What You Need To Know about GLUG and
What Do We Know About Wine?

We would like to sell you wine. Selling over the internet creates immense savings. Shop rents, advertising, and the need for staff to be present over long hours creates a large, fixed overhead. It seemed to us that there was a better way to service wine consumers by bringing together the two ingredients of, savings for you and better wines. Thus GLUG was created. We have a direct selling license that allows us to buy from any producer and a producer’s license which allows us to make wine ourselves. We have commissioned winemakers to make wine on our behalf.

Selling wine directly is of course not new. To make GLUG appealing and have you return to the site, we believed we had to create a different 'virtual shop'. Hence the site covers a number of wine and non wine topics as well as showing you what we have for sale. The wines for sale will concentrate on small producers and only rarely will we stock known brand names. Where possible we will sell wine that is vineyard specific, is not blended and is made by a winemaker who we respect. It will be wine from this vineyard grown by this farmer and made by this winemaker in this winery. It is best that you buy popular brands from the large retail stores as that will be your cheapest source.

Who buys the wine?

Our chief wine buyer, David Farmer, now lives in the Barossa Valley. This provides our customers an advantage. To buy well today you have to be right where the vineyards and wineries are. Let us illustrate this with two examples. Vintage 2004 and 2005 in the Barossa Valley left many tonnes of cabernet sauvignon not harvested because there were no buyers at a price above the cost of picking. This creates opportunities if you are on the spot. And are you aware that there has been an explosion of small grower-winemakers who have broken free of the big company distribution system. Small parcels of the choice fruit from their vineyards they now keep for themselves. The French have a term for them, 'garagistes', literally those who make tiny amounts of wine in the garage. Not home bottlers but graduates of our wine universities. This is exciting wine and you need to know about it. It has astonished us how rapidly this movement is spreading. By living in the Barossa Valley we have easy access to not only the Barossa but to the Clare Valley, Eden Valley, McLaren Vale, Langhorne Creek, Adelaide Hills, Coonawarra and Padthaway and too many wine brokers who operate from Adelaide.

We also wanted to create a 'virtual shop' that was packed with informative comment. To do this a small group has come together who have a strong interest in wine but also an interest in other fields that cross over with wine, such as food. We also wander off into some other topics that we find interesting. Topics of which we feel we have special knowledge.

Two features that will make your buying smarter

We have also created two features to help you with your buying. GLUG will not be selling wine that you can find in your local wine shop though we will run a section giving our views of the 'best buys' that we see from scanning liquor advertisements from around the country. This section is called 'What the Market Says'. Why would we do this? The first rule of retailing is, never advertise a competitor. Well, we like to break rules and in any case we ask you to measure our wine selections against any other wines you might buy. We have been retailing long enough to know that we will never get all of a customers' purchases. Thus we might as well send you into the market place with the best information. We also have a section called 'What We Drank Last Night' that reviews wines we have enjoyed and some we haven't and highlights those you need to know about and set out the reasons why. Most of these will not be available from GLUG but we will tell you where to go to purchase them. Our reasons for doing this are the same as for our 'What the Market Says' section.

Here are some of the contributors and wine buyers for GLUG.

David Farmer. David leads the wine buying group. He commenced Farmer Bros with his brother Richard in June, 1975, in the Canberra suburb of Manuka. Recently David owned a Canberra shop on Melrose Drive, Phillip that was sold to the Liquorland division of Coles-Myer. He has an intimate knowledge of all the wine regions of Australia and there are few wineries that he has not visited and many he knows in great detail. David contributes articles on wine, reviews wine books, an opinion piece 'what we drank last night', comments on the wine industry, with occasional pieces on fishing and cooking. David moved to the Barossa Valley in March, 2004, to commence making wine contacts and buying wine for GLUG.

Ben Parker. Ben joined David Farmer in the Barossa Valley in March, 2004 to start GLUG. He joined Farmer Bros in 1987 in Melbourne as a trainee. Since then Ben has worked with a great number of liquor retailers and has developed just the right amount of attitude to pull wines apart and find the true kernel of what makes a great wine versus ordinary. He will work the next few vintages in the Barossa with a variety of wineries to lift the GLUG technical skills. With David he has an interest in the influence of the 'site' on wine tastes and is currently doing a post-graduate diploma in 'Geographic Information Systems and Science' to lift the standard of our map making.