Surfer Dudes Make Wine

Filed in archive Canadian Wines on April 27, 2006

Surfing and wine....how exactly do these two things go together? Honestly, I can more easily envision surfers chugging back a brewskie, but a few transplanted Australians thought differently when they created their own wine company called Twin Fin.

From This wine's for you: Seeking to tap the laid-back imagery of California sunshine and bacchanalian beach parties, Constellation Brands, the world's largest wine purveyor, is hanging ten with Twin Fin, an innovatively packaged line of wines crafted by two transplanted Australians who look and play like they just stepped out of a Brian Wilson song.
Winemaker Hugh Reimers, 34, teamed up with surfing buddy and viticulturalist Sam Burton, 33, to come up with the concept.

"To me, California is all about the beach, the sand and the sun," says Reimers, a chiselled 6-foot-5 former professional Aussie-rules football player, who developed Twin Fin for Constellation's Pacific Wine Partners subsidiary. "I don't think that anybody had captured California on a wine label before."

No surprise, the label is the key to the venture: It features a retro-styled watercolour of a red 1968 Plymouth Valiant convertible parked on a beach, red-and-yellow "twin fin" surfboard leaning out of the back seat. The message: French chateaus and intimidating appellation gobbledygook be damned.

"Why make wine hard?" the tanned, dirty-blond Burton asks in a thick Aussie accent. "Wine should be easy." Hence the bottles' screw-cap seals, a concession to twentysomethings who would rather fumble with an iPod than a corkscrew.

The concept is clearly working. Launched in February, 2005, the brand's six wines, including (for now in Ontario) a pinot noir and cabernet sauvignon priced at $13.95 each, racked up sales of 2.1 million bottles in the United States in 2005, making it that country's No. 1 new brand of the year.