Ep. 1109 Bryan Dias | Get US Market Ready With Italian Wine People

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. Thanks for tuning in to get US market ready with Italian wine people on the Italian wine podcast. I'm Steve Wray, your host. And this podcast features interviews with the people actually making a difference in the Italian wine market in America, their experiences, challenges, and personal stories. And I'll be adding a practical focus to the conversation based on my thirty years in the business. So if you're interested in not just learning how, but also how else, then this pod is for you. Hello, and welcome to this week's edition of Get US Market Ready with Italian Wine People. I'm your host, Steve Wray. And, today, I've got a special guest, someone I met in New Orleans a couple of weeks ago, who kind of sort of is in the same business, Brian Diaz. Brian, welcome to the show. Hey, Steve. Thank you. How are you? I'm doing fine. Thanks. Really enjoyed meeting you at Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans, which was obviously a a a spirits oriented show. But I met you, and you're the host of the Nola Drinks Show with Brian Deas. You do both radio and podcast. So give us a little background on you, your history, touch on a little bit about wine, and where you are with broadcasting and podcast. Yeah. Sure, Steve. So, as you said, the name of the show is the Nola Drink Show with Brian Diaz, and, we broadcast locally on radio here in New Orleans weekly. We're on, Fridays at 5PM on a, AM radio station. That's still a thing these days. And, also we do a podcast version of the show. And essentially, podcast version of the show is everything that airs on radio plus a podcast only segment called Another Shot with Nola Drinks where we get a little deeper into the weeds sometimes on different topics that we address on the show. Our tagline is exploring the world of drinking food and culture in New Orleans and beyond. So we take a very wide stance of what that means. Sometimes we just talk about drinks. Oftentimes we talk about social issues. We talk about economics of the drinks business or food business and a whole host of other things. We've been doing this for, oh, boy, six or seven years, I think. Something along those lines. And, yeah, we always just it's a long format interview show. We just have a single guest or set of guests on for the entire hour, and, we just kinda get deep into these different topics that we cover. So what kind of prep do you do before shows? And you and I talked, and my procedure is to have an hour conversation with somebody and then do an outline just because I'm built that way. That's the way I write. That's the way I do a lot of things. I wanna be prepared, not that it's unprepared if you don't do that. How do you work? Yeah. Yeah. That's a it's a really good question, Steve. And you and I, as you mentioned, we we we did exactly what you just described. We talked last week for a little while. I kinda take a little bit of a different tack because we do a long form interview as I mentioned, and it usually takes me about seventy five to ninety minutes from start to finish to tape an entire episode with my guests. And that's because we have to pause for breaks for the radio portion of the show, but that also gives us time to have conversations between the lines and sort of recalibrate our conversation at times if if needed as we go. I will give people I actually am a staunch opponent of providing questions to people because I don't want to have a lot of this scripted. I wanna be able to follow tangents. I wanna be able to get into topics with my guests. Sometimes we just go which way the wind blows. There'll be a bit of a framework that we usually discuss before we go on the air. And then as I mentioned, when we take breaks, we may recalibrate a little bit. But my whole thing is if when, like, dealing with a PR company or somebody who's arranging the interview and they'll ask for a list of questions, I will tell them if you can't send me somebody who can talk adeptly about the topic for an hour, then you're not sending me the right person. Okay. Does that make so it's it's I I try to not over plan. I don't provide a list of questions as I said. It's a very general conversation, out of the gate, and then we sort of just let the conversation goes where it needs to go because now we were kind of getting lightning in a bottle that way. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm kinda caught between a rock and a hard place, and I kinda lean toward the hard place. So but that's just me. Styles are really different, Steve. I I get all that. And for me, I I like the improvisational, aspect of this. Part of this is my music background and and such and, like, you being a wine person as am I. One of the things I always enjoy challenging myself is, like, very often I won't taste somebody's expression, their wine, or their spirit until I'm actually taping the show. Yeah. That that part's great. Yeah. I trust my palate, and I kinda go with it that way. Interesting. Yeah. We don't do any product stuff here at all. Not that I'm averse to it. Just we have done it in no tastings. That's not what I'm interested in. The, intro to the podcast says something about it's not just a matter of knowing how, but what we talk about is how else. Right. Because this business is so challenging, and you know that every state is different, and then some places, every city is different. Texas has what's called a class b license, which is, like, a fourth tier. And if you're in the wine industry, that'll just make you cry. Right. Louisiana had its own challenges in getting samples through a clearing wholesaler. The people that we dealt with were delightful, but, you know, you learn a lot. 52 different markets, all that kind of stuff. One of the things that I very often find when people get PR training or they deal with a PR firm, they're taught what's called the two breath technique. And the two breath technique is you're gonna have fifteen seconds or twenty seconds to get your two key talking points in. And a lot of the training that people get and the advice they get is built around short form interview stuff, a new segment, a brief radio segment, whatever it is. And that's another reason why I don't provide questions to people is because I've had times, especially with radio, where there is no visual to look at, where someone will basically say what they think they need to say in five minutes or four minutes or two minutes, and then they're done. And if I kind of give them that much fodder or that much rope they will hang themselves with it and that's why I basically don't provide questions because I wanna be able to ask them an open ended question or ask them a question that they can kind of get into without having over thought it or you know, lean on their talking points and basically run out of gas very quickly. Okay. So let's, talk a little bit about structure, and how and why do you do radio plus a podcast? First of all, why do you do radio? And then the second question is why do it plus a podcast? Right. It's it's a great question. When I when I started doing this, I started, filling in for a friend of mine on his daily radio show here in New Orleans going back several years. And, it's a two was a two hour show every day. And, you know, that's different multiple guests, multiple segments that needed to be filled. It was a lot of work, to be honest with you. And then when I started doing my own thing, basically, I continued on radio and, you know, podcasts are the way of the world. So it was basically to answer your question very directly, it was very simultaneous for