McIntyre, J. & Germov, J.
The Conversation, 14 February 2018.
Do you remember Lindeman’s Ben Ean Moselle? This slim-bottled, white table wine was quaffed in great quantities in the 1970s. It played a leading role in democratising wine drinking in Australia as tastes began to diversify from an almost exclusively beer-drinking nation.
As we discuss in the Journal of Australian Studies, Ben Ean’s fortunes were aligned with tremendous social flux between the 1960s and 1980s. According to industry luminary Philip Laffer, Ben Ean was invented by accident in 1956. It boomed in the 70s but began to decline in popularity in the mid-1980s as fine wine became more desirable. In 2009, the company that owned the Lindeman’s brand stopped making the wine.
