Ep. 100 Monty Waldin interviews Sarah Abbott MW (Swirl Wine Group) | Monty Waldin's Let's Talk Wine Biz

Italian wine podcast. Chinching with Italian wine people. Hello. This is the Italian wine podcast. My guest today is Sarah Abbott, who is a master of wine, and Sarah is also the founder and CEO. Sounds very, very, sort of intimidated of swirl wine group, which is based in the UK. Welcome. Thank you. It's lovely to be here. So great name, swirl. Thank you. Yeah. I think it came to me after a couple of glasses. A couple of swirls. Yeah. So first question is, you know, you are British, I guess. Yes. So briefly upbringing. So I grew up in bedfordshire in the country. My parents were not interested in wine particularly until my mother got a job running a really smart country house hotel. And I got a job as a washer wrapper when I was, twelve. And just through being exposed to that kind of life and seeing the whole buzz and the thrill of fine dining, and they had an amazing wine cellar, and the owner was French and my mom then started coming home with wine and I just started Please say your mom started coming out of bed. I don't think so, although my parents did divorce. Oops. Okay. Well, we can edit that. Yeah. So so I gave him a family of great cooks, love flavor, love taste, and I was the first person in my family to work in wine. And really, it came out of that curiosity for flavor and place and a case I love seeing room full of people celebrating and having the most amazing time, and I really associate wine with that. Okay. So you got into the wine trade, so young. Did you still ever work at a wine shop? Or Well, not in wine shop. So I did my I have all sorts of a a job. So I sold double glazing part time. That was a that was a really horrible job. I did my first degree. My first degree was in classic, so I had a lot of interest in ancient history and actually so much of that connects than with what I then found out about the history of wine. The classics department at university had a really good wine cellar and wine parties. Did you go to a property university? Well, I went to Newcastle upon time, which had a fantastic, very strong classics department. Stored in England, by the way. No. I didn't. Yeah. Fantastic city. And I stayed at after my degree. I got a a placement at Durham University, and then I was actually marketing image analysis software, decided I wanted to work in wine, took a massive pay cut, went to run a country house hotel down in Gloucestershire, organized the wine cellar, found a lot of bin in, sold a lot of wine, was visited by the main wine supplier, who said, please, will you come and work for me? And that was then how I got it into wine. So that was my twenties. And what was your job for them setting the the the leasing division. So, so I actually I'm I think selling and getting to the point where the sale is almost inevitable is the most important thing there is, and it's not something that happens at the end of wine. It's without a sale, nothing happens. And I've really taken that with me, and I did do a lot of sales job and commission based selling. So So were you good then? Did you done a good deal? I was good, but I never did. So, you know, when you go into these very sales led jobs, they give a script, and the script doesn't work. The thing about selling is that you have to it's like matchmaking. It's like, you know, putting the perfect marriage together between the product and, the customer. But what I did for my first job in mine, I was working for a domain bottle burgundy specialist, and my role was to go around and sell burgundy to restaurants, hotels, small wine shops, and I did a lot of events and tastings, and I did a lot events for their customers, and that was how I sold them the wine because, something like Burgundy was more expensive. You know, it was a highly competitive market, and Burgundy is all about context and story and and history, and and actually the market then for Burgundy was not as sort of thirsty as it is now. I really wish I bought a lot more Burgundy with my staff discount at that stage. Rather than just buy it and drink it. But anyway, so I did that, then I worked for an Italian wine specialist, again, very high quality, at Sien de gricolo Estates. Estates estate wineries. Was that a bit of a shock moving from the glorified bites of burgundy to the Lambrisco arena. No. It wasn't really. I mean, it was, I suppose there are slight differences in business culture, but no. I mean, there's I was working with high quality producers, and I actually had a lot more responsibility and authority in my in that role, and I was really allowed to get on with it. So I would take groups of winemakers from Italy to come get three or four over. And I would take them around, I'd organize events them and trips for them and visits with key customers. So experiential kind of widespread. It was experiential and Was that quite was that quite unusual at that time? I don't know if it was unusual, but I I think that now the whole idea that in order to sell anything interesting in wine, you have to get people to try it and taste it. And and everyone talks now about the story, but I think actually that's taken a while for it to be recognized. But what we found with selling that really good quality Italian wine, not not easy drinking everyday Italian wine, but anything of real quality and interest and value is that you had to do it through independent retailers, and I would basically become a sort for a traveling almost expert, and and I'll be parachute in. I'd say to the shop, okay, well, I'm bringing in two or three winemakers will come and do your tasting. I'll give you an overview. Get your customers there. They can place orders on the night. It's, an absolutely no risk situation for you. You're doing all the work, basically. Well, that's what you you had to put it through because it's a risk. And the thing is that so if you're a winemaker in Swave, you know, your wine is everything to you, your survival is everything to you, but actually, if if you're the owner of a wine shop in, I don't know, Lewis, that smart bee producer is not everything to you. And so you have to, if you want to pull through anything that's high quality and interesting, you have to take of that risk, you have to make it absolutely inevitable that the sale will happen. And, and I think that experience when I was really going around, you know, driving around in my tiny car and pounding the the streets taking taking round