Treasury sells Rosemount back to the Oatleys
Nicky Oatley and Sandy Oatley on the announcement that Treasury Wine Estates has sold Rosemount back to the Oatley family.
In 2001 Rosemount left home with its pockets full of money; it’s just returned home, effectively skint.
Treasury Wine Estates today announced that it has sold the Rosemount brand back to the Oatley family, 25 years after Bob Oatley’s company merged with Southcorp in a deal that was – back then – valued at about $1.5 billion. Heaven knows what Oatley has paid to buy it back but fair to say – to paraphrase the late Kerry Packer – that you only get one Southcorp/Treasury in your lifetime, and the Oatley family have certainly had theirs.
The Oatleys have sold super high, and bought-back monumentally low.
The buyer, officially, is A.G. Oatley Wines, run by Bob Oatley’s son Sandy and granddaughter Nicky. The sale also includes the Ingoldby (McLaren Vale) and Secret Stone (New Zealand) brands, along with associated inventory. No price has been disclosed. The deal is expected to complete on Friday 23 October.
Bob Oatley founded Rosemount in the Upper Hunter in 1969. Through the 1980s and 1990s it became one of the great engines of Australian wine’s export boom, taking chardonnay and shiraz to the world. The 2001 merger with Southcorp was, on paper, a triumph. In practice, Rosemount’s influence within the merged business proved controversial, in what was widely termed “the reverse takeover”.
The Rosemount brand steadily, under Southcorp’s ownership, withered, and lost its identity. It passed to Foster’s when Foster’s took over Southcorp in 2005, and then to Treasury Wine Estates when Foster’s demerged its wine business in 2011.
“I worked with my father building Rosemount into a globally recognised Australian brand for over 20 years,” Sandy Oatley said. “To have the opportunity to now work on the brand with my daughter Nicky is an extraordinary full circle moment.”
Is it ever.
Nicky Oatley said the family wasn’t yet ready to say what a reimagined Rosemount would look like. For the moment, she said, the family was just happy to have it back.
For TWE, the sale is part of a broader clean-out. The company is reducing 76 brands to a priority portfolio of 30, focused on its “Power brands” (Penfolds, DAOU, Matua) and “Regional Heroes” such as Wynns, Pepperjack and Coldstream Hills. It recently sold Seppelt, Rouge Homme and Tollana. TWE will keep royalty-free rights to sell Rosemount in Europe for up to three years.
There is no mention of Devil’s Lair in any of the above.
As an aside – Southcorp’s purchase of Rosemount, all thoise years back, was for a long time seen as a “once only” or “never to be seen again” moment in the Australian wine industry. Then, at the end of 2023, Treasury Wine Estate bought Daou in the US for AU$1.6 Billion, in a move that was Rosemount-esque in both its dare and, quite possibly, eventual outcome.
Now Treasury has evoked those glorious Rosemount-buyout mnemories all over again, by selling it back to the Oatleys.
Rosemount has been a ghost of itself for a long time. The world now is not the world then. Whether the family that built it can bring it back to life will become one of the more interesting narratives in Australian wine.
