Ep. 1073 Robert Joseph In Georgia | 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 second early bird discount will be available until September 18. 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. In this episode, we welcome my favorite partner in crime, Robert Joseph, live from the streets of Tbilisi. Robert brings us the very latest from the American Association of Wine Economist Conference, as well as his thoughts on the Georgian wine market. Today, we're talking history, potential differentiation, blind spots. If you were a fan of the Real Business of Wine series, this conversation is right up your alley. Let's get into it. Oh, I'm so excited. I'm so excited to talk to you. I know that we have a ton of stuff to chat about, but but first, first, first, you are in Georgia. And, and and the thing that I love about this, this, so much comes back to these moments. You and I were supposed to be in Georgia right after the pandemic started. When we were running real business wine, we were supposed to be in Georgia. Precisely. And it had been a year or two bef I think I was here in '18, I think. Maybe '19, actually. Certainly not in '20. And I didn't then really get into the heart of Tbilisi as much as I have this time. And I think that a lot has happened in the wine industry here even in the period since then. This is one of the most extraordinarily dynamic wine places I have seen on God's Earth. Oh my god, I wanna hear all about it. But first, we are there for a couple different reasons, both of which I'm so curious about. So the first of this is the, the wine the American Association of Wine Economists who very kindly invited me to come and give a kind of keynote to their, their conference and they have a conference in a different place every time and next time it's going to be in Stellenbosch, for example. And they were due to come to Georgia some time ago and it didn't happen so this was they were very excited to be here. They had a lot of people drop out which I think is one of the reasons I got my late invitation to give the keynote. And a lot of people were scared of going to to to Georgia looking at it on a map. And so that was on the side and the other side was I have a project that you and I have talked about over the years, to make, a wine here in Georgia or, in fact, to make two or three things here in Georgia. And the timing was just perfect to come over here and spend a couple of days blending, with the brilliant winemaker that I'm working with after finishing the conference. Okay. So let's let's do them in order of, of sequence. So first you were there for the Wine Economist Conference. You gave us be keynote. I saw that you were, like, throwing mathematic formulas out into the social media wild. Obviously, all of us, we've not been there. Kick it down for us. Be our man on the street. What what was significant? Well, I think one of the rules is, you know, don't diss your hosts, which, of course, was effectively what I was doing. I was very cognizant of the fact that I was one of the only people in the room, not only without an economics degree, but without any kind of degree at all. I'm still on my gap year as you know. And so, I was just but I've done a lot of reading of wine, economist papers, and I've been at a a the wine business research conference in Dijon a few weeks earlier and I have to admit that I was, frustrated by this huge gap between, all these clever economists and the wine business. Right. And there there is I drew I I showed them a Venn diagram, in which basically there was wine around the outside and there were these two circles, one of which was the wine business and the other which was the economists and a very small overlap. Now to be fair, in Australia and Adelaide and in Sonoma and The States, there are definitely places where that overlap is is much bigger. But in certainly in France, in just in most places, there isn't. And if you the interesting thing as a journalist, when you read the papers, the only thing that the the the the academics tend to do is quote other academics. And so, you know, these papers are littered with references to x y and z and et al said in 2007 and so on and so. And there are very few references to what I call the real world, in terms of real real data of what's actually happening. An awful lot of this is theoretical. And I have to say at the Dijon conference there was I was next to somebody from Gallo, who after a one particular presentation we both went out and got coffee and he said what they've described which included a lot of research does not resemble the real world as I know it in terms of sales and behavior. So the first thing I was saying is look you guys please start talking to the wine, world, the wine business world a) because they've got some money which they might help give you, and b) because you'd get stuff more right and you do stuff that's that's actually more interesting. And the other thing I threw at them, which I probably shouldn't, was that they tend to research stuff that they're interested in. So, there's lots of research into organics, there's lots of research into wine competitions which a number of wine economists hate. They also hate scores And, you know, nobody has looked at and this amazingly to me, the sort of economics of of actually running a vineyard, running a wine company, a winery in 2022, or why, bourbon barrel wine is so attractive to, the producers of bourbon barrel wine, which by the way is because you can pick up empty and use bourbon barrels for for $10 a piece, and you can charge $15 for the wine you've made in them. But hold on. Hold on. Let me let me jump in and ask a question. Then if they're not talking to wine businesses, like, what are they doing? What's their what's their purpose? I I don't I don't understand why they exist if they're not interacting with or asking the questions that we as wine business people need help with. I can explain that very easily, and I wasn't really aware of this until now, which is, of course, they live, and I'm saying this with affection certainly for for for a number of them. They're living in a bubble, which is an academic bubble, And the people who count are publishers of academic journals, and the academics, the senior academics in their own establishments, universities, colleges, whatever, or indeed others. So if you can write stuff that impresses your peers, in terms of the publishers or the other professors, you, a, get published and that gets noticed. You potentially get tenure, which means you've got a job for life. And potentially, if there is any funding for more research, you get the funding. Okay. Where that funding comes from is another question. But hold on. Because now what I'm hearing from that and I'm I'm certainly not trying to rip on your host, but just maybe trying to get down to the bottom of some things that I'm I'm I'm thinking in in my brain, my very tired post hot summer brain. Okay. So these are the people who were doing the research and writing for academia, which means this is what's being taught to people coming through wine business programs. I'm not sure, actually. No. I think these no. I'm not sure. I think, people doing wine business, well, I think that may be true of some. Quite a lot of these people have come into this VAR eco