It all started about 27 years ago, when as a schoolboy, a mate and I used to walk home passing a local winery "St. Agnes Distillery", in those days we used to collect stickers so we called in and enquired about some stickers, they didn't have any but offered us some boring old wine labels which we took anyway.

When I got home I had a better look at these colourful labels and decided they weren't too bad after all, this started my craze in collecting wine labels.

I looked in the Yellow pages and rang every winery I could find in my local area asking for labels and was surprised what I got  in the post in the coming days, I suddenly had hundreds of wine labels, some quite attractive and others very old too !

Anyway to cut a long story short, I became an established wine label collector, writing to wineries all over Australia and Overseas, I also obtained a few beer labels along the way which I kept to one side.

One day whilst browsing the local newspaper, someone enquired about label collecting in the  "What's your problem" column, a phone number of a Secretary of a Label collecting society was supplied, which I duly rang, the chap on the other end told me all about their label club which had about 20 members who collected wine and beer labels, the members met bi-monthly for their meetings at a local Hotel, I could hardly believe it, more nuts like me who collected labels, at that time I thought I was the only one!

I was a member of the club "The Adelaide Labology Society" for about 8 years (now defunct),  whilst a member I got thousands of wine labels and hundreds of beer labels too, the trouble was I was getting too many labels and had to choose between wine or beer, as there are fewer breweries than wineries in the world I chose beer labels and haven't looked back since !

As the years went on, instead of collecting beer labels from all over the world, I decided to specialize in my favourite regions, these being Australia (of course), Asia, Pacific Islands, Middle East, and Egypt, which is what I collect today. 

I am currently a member of The Victorian Beer Label Collectors Society (Australia) # 388, the Australian Beer Can Collector Club #1935 and the OC/OC (one can/one country) club of the USA #234

I enjoy beer label collecting for many reasons, apart from the satisfaction of building up an attractive display of labels from far away exotic countries, I have made some great friends over the years (some of whom I recently met in Germany /England & China) and had some interesting experiences visiting breweries in Australia and all over the world.

Cheers,

Michael.

San Miguel Brewery, Hong Kong 1994