Italians, my dad actually used to lend me his BMW when I took the Italians round because he said, you know, their Italians, they they will want a proper car. Like, and it was such a good grounding for me and really understanding because you would see how consumers would react. You could see what worked and what resonated. And also you could see that if you put the effort in, people would buy a really high quality prop at Lambriscoe that was retailing at twenty quid. They will buy it as long as they know that they like it. It's a test drive, isn't it? It's a test drive. We and we've got to drive. And in fact, there are some marketing research research papers that go into buying queues for wine, and they say that wine is the only purchase landscape that's as complex for consumer good as goods as wine. Is buying a car. But actually, when you buy a car once every couple of years, and we're asking people to buy wine, well, every week. So it is a test drive, and we and I think we don't do enough of that, or we didn't do enough of that. Enough so. Sampling is everything. So what are the I mean, how much of your business is Italian wine? Quite a small amount, actually. So my Well, that's the end of the show. Thanks so much for coming in. Well, small small and not so small. So I started so my interest with Italian wine started with that, importance called wine traders, the guy Michael Pally. When I did my master of wine, I did my master of wine dissertation in Barolo. When I set up my own business, I just found myself specializing in, what you might call the weird stuff. So although I did my training in the classics, burgundy Barolo, and I worked for a Bordeaux specialist as well, I found as a marketer that where you can really get your teeth into something is with wine that a people don't don't know exist, or b that people think is rubbish and snigger at. And the thing that I've done most of my work with is the the former, actually, so these emerging terwas. And I love the idea of beautiful terwas that people don't even know are there. Such as? Oh, so I've done a lot of work with, for example, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Turkey. Those are the three main ones where I've run campaigns for those three and found them in porters, got them into the market. And, I mean, I love all the the creative side of wine and the tasting side of wine, but it's if you if you cannot sell it, that terwa has no voice and it will die. What about unknown terwa's in So you've mentioned Ambrusco, which yes. Yeah. It's one of my favorites. Yes. So my it was Michael Pally, the master of wine who set up mind traders who introduced me. I mean, he he's, almost willfully determined to champion the very best, you know, even if it's a a hard sell. But he introduced me to Lambrisco, but actually what happened with Italy is that I met the the team from Neswave Consortio through running a volcanic wine master class for the Institute of Masters of wine. I'm I'm on the events committee. They had submitted some fantastic wines to this tasting, and people at the tasting loved them. And all the reviews were full of this surprise that they had good wine coming from Swave, and I just thought, why why is there this surprise? You know, it's a really old Taguire, it's a hillside vineyards, etcetera, her. And it just struck me that actually so the French, for example, are very good with their major exporting wine appellations. So Shabbly, for example, you've got a a load of Shabbly is made, an absolute ton of Shablis. And you've got Duversa at the top. You've got perfectly drinkable, ag in box Shablis at the bottom. Nobody introduces Shablis. Bordeaux. I mean, you've got Bordeaux Roush, your basic Bordo Rugeo, Bordeaux superior. That's your kind of Wednesday night glass of wine. And you've got some of the greatest and most expensive wines in the world, and nobody produces those. And it's just, I think, that with lots of the Italian classics, suave, even Val polycella, even prosecco, the the commercial success seems to come at the expense of recognition for the very best within that appellation, even though the very best are as best, you know, as good as, as great wines from anywhere. So it was a different type of marketing challenge. And, I think I was a slightly unusual choice of partner because Italian wineries tend to like the structure of a big Asian see. But the point is that when you're trying to introduce to a market, the top quality and the different story of a big appylation, you've got to think like you're a tiny new product. You've got to be talking to the influencers use. It's you've got to think more like a kind of guerilla marketing campaign. And, so that started with Swave, and I have now been approached by a couple of other Italian wine regions, although we haven't confirmed anything yet. It's a shame. Yeah. Let us know as soon as you I can guess, like, we sort of guessed one of them, but we won't go there. But it's very interesting what you'll say about this, if it's Italian, it can't be expensive. Well, so the average bottle price for Italian wine UK is four ninety eight. So that's That's four pounds ninety eight. Four pounds ninety eight. So that's fourth from bottom. So Germany's lowest, and that so New Zealand's top, then France, Australia earlier. Spain, Spain has a higher average bottle price in Italy. Okay. So this is skewed because you will have top I mean, we know there are top Italian wines being sold in the UK, but generally in the UK, you know, there's a lot of the Italians are really good technically. So they're actually very good at providing very drinkable, refreshing, juicy, whites, and reds, and of course sparkling, you know, on time in the right kind of style. And and that's not to be sniffed at because that kind of commercial success is is the it's the absolute engine of an identity, and it's the engine of kind of survival in these rural economies, and they are basically, it's all farming. But it is also the fact that the kind of the brand health of any country, if you think of a, you know, the the wine of a country as being like a kind of ambassadorial brand for that country, if you are focused on those lower price sectors and only those lower price sectors, it becomes it's slightly dangerous because it means that you're constantly being squeezed on the margin for your producers. And your reputation then starts to be associated with that style of wine that kind of that's as much as you can do. And I think this may be related to this kind of the the way that Italy finds it harder to get recognition for the nuance of quality within its bigger appylations compared to the French. Fun. It's not pretty good. Sorry. Oh, yeah. That's fine. