Ep. 1100 Nicole Rolet | 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. Tickets are on sale now. So 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. This week, we are joined by the lovely and talented Nicole Rollet, CEO and driving force behind Chainebleau. We forgo wine talk and instead jump directly into the blood, sweat, and tears of building a modern luxury brand. From solving spreadsheets and finding the right partners to acting strategically and overcoming fear of rejection, We're talking about the non obvious demands and rewards of our industry. Let's get into it. Welcome. Lovely. Nicole relay. I'm so pleased to finally have you on this podcast. It's taken me a long time to get you here. How you doing? It's always a joy to be with you. We've never had a conversation that hasn't been totally thrilling and interesting, from my point of view. So I'm delighted to be here today. Oh, my, my heavens. This is why I keep you around right there. You know? I need I need the ego. So you and I had a chance to attend an event a couple weeks ago in London. And in the process of it and and we will talk a little bit about that event. But in the process of it, one of the things that came up, as you and I were just chatting, is what people think it means to own and build a wine brand versus the reality of what it means to build a brine wine brand. And this is something that at Five Forest, we are constantly dealing with because, you know, the the dichotomy between this romanticized view of, I own a wine brand versus I work my ass off to build a wine brand. It's just, you know, it it's as disparate as it can be. And, and and I've known your brand since before I've known you personally, as a matter of fact. And I I really wanted to talk with you today about your experience, not not with the wine, not with the education, but legitimately with what it has been in, oh, sixteen years. Am I doing my addition right? There wasn't a real, you know, beginning, middle, end of that. But, yeah, I am we did launch our first wines, in 2010, pretty much. 2006 was the first time we put our own wines in our own tanks, but there were twelve years of renovating the priory in the vineyard before that. So, it was a bit like putting a lobster in a pot and then watching it slowly boil. Yes. So it is it has been a never ending start up, and, that's been part of the challenge is sort of I call it a sprint a thon, you know, the intensity of the sprint and the the longevity of the marathon. So, I I didn't think that the intensity of the effort would have to be kept up for for quite as many years, and that's certainly something I would tell anyone who's getting into the one business. It takes a lot longer to get to cruising altitude, than a lot of other businesses. And then when you get there, supposedly, from what I hear, it's easier to stay there, but it just does take herculean effort to define the laws of gravity. Pandemics aside, you know, acts of God not not accounted for. When I so I've been self employed since I was 24. And when I started my first business, I have a great accountant, it's the only person in the world who intimidates me, who's been my accountant this whole time, who I said, yes. I've done the business planning. I wrote this fabulous business plan that got, like, used to teach people how to write business plans by the lenders sort of thing. Oh, it's okay. I go to her with it, and I'm like, alright. According to my business plans, I will reach profitability in two years. She starts laughing. She's like, okay. If you reach profitability in two years, you're a freaking unicorn. You're lucky if you hit profitability in five years. And this was not with, you know, a high capital investment business, like, we're gonna go buy a medieval priory. So I I do wanna talk about the money. But before we do that, just let me back up a minute. Schemblut, to give anyone in the room if anyone hears us talking and doesn't know how fabulous Schemblut is, I'm gonna be surprised. But give us the elevator pitch on Scheinble, what you make, where you are, and why it's fabulous, and then we'll talk, man. We're in the heart of the Southern Rhone, but we're way up in the mountains. That makes it very special because we have all the advantages of the sun and and concentration and ripe fruit of, sort of hotter latitude and all the elegance, finesse, or strain that you typically associate with an older Rhone, or cooler climate, wine. So the reason that we got excited that the vineyard might be a unicorn is, because we could have our cake and eat it too and stuff that most winemakers have to choose either or, we we had all in our in our own backyard. Obviously, that's only in the beginning because then you have to verify it properly and do everything else right. But the vineyard itself is very exceptional, and that's why we had the ambition to make concrete quality for from the get go even though the region, isn't really known for that. And we took on a huge challenge, as a result of that, but I'm very excited that now all the wines in the range, the reds, the roses, the whites, they've all been not just award winning and critically acclaimed, but also, very successful commercially finally after a million years of of working hard to put it on the map. From day one, like, before the land was purchased, the it sounds to me like the goal was to produce super premium wines. You were going to have a luxury brand. Is that correct? So it's a it's a bit of a chicken or egg. I think, you know, you don't wake up in the morning and think that your kid is gonna be the next mac and roll in tennis. You need to notice that they really love it and they have a natural ability, then create the right circumstances for them to express that and then get the third party validation and then go for it. So that's very much our story. We never woke up in the morning and say, oh, let's make a super premium wine. It was the vineyards that dictated the fact that we had the potential to do that, and that's why we that's why I changed my life around because had it just been a nice, normal, sweet vineyard like everybody else with a nice house in the middle of a French countryside, I would never have changed my whole life around, left my other successful professions and and trainings behind to dedicate myself wholeheartedly to something where the upside potential was meh. I mean, why would I do that? That doesn't make any sense. Would you do that? No. No. No. But I I think that to be fair, everybody has a different, you know, what is meant, what do I want, what kind of life do I want? But the the thing for me that I think is so important is these are mindful choices that we're making along the way. We're not swept along in a tide of, well, you know, I think that this is the price point for me, or I think this is what I do. Like, there's a real conscious, no would I mean, you know, as you were going, there was a a strategic direction for the brand. Is that right? There's no question because, again, because the potential of the grapes was there, then everything else that came from that was okay. The wine world has tons of wine. It has tons of fine wine. It doesn't need another wine. Does your vineyard have something special, new, and different to add? And if so, and the answer is yes, then why should you let oth