Ep. 106 Monty Waldin interviews Felicity Carter (Meininger's Wine Business International) | Monty Waldin's Let's Talk Wine Biz

Italian wine podcast. Chinching with Italian wine people. Hello. This is the Italian wine podcast. My name is to all in today's guest is felicity Carter. Felicity is the editor of mininger's wine business international, which is a magazine based in Germany, which is also published in the English language. Welcome Felicity. Thank you, Monty. How did, Australia lady end up in Germany? Well, I'm applying for a job. I was living in Sydney, and I'd always wanted to work overseas and work in Europe, but I didn't have any of the visas. I wasn't, born from English parents. I had no right to work anywhere, were you born there? Well, funnily enough, I was born in Germany. Right. And why were your parents on, like, a sort of love cruise or something? They were not. No. No. No. It was the cold war. And, my dad was an army officer, and he was stationed there. So, I was born there, which prove very easy when it came time to get a work visa, which are quite hard to get. They looked at my passport, and they said, I don't know why her German is so bad, but prodigal daughter, she's come home. She's clearly one of us, and they stamped my work visa. So you're Australian born to Australian parents in Germany. Right. Then you moved to Australia over the family. And I was stateless for a while. I had to apply for Australian citizenship. Really? Mhmm. I've got a naturalization certificate. So I like to think that I'm a true blue Aussie, but, my documentation says otherwise. Okay. So how did get into journalism? Well, it was after I was working in advertising, and advertising is about writing material for other people and really trying to spin creatively what they tell you that you're going to to write. And I was finding it creatively very, very stifling. And then September eleven happened, and I looked at the pictures of what was happening, and I said, I know what I meant to be in life. I'm gonna be a war correspondent. So I went back to university and trained as a a journalist. And, but unfortunately, there were no wars on. And, you know, when you're, when you're slightly older, newspapers don't send you off to be a war correspondent anyway. So Would you really have done that? Absolutely. Yes. Had you had any experience of conflict before? Well, I grew up in a military family. Both of my parents were military. They'd met war zone. And Which one? It was the Malaya conflict in the nineteen sixties. My mother was a nurse in the air force, and her most exciting memory in her life was being held up in the jungle at gunpoint while she was, in the back of an ambulance. And, it was always that they lived for something that was much bigger than themselves. And so as a child, I always wanted to do something that was also they had a very strong sense of public duty that you were supposed to do something and contribute something for the public good. Where did that come from? For my parents? No. Where did they get their sense of duty from, obviously, your mother's a nurse, which is a sort of public, a public job, if you like, where you're helping the community by being a nurse, and your father's are in the military. So he's laying his life on the line quite literally. Where did that come from? I think that was a very Australian thing, especially, you know, Australia is a very harsh country. It's a very harsh, and it always has been. And the only way that you can survive is by, especially in the early days, was by looking out for one another, and that's very deep in the Australian ethos, the idea that you you need to contribute to community. And so, you know, I was in advertising, I thought, really, what? It was fun, and it's very well paid, but I thought, you know, really, what am I doing with my life? Writing brochures and ads for Mastercard? Is this really contributing to the world? So that's how I ended up in journalism. So then you got into wine journalism. How did that happen? Well, it was because I was very cross. I had sold a, I'd I'd worked for wine company very briefly writing their brochures. And as a result, I thought I knew a huge amount about wine. Of course, I knew absolutely nothing. But I sold a story to the age, which is a Metropolitan newspaper. In which city? In Melbourne. It's it was one of the not now, but it was one of the top three newspapers in Australia. And, it was on a wine subject. I'd found a an interesting scientific experiment that was going on with developing new grape varieties I sold the story to the age. And they liked it and they said anything more you would write for us, you know, the door is open, which is amazing to think about now. So I started to stay up late at night, and I started to read obsessively the the wine press from the rest of the world. And I thought if I can find a trend and if it's, you know, happening in Australia. So then what happened is, what happens when you end up in a newspaper is all the publicity people start to ring up the newspaper and say, who is she? She's not part of the wine for eternity, you know, where does she come from? Do we need to be inviting her to things? And so got invitations and they were really rude. A lot of them would say, you know, who are you? And I'd get invitations and they'd they'd put these, these caveats on them. They'd say, we'll invite you, but since you're a nobody, you can only come if you promise to write, you know, x y z. And I was so angry story at this. I thought, damn you. I'm gonna learn about wine. So I think I'm the only person who entered the wine trade for a a a sort of bad motive. Yeah. Through hate rather than love. That's right. Through sort of this this I was, you know, Australian wine writing is unbelievably competitive. It's like a it's like you enter the, the coliseum. It's gladiators going off to one another. And if you went unprepared like I was because I didn't really know very much about wine, you get torn apart. So, I thought, damn you, I'm going to, I'm gonna I'm gonna make