Cleanskins - What are they?

Cleanskins - What are they?

Cleanskins usually are the excess from wineries.

Let me explain - Sometimes wineries may have a particular product called jacks blend and it is sitting in giant vats and as the sales filter through they bottle another batch and so on until they reach the end of the wine.

On some occasions because of either lack of sales or it may have been an exporter who cancelled their order due to lack of sales, the winery is stuck with say 1000 litres of wine. The decision then is, do they print more labels and bottle or do they just bottle in a cheap bottle and not label and therefore sell it as a cleanskins because it is cheaper to offload. Eg no label, no expensive bottle, no marketing team.

The other reason cleanskins are born is lets say for example that a company like Penfolds has a wine like Koonunga Hill Red and the sales have been a bit slow lately and it still has 3000 litres left and the new vintage is coming online and they need to make space. They could label it and bottle it under the Koonunga Hill label and then drop the price from $12 to $8 for a couple of months to clear the excess.

However the problem then is that You the consumer has seen the wine at $8 advertised for a couple of months and now that they have off loaded the excess they want to sell the new vintage at $12 again. Guess what happens, you the consumer say NO, the product was $8 I am not paying $12 so you don’t buy it anymore because you believe you are being ripped off. So the brand has been bastardised so to speak.

So from a winery point of view they can offload some excess wine at a reduced rate and not affect the band integrity. This is why wineries offload the wine as a cleanskin it does not damage the marketing that they put into place and the price the consumer is willing to pay has not changed.

The other reason cleanskins are born is basically because now they have grown so quickly that there is actually a market for the product. So some wineries are actively sourcing wine at cheap prices and selling them as cleanskins, they actually have a wine division that purely sells cleanskins because the market has grown so much in the last couple of years they are a part of the wine consumers buying habit.

I hope this clarifies the subject as we have a lot of consumers who do not know what cleanskins are.

Regards Jack Simic