The film director Michael Winner, who probably never drinks a wine under £160 a bottle, has never heard of it; students, who rarely pay more than a few pounds for plonk, reckon it's a bit beyond their means - and passe, anyway. But for the rest of us, Jacob's Creek is the label we've partied through the 1990s with.
So claims a survey of changes in the ways people live, earn and spend, compiled by the UK Institute of Management. The survey's most interesting findings concern the way our tastes have changed. As relatively nouveaux wine-drinkers, we've put our collective faith in one brand per decade. In the 1970s it was Hirondelle, in the 1980s Piat d'Or; now the drink is Jacob's Creek.
Hirondelle is no longer produced. It has disappeared into the squiffy mists of time, along with flares and glam rock. It was an Italian white table wine masquerading under a French name. For supermarket customers - first time wine-drinkers whose dads still swore by the sweet draught beer Double Diamond - it was safe, but with a hint of sophistication. In 1979, it had the right economic bouquet, though a Good Food Guide survey that year rated it as no more than "acceptable".
Seduction, Continental-style, beckoned in the 1980s. The French, the ads purred, "adore Le Piat d'Or". We swilled velvety glasses of the stuff, never doubting that the brand was equally popular in France, and unaware of laughter from across the un-tunnelled Channel at the way we had swallowed a wine the frogs hardly bought.
Piat d'Or, both red and white, is still a big seller, in its opulent-looking, pot-shaped bottle with the oval gold label. However, its TV ads, where a posh, suspicious father is won over by his daughter's suitor when he turns up for dinner with a bottle of - surprise, surprise - Piat d'Or, now seem chokingly smug. Just the right bevvy for those entering the placid confines of middle-age, you might think.
No wonder we turned to uncomplicated New-World wines with relief in the 1990s. Many were from Australia. In shops and supermarkets, Jacob's Creek, with its brand name in clear, large letters, had the effect of anglicising and making friendly such confusing foreign terms as Chardonnay, ShirazCabernet, Riesling, Grenache-Shiraz.
Wine writers attribute the success of Jacob's Creek to its accessibility - you didn't have to be a buff to know where this tipple was coming from. They might perhaps add democracy, in that JC is free of all the old-world cant associated with European wine - and taste. When the first exports arrived in the 1980s, Jacob's Creek had a lower acidity than other New-World wines.
In the 1990s, it's been lightened a little, in line with perceived trends. Judith Candy, product development manager for wines in Tesco UK, says: "It used to be
a bit fuller, a more oaky blend; now it's more citrusy." It has also moved, she says, from the "experimental" fringe, bought by customers willing to try something new, to the mainstream. "It's now much more mass-market than you'd think."
Jacob's Creek became successful by an unclassical route. Kim Tidy of UK off-licence chain First Quench recalls that it reached the top position by word of mouth: "The timing of its arrival was spot-on in the mid-1980s, with Castlemaine XXXX, Fosters, Neighbours and Crocodile Dundee. It was fashionable, not naff, to be associated with Australian products."
Tidy thinks the brand might not now be so dominant as it once was; maybe that's why its first UK TV ad campaign has just been launched. But it doesn't detract from JC's success as wine of the decade, and if you suspected that success was based more on smart marketing than smart wine-growing, you wouldn't be wholly wrong.
There is indeed a Jacob's Creek in South Australia. It was there in 1847 that Johann Gramp, a settler from Bavaria, planted his first vine cuttings. Jacob's Creek is a stream in the Barossa Valley, an hour's drive from Adelaide; it was unknown to tourists until the popularity of the brand led to the first wine pilgrims visiting in the 1990s.
The marketing suits must be glad the names weren't the other way round. If it had been Johann Jacob's vineyard at Gramp Creek, they might have come up with "Don't get cramps, drink Gramps", instead of the current slogan, "Australia's top drop" which, on reflection, sounds hardly more inspired.
Jacob's Creek jumped from map to label only in 1976, when owner Orlando Wyndham (not a person; but the biggest wine and spirits group in Australia) decided to name a Shiraz Cabernet Malbec after the site of Johann's original vineyard. Orlando Wyndham and its UK importer, Caxton Tower, know much more about their customers than their customers know about them. They know that if you drink their drinks, you're probably either a "confident wanderer" in a supermarket, or a "reassurance buyer", who puts his or her faith in the brand.
What northern Europeans want most is consistency, says Christian Porta, managing director of Caxton Tower. "The quality is improving all the time. The customer will never be disappointed." The suits from Jacob's Creek are steering us away from both the old French snobbery of vintages and appellation controlee, and the new snobbery of American wines. And they're trying not to let their Chardonnays or Shirazes become fashion accessories for those living cool lives.
"We don't want to get into lifestyle, and say that if you're young and beautiful you should drink our brand," says Porta. Other drinks that have played the sophistication card have run into trouble.
So, in the new TV commercial, the images are of a wholesome Australia, where the popularity of the brand has metamorphosed from a drop into a ripple, into a wave. We are expected to keep lapping it up.