Ep. 991 Dan Petroski | Uncorked

Welcome to the Italian Wine Podcast. This episode is brought to you by Vinitili International Academy announcing the twenty fourth of our Italian wine ambassador courses to be held in London, Austria, and Hong Kong from the twenty seventh to the July 29. Are you up for the challenge of this demanding course? Do you wanna be the next Italian wine ambassador? Learn more and apply now at vinitiliinternational.com. 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 welcome one of the true free thinkers in wine, Dan Petrovsky, founder and winemaker at MASKIN. Anyone who follows wine media will know Dan, a renowned innovator, self taught winemaker, and consummate storyteller. Today, we talk about taking chances, tackling big issues, and the myriad possibilities for tomorrow's wine marketing. Let's get into it. Welcome, Dan Petrovsky. I am super excited to interview you because you and I, like, we cross streams from time to time, but I have never had a chance to actually sit down and speak with you. So glad to have you here. Thank you so much, Polly. I feel the same way. So, you do a lot of interviews. And when I was doing the research for this podcast, I was thinking to myself, how do we actually make certain that we're just not regurgitating the same old answers that you've given time after time after time? So what I'm gonna say is if anybody wants to know how you got into wine, that's all been talked about. You know? If anyone wants to know about Larkney, that's all been talked about. We're gonna skip over all of that because I want to talk with you about the weird ass decisions that you make around building masking. I'm fascinated by this. So that's the direction that I hope that we will go today. To get us started, I am gonna ask you to just give a brief overview of MASKIN as a brand just in case there's anyone listening to this who's never heard of it before, which would be a shocker. No. I appreciate it. And, honestly, it's hard for me to regurgitate anything because I wake up every day and my mind changes, and and my ideas evolve. And I push forward, and I look to people like yourself, and I look to social media, and I look to journalists and news media for inspiration, for how to change and evolve and and build a better brand, build a better marketing concept, and build and then also build better wines. At the core of it, you know, Masa Cana is a winery. I started in 2009. It was started because I felt there was a a cultural gap between climate, place, and what people were drinking in Napa and Sonoma. We were, you know, we were making these really warm weather sunshine filled rich red wines and even white wines. And we were drinking them in Mediterranean climate, which having lived in the Mediterranean for a year, lived in in the South Of Italy for a year, that wasn't the case, that I've been in in how we were, eating and drinking and hanging out and communicating and, and living our best lives. But here, I just I just found that there was a weird American gap between, you know, what grows together goes together, but didn't make that wasn't the case here. Especially with the drinking culture. Yeah. With the drinking culture here. So I just so that's how my son started. It started with this kind of, I need to break this, I need to break this down. I need to bridge this gap. I need to get back to my romance and nostalgia of having lived in Europe and drank nothing but white wines and, you know, was right in the Mediterranean Sea the whole time. And that was, that's really the impetus to it all. And, you know, fast forward to to present day, you see a lot more of that coming out in my marketing and my communications. My, my website looks like a travel website. It doesn't really look like a wine website. I just can I'm commissioning someone who's gonna be traveling through South France and Italy, the next few weeks to, you know, to to to take pictures with the eye towards a massacre website. And because I want people in my from my perspective, I want true I don't own anything. I don't own a vineyard. I don't own a winery. I have no place for you to come and have a great experience like you do. And if you travel and visit Napa Valley or Sonoma County or some of the other great wineries of the world, I I have to trigger something inside you to want you with and with my imaging, with my communication, to want you to continue to build a relationship with the brand. So that is that's what I do every day in, you know, my own mind, and I try to put it forth in in actuality on paper or on the web or in social or or whatnot. So it's interesting that you would bring that up because I was at an event in Bordeaux couple weeks ago, the, Act for Change Symposium that was run by Vin Expo. And Pierre Mansour, who is with the wine society, it was the first time I'd ever heard someone on a panel say the part of climate change that we're not discussing is that our drinking is changing. You know, the the world, the environment in which we live has a direct impact on what we consume. And and this is just it is completely glossed over. And I mean, fair enough because we're all freaked out about climate change. Right? So I I think it's completely reasonable that we're not sitting around talking about that. I'm really glad that that you brought that up. I kinda wanna jump into the efforts that you've made that when I say are weird, they're not weird to the rest of the world, but they're kinda weird in the wine world. So, I mean, way back in the day, you're you're talking about NFTs now, but you've been involved in NFTs for a long time. Correct? Yeah. I there's a lot there's a lot. We can we're gonna talk for a while talking. Oh, yeah. Well, you know the crazy thing? I can see all your NFTs. I go into opensea.io, and I'm like, oh, and that's a part of that's a part of the NFT world that I find completely fascinating. I was like, oh, look. Everything he's a Steve Aoki fan. Who knew? You know? No. I just I literally, fifteen minutes ago, just bought another NFT. I used to work at Time Magazine, and time has gone deep into crypto and NFTs. And they have a, they have a a whole background of called timepieces, and it's they get artists to come in and and kind of work on culturally significant things that are happening, in the moment. But I just actually bought a Time magazine thing called pieces. It's a slice of the covers, like, generative art of the covers of the 52 issues of time in year 2020, you know, probably the most pivotal year in our lifetime. So to own something that's historical and also has a personal, connection to me, is really important. And I and I find, you know, I I I find that the NFT world, a little bit miscommunicated. I think we've done it bad. I think the industry, the people behind it, I think the metaverse has been kinda poorly constructive from a marketing perspective. I think climate change is a poorly constructed with you on that one. Yeah. It it it makes me bonkers. Yeah. And and then and climate change has been poorly communicated over the years. I think there's so many ways to kind of, to stand the cat in in a a positive way, an optimistic way. I've I've came out early and hard on climate change saying, you know, damn you, shame you. This is wrong. You gotta get better. And that doesn't work all the time, and I get it. And but now I'm like, oh my god. What generation of of humans has ever said that their generation is worse than their parents' generation, which is their parents are worse than their, you know, than their grandparent generation. The next generation's always going to be better. So if climate change, because of the lack of w