Ep. 1033 Darren Oemcke | Uncorked

Welcome to the Italian wine podcast. This episode has been brought to you by the wine to wine business forum twenty twenty two. This year will mark the ninth edition of the forum to be held on November 2022 in Verona, Italy. This year will be an exclusively in person edition. The main theme of the event will be all round wine communication, and tickets are on sale now. The first early bird discount will be available until August 22. For more information, please visit us at winetowine.net. Hello, everybody. My name is Polly Hammond, and you are listening to Uncorked, the Italian wine podcast series about all things marketing and communication. Join me each week for candid conversations with experts from within and beyond the wine world as we explore what it takes to build a profitable business in today's constantly shifting environment. Today, I'm super excited to interview my friend and one of the smartest fellas working in wine, Darren O'emke. A straight shooting Australian, Darren has experience in all walks of the wine world, engineering, production, technology, marketing, mentoring, teaching. And in his spare time, he still manages to catch a few waves. In this episode, we'll settle in for a good old Antipodean chat about what we love in wine, what we'd love to see change, and even what we can learn from the surfing community. Let's get into it. Good morning, Darren. Good evening, Polly. How are you? I'm well. I'm so glad you just started with that. I think that this is one of these lovely wine moments. It is 09:38 in the morning on Friday for me, and that makes it what time? 05:08? In past five. Yep. In the afternoon for me. Okay. Let's start with the question the burning question. Why does it's Adelaide, Southern Australia. Is that right? Why do you have that weird half hour time zone thing? Are you guys the only place in the world that does that? Do you know when you send that to me this morning on Twitter, I realized that we do it. So it is it's really hard. I have to use apps to help me schedule meetings around the world because that that half hour, messes with your head. I think maybe. I hope not. It's just so diabolical. I look at that, and I'm like, I I have a hard enough time with time zones as it is. So that would just kill my productivity. Alright. Darren. There's an app. Yep. There's an app. There's an app for everything. I'm pleased to have you on today because we're we're very calm for two people who are not calm when we're having private conversations. You are one of the hardest working people I know in wine. You do so much. So, you have Hydra, which is consulting for the wine industry, but not just for the wine industry. We're gonna talk about that. Yeah. You have the foment accelerator and incubator program. You are a chair for Riverland Wines. What am I missing? I lecture wine retail at, the Adelaide Uni Graduate School of Business, so there's another one. Holy. Oh my god. Do you sleep? When do you read all those books behind you, Darren? Oh, I read them years ago. I haven't read a book since Twitter. And on top of all of that, you're a surfer. I am. You surf more than you read? Oh, yeah. No. I'm quite serious. I did read most of those books years ago. I sit down to read now, and I'd I'd get on Twitter and, alternate between rage and amusement, which is much more emotionally enthralling than most books. So I think I think that's Twitter's goal for us. So look at that. They've been very customer centric. They followed our journey, and they're meeting us where we are as the audience. So yay for marketing. So I I want us to talk about all of these fabulous things that you're doing in wine, but I actually wanna talk first about surfing. Oh, good. I'm I know. Friday it's Friday afternoon or It's Friday after coffee. You have champagne. We're gonna talk about surfing. Screw the podcast topics. No. So I was thinking about surfing. My brother-in-law is an avid surfer. I'm from Southern California. I grew up in, you know, beach towns. And when I was prepping for this podcast, I was thinking to myself, surfing, very you know, you've got everyone from your amateur surfers, the people who dream of being surfers, people who remember the days when they were surfers, all the way through to your elite athletes. You must obviously have a range of products to suit them. There must be some form of education involved in, well, how do you pick the right surfboard and where should you go and the stories of the best surfing in the world. And then I imagine climate change is probably screwing with surfing right now. Is that characterization correct? Don't get me started on, La Nina. The Please get started. The we're we're going into our third La Nina on the hop, which I don't know has ever happened before. And La Nina just messes with the winds, and it messes with the swells. And I'll take I know I shouldn't say this because in, Australia, El Nino's drought. But El Nino, the surf is cracking. So everything aligns for El Nino, and everything goes to heck when La Nina comes to town. And, of course, it rains in Sydney all the time. It's cold winters. We normally here for winter, I'd normally grab a a coat once or twice a year, a woolen jacket. This year, I've been wearing woolen jackets for the last month and a half. It's been it's been as cold here for us, unusually cold, as it has been unusually hot for you. Well, perhaps not quite so much. Yeah. I I I hear it, and then that'll swap because, of course, we were having terrible Southern Hemisphere summers. I go back to kind of this We we live on a on a cliff near a surf break, and we're dreadfully concerned about what, rising seas might mean for our views. We may we may move from being a whisker back from the beach to having an almost perfect view. Wow. It's like when they used to talk about how Nevada was going to become coastal land at the rate that we were going. That that was the joke when we were growing up. So I just I kinda wanna go back to the surfing thing for a minute. Yeah. Do you have this discussion in surfing? Well, even I imagine it's probably not even a discussion. Do you see from a business point of view when you look at surfing that there are people who are sitting around talking about, you know, oh, are you doing it because you enjoy it? Should we try to educate them around why this board is better than this other board or this waxes? And if they if they just know more, they're going to buy our products. Like, does that exist in the world of of surfing marketing? Yeah. Yeah. Surf surf marketing. Surfing is actually quite a serious business. If you're in the business side of it, which I've never I'm not in the business side, but it's a lot like wine, actually. So the business side of surfing has a mixture of these artisan producers right up to these huge multinationals. The mult everybody complains that the multinationals are spitting out these cheap crappy boards that are mass produced, that everybody that almost every surfer on the planet buys. And there's a small group of handcrafted surfboard makers, and the boards cost two, three, four times as much as these so called pop out boards. The whole structure, the whole mindset is so wine, it would do your head in. The the difference between surfing and wine is that surfing's actually a completely limited resource. There are only people say the opposite to this, but there are only a certain number of waves that ever strike a particular beach. So as the population of surfers goes up, the ability of individual surfers to catch waves declines. So if you imagine, I don't like the term wine snob, but I'm gonna bloody use it anyway. If you imagine the surfing equivalent of a wine snob, this is somebody that understands ways. They can see where they're breaking. They, you know, they've got a good rhythm. They're in place. They're fit. They can get more ways than anybody. And the people who aren't really good at it, they struggle and they scrat