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Really important that the work of the the academy that Ian daggett is doing with Vinitally, when you actually are saying it's really important that we talk about the nuance of these two wires that you give top Italian wines exactly the same kind of really connoisseurs, geeky, dedicated attention that you give to the great wines of France because the wines do deserve it. It's just that haven't had that same culture lavished on them. You think of some of the classics? Obviously, you know, bruelello is an expensive wine. The top chianti, classicos are fairly expensive, not ridiculously expensive, I think they're still underpriced. You know, for me, is a classic white wine, and it's just disappeared off the face of the earth. Lambrusco is potentially a world class wine of its older genre, and it's never gonna sell for the kind of price that say even a moderate burgundy, red burgundy would sell for. How can that change Yeah. Is it going to change? Is there any way that it can change? Or will you be who's gonna say that no, Lambrisco is gonna be below x price point and that's it? I I will never take that for an answer. If it hasn't succeeded, it's just because you haven't taken it to market in quite the right way, you haven't spoken to the people who are likely to love it. You haven't taken the risk sufficiently to persuade import to take it on. So all of the it's basically the classic marketing curve. Where you live in in the marketing sense with products like that is that you live in that if you imagine the marketing curve, you know, it comes along into the hump, then down, you know, and in that little first little line is all the early adopters. Now, they're early adopters in terms of the crazy specialist importers who people like, you know, red squirrel in the UK, people like knotted vine, people like Clark, voiced, all these absolutely fanatical wine loving. They're proper business people, but they will all people like indigo. All these people who are hermine to bring in the very best from a particular region and get it into then their early adopters who are typically world class restaurants, and I don't just mean fine dining, but even great informal lining restaurants. So you first of all have to persuade the importers who are not driving bent is. You know, they're not shipping, you know, million bottles of, of, you know, five ninety nine prosecco. They're shipping mixed pallets of wine that has got to be hand sold by them to people who've then got to hand sell it to their customers. So it's absolutely doable, but you just have to be realistic about what it will take and how long it will take for if you don't do that, this is one of the things that frustrates me about working with, you know, some of the generic bodies is that the little guys are so important to the big guys because it's the little guys who create the the excitement, the thrill, and the interest. But the big guys are so important to the little guys because they're the ones who are able to plan for investment in the market, who are able to actually create initial awareness of a of a wine country or a wine region. I see time to time again in every country that I deal with. This tension that gets set up between what had perceived as the opposing interests of the big producers. The big police forces are the best. And the it's like an ecosystem. If you don't don't have the thrilling wines made by people who see it as a birth, you know, then and anything about that really high top quality, okay, several generations later, you'll find they're doing quite nicely they've built in all that association and added value into that brand. But to begin with, you know, it's it's an absolute it's like a kind of, like almost like a sacrificial thing. You know, it's like almost a spiritual thing. They dedicate themselves completely the leap of faith. And to to making this stuff, and they have to then find importers who have that same, almost willful, optimistic dedication to taking these wise that are so beautiful, and selling them to people who are also slightly crazy because anyone can give their wine away. The easiest thing in the world is to sell shedloads of fairly, you know, of of wet wine. Wine is just wet and inoffensive, and that's okay. People need wet inoffensive wine but if that's all you do and all you talk about, you won't ever create the possibility for being accepted for transcendent quality, and and you need both, really. Okay. And I think that's the that's something I think Italians could learn from if you look at what Australia do, Australia, they had a hard time and they have come back into a structure. Well, we could get you up on the Italian one podcast actually. You know, we're just churning out podcasts, so that we know below production cost for our supermarket audience. So what we need to do is maybe do, let's do one podcast every two years. Agent in barrel maybe for fifteen months. And then hand set it to a to a sort of bespoke audience somewhere in the middle of I'm not sure you've got the inherent terroir. You know, you've I mean, I didn't I think we're more kind of a I think we're more of a jolly professor. That's a just smile on your face when you said that it will be straight in the eye and challenge me. But there's nothing wrong with being a jolly you know, fruity, easily digestible thing. Sarah, but it's been great talking to you. And I'm I'm honestly that I know nothing about marketing and, branding brand positioning, but I've learned a lot, just listening to you. And had I met you a while ago, I would have probably done better in my marketing accept, which is a big staging post in my lifetime. Oh. That's great to see. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. Yeah. It's great to hear you. You're enthusiasm, but not just about, wine in general or Italian wine in particular, but just about you, obviously, clearly, oh, absolutely love your job. Yeah. I do. I I That shines through. Very lucky to be doing what I do. Half an hour, you haven't stopped mining. You can't see that on the radio wonderful cars, but but you just haven't stopped smiling. Okay. Alright. So hope to catch up with you again. Thank you. Thank you. Follow Italian wine podcast on Facebook and Instagram.