to evaluate the possibility of re-launching the category. The big bottlers are said to be interested. Inevitably, there is talk of introducing new quality standards and amassing a marketing budget.
Instead, the would-be Liebfraumilch revivers should spend some time Googling Liebfraumilch. The following are pretty typical of what I found:
NIERSTEIN, GERMANY — A century ago, the vineyards that rise precipitously from the banks of the Rhine here produced some of the most prized wines in the world.
Then came a trio of disasters: World War I, World War II and Liebfraumilch.
New York Times 2012
Many wine-lovers of my generation started their drinking careers with Liebfraumilch (although few now admit it). But as our tastes outgrew such vinous bubble gum (along with flares and cheesecloth shirts), we looked elsewhere and never returned, believing that all German wine would taste the same.
Jonathan Ray, Daily Telegraph 2005
The trouble with online comments like these – especially when they are from newspapers such as the New York Times – is that they are like big, dark old stains that stubbornly resist removal. And like some of those stains, they are just as hard to hide. From Bangkok to Boston, anyone looking for online information about Liebfraumilch will find plenty of negative commentary stretching back over 20 years.
Trying to counter a negative reputation by bringing in tougher laws and saying “we’re better than we used to be” is a very tough challenge, especially in a world full of products that aren’t weighed down by such baggage. Minister and ‘new’ Liebfraumilch enthusiasts need to learn the basic rules of marketing. When valuing a product and deciding on whether to invest in it, serious marketers carefully assess its ‘brand equity’. Some semi-dormant brands, like Babycham, the ‘pear cider’ recently successfully revived by Accolade, have lots of nostalgic value and little that is negative. Liebfraumilch has over 20 years of negative comment, which puts it a little lower on the brand equity scale than the Trabant.
Far from being revived, for the sake of the rest of the German wine industry, Liebfraumilch should be buried as soon as possible, and a new brand devised for wines like Christoph Hammel’s. But, if he’s really set on using the name, might I suggest that he consider ‘Not Liebfraumilch’?
Robert Joseph