this happen. I did. So mining is published in two languages, German and English. No. It's published in English only. What what happened is that about ten years ago, and this was happening across Europe or it wasn't just mining us, but there was a big push going on in Europe to enter the English language market. So there were a lot of hand European productions that were suddenly being done in English, or there were a number of magazines in aviation, for example, that began to be launched in in English. And since mining is a very important and significant wine and spirit, publisher on the continent. They said, well, we've covered as much of the German speaking markers we can. So our next option is to go English, but it proved to be more difficult than they thought because to write about, a complex subject, you really need to have a native level grass of the written language. And translating from German often doesn't work in English. So they decided they needed an English speaker. So they hired you? They hired me. Yes. So one of your fascinations is holding the attention of your audience, whether that's the written word spoken word. What do you mean by that? Well, when I worked in advertising, the thing was nobody wants to read advertising. Nobody. They don't read it for entertainment. They don't read it for intellectual stimulation. In fact, people don't want to see it. So how do you grab their attention in such a way that you can hold their attention long enough to speak to them? And that is the central obsession for advertising. It's always thinking about other people. And in fact, when you look into it, the techniques that you used to hold somebody's attention are exactly the same techniques that were used by the orators in ancient Rome. The knowledge has been held for a very long time since since the ancient world, but we keep rediscovering it all the time. So what techniques were they using then on their smartphones and Facebook proof of us. One of the things that they would say is and in fact, I'm gonna talk about this tomorrow, a Cicero, the great Roman orator. There used to be this thing in ancient Rome that if you were an orator, it was your job to entertain people. And you did this for hours and hours and hours, you know, you had to be funny, you had to make them laugh, you had to make them cry, and he was up against one of the biggest legal challenges of his life. And he if he did this, the they would run out of the time for the the court case to finish before all the sort of the summer holidays stuff. Take a filibuster, basically. Yeah. Basically. So he said am I gonna get around this? And he said, get to the point. That's what I should do. I should get to the point. I should just stand up and say, this man is a wretched individual, and here's why I lay out the evidence. And he won the greatest legal case in the ancient world. And it's amazing to think, but he was the first person that said, get to the point. Start with what you're gonna tell people, why they should be interested, why should the audience care about this, and then give them the evidence. And, it's still a very good principle today, which is violated by almost everybody that up with a PowerPoint presentation. Right. I mean, are you a brutal editor when somebody sends you an article? Oh, I have sent you an article. I'm not gonna make any comment at all. I think called one of the fiercest editors in the business. No. Yeah. No. We'd never have guessed. Really? Tell me the truth? Yeah. You are ferocious, isn't it? Well, editing is a really this is the other thing. Editing is a really important skill, and it's it's disappeared because of lack of budgets and whatever, but no actor gets on the stage without a director. Nobody that you think is talented, whether there are Alarena or, an artist or whatever, has put something out there that hasn't been directed or edited or crafted with the help of somebody else. It's a big lie that, you know, there's just this talent that gets out there and does it. And so having somebody to listen to your speech before you deliver it or look at your article before you send it out to the world is is a really important part of the process. Where do you think a lot of wine writing goes wrong? I'm not saying wine writers, but wine writing goes wrong in holding people's or feeling to hold people's attention, bit on, in a magazine, or bit online to, even, like, a Facebook post. The first rule is who you're speaking to. That's always number one. And normally, if you were putting an article into a news or magazine, you've got two possible audiences or two audiences that you need to consider. First of all, you've got the editor that you've got to get it passed. So that's audience number one. But your major audience is the reader. That's who you've got. And with most white wine writers, they're multiplying the audience they're trying to speak to. They're trying to speak to the editor. They're also trying to speak often to their fellow wine writers. They're trying to prove that they're a member of the fraternity in good standing, and they do this by proving their expertise. Unfortunately, while they're busy doing that, they're busy using the article or the wine writing as a way to burnish their own credentials. They're not thinking about the reader, and that's the problem. And I look sometimes at articles, and I think do you personally want to read this? The person who's written this, would you sit down and either for entertainment, or to fill in your time, or to learn something, would you slog through this article? And the answer's often no. So how do how do win writers change? Edit, they're fierce editing. Boys. Boys. Boys. Look, when I was learning to write, when it was in advertising in when I went into newspapers. The process was absolutely brutal. There was nowhere to hide, especially in advertising where you've got millions of dollars involved. Every word is scrutinized. And often it's scrutinized by many layers of people you've people inside the agency, then you've got the clients, