Ep. 878 Pauline Vicard | Uncorked

Welcome to the Italian wine podcast. This episode is brought to you by Vinitili International Wine and Spirits Exhibition. The fifty fourth edition of Vinitili was held from ten to the April 13. If you missed it, don't worry. Go to viniteli+.com for on demand recordings of all the sessions from the exhibition. And remember to save the date. The next edition of viniteli will be held from the April 2023. 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're joined by Pauline Wicker, cofounder and executive director of Arany Global, a research and action institute dedicated to the future of fine wine. Today, we get a sneak peek into their upcoming report, Fine Wine and the Restaurants, looking ahead after two years of global disruption. We'll talk everything from business models to staff challenges to the new relationship between consumers and hospitality. Let's get into it. Pauline Pickard. I'm so excited to have you here with me today. You're one of my very favorite people online and so, so smart. Thank you so much. It's a big pleasure to be with you today. You're also one of my favorite people in wine, so it's always such a nice moment to have a good conversation with you. Thank you. So we are here talking today because you have just started presenting a report, and you are about to launch a report that comes from many months' worth of research that's all about the relationship between fine wine and the entree, restaurants, role of hospitality, and what's happened in the past two years. And, of course, our mandate with this, this particular podcast is business strategy and marketing. And when I had a chance to read the report prior to publication, there were a lot of things that stood out to me specific to how the fine wine world is moving forward in relationship to our gatekeepers, our hospital, and, really, our front lines. So that's what I wanted to talk about today. Can you give me and, start with an overview? What is the report? Where did it come from? What do we need to know? Yeah. So well, thank you for giving me the opportunity to share some of the some of the results. The report is called fine wine and the restaurants. And as you've said, it's exploring how the relationship between restaurants, chefs, sommeliers, their wine list, and the customers have changed and evolved, around the last over the last two years. So I don't know if you remember, but we started exploring that question in April 2020. And at that time, everyone was so worried, like, are restaurants are going to be open again, and our people are going to go out again. Everyone was so worried. And, of course, looking at the streets today, we know that they've reopened and that people are going out again, but we wanted to explore what was the shifts and what was the very big, heavy, deep trends that we see behind all of that. And we also wanted to measure how restaurants and their wineries had been economically impacted by the last two years on a quite global level. It's part of a longer, like, research project that we do with about knowing the fine wine consumers better. So we've started that big research in 2019, and every year, we explore a different angle. So this year was the perfect year to explore what happened with restaurants after the the two years that we haul out. And when you look at fine wine in particular, and fine wine stakeholders, for the lack of a better word, why it's interesting for them to look at restaurants, to look at the entree or, you know, the unlicensed or the, depending on where you are and how you call it. But according to the CEED, which is the European, a big European initiative on on on wine, restaurants well, the on trade sector represents 30% of all European wine sales before before COVID. So it's it's a big route to market. It's a big distribution channel. Then when it comes to fine wine in particular, restaurants have always been part of what gave the wine its fine wine status. Right? When you listed in the three Michelin star restaurant, that's your proof that you are actually a fine wine. It was kind of a passport to the fine wine status. And then one of the reason we also chose to really focus on that question this year was because more and more wineries do have their own restaurants with the growth of panotourism over the world. So they also have restaurants to think about themselves. So that was those three reasons combined that we decided to go and explore quite deeply, about that question. So before we kind of delve into specific topics, in a in a broad brush, were there things that you discovered that were wholly unexpected? Like, were there just those moments when you were like, holy shit, we had no idea that this was the path that the industry had taken? So maybe not like a massive, massive, big surprise, but just something that, I mean, to me hit me like, gosh. It's going to be harder and harder to be an export manager of a winery because the markets are more and more complex and more and more individuals. So, you know, when I was learning about wine exports, we're talking about big broad markets. You were even sometimes you've read, like, The US market or the European market, and then we had to go country by country. And now in some situation, it's like city by city. So it's it's and and every situation is different. And and through COVID, there were so many ways of reacting, so many ways of adapting, and so many new business models that were developed that, knowing your I I know it sounds, you know, one zero one kind of marketing lessons, but knowing your market and being having a very individual approach is more than ever necessary, I think. So you had to narrow that down for the purpose of this research. Can you just tell us where you chose to focus the research efforts? So what geographic markets? Was it geography? Was it demographics? Like, what were your parameters? So maybe, yes, on the methodology. So this as as a lot of things we do at OERI, there's a lot of qualitative research. So that's our first step. It's like interviewing a lot of experts in the in the trades everywhere around the world. So there's no parameter on geographics or, you know, where where they are. We had to define fine wine, of course. We had to define what are restaurants what the restaurants we were interested in were because, of course, we didn't study, you know, the big chains, the big fast food chains, or stuff like that. Right? So we had to define those parameters. But, otherwise, no. We the goal of that that qualitative study was to really give a voice of the different narratives that we found, and also explain the changes. We have a bit of data, and those datas have been we've we've worked with both wine services, which is a Bordeaux based agency and that studies restaurants in particular and wine intelligence who study a bit more the the consumers. So they had they had their own research parameters, and they've they've studied can't be 6,800 restaurants across the world. But, again, the parameter was the definition of the restaurants and not where they where they were located. And then what I mean, were there key markets that that you were focused on? So you were saying how it's become more granular, and it used to be that we would talk about The US and European. But, you know, when you do that now, are you breaking that down so that we're talking about Paris versus Germany versus London, San Francisco? You know? And and What does that look like? In the report, we talk a lot, about New York and San Francisco and Chicago, Texas, and Florida to compare The US market. And in Lebanon, all those cities had a very different ways of react