Viña Anakena was bought by Accolade Wines in September and the company claims to be the first company to have a footprint in all major New World wine regions.
To support the launch of Anakena, Accolade Wines says it will invest £500,000 in the brand over the next 12 months. This includes a new partnership with the Lawn Tennis Association, which will see Anakena become the Official Wine of British Tennis and the Lawn Tennis Association. Accolade Wines has signed a three year deal to ensure a long term platform from which to build awareness and loyalty for the brand.
Accolade Wines CEO Paul Schaafsma said: “Viña Anakena is a high quality Chilean wine brand with an established international reputation as a producer of world-class, distinctly Chilean wines. We firmly believe that, under our ownership we can now take the brand to the next level in terms of its global presence and distribution.
“Our research shows that there is a gap in the market for a new authentic Chilean brand and that opportunities are out there for us to build distribution and consumer demand for Anakena,” said Schaafsma.
Accolade UK & Ireland marketing director, Amy White said: “The Chilean wine category is a highly competitive one with popular brands already established. In developing the right proposition for Anakena in the UK, we spent a lot of time engaging consumers to best understand what they are looking for in this sector of the market. It became acutely apparent, through research, that brands with heritage, provenance and a true story to tell were the factors considered most important.
"Anakena is a brand built on stories and provenance as throughout the range it plays homage to Chile’s indigenous people and it’s country’s pre-Colombian cultures and with the results we’ve seen in consumer research, we have no doubt whatsoever that as soon as these new wines hit the shelves, the UK consumers will engage positively,” she said.
“In consumer research Anakena scored higher than any of the key competitor brands in the category. The brand came out as the number one choice for consumers on a range of benchmark criteria such as, shelf stand out, quality of packaging, price: quality ratio, purchase intent, propensity to switch and ‘a brand for me’. The results were overwhelmingly positive for Anakena and alongside the marketing programme we have in place for the brand, we’re feeling very excited about the future potential of this brand,” said White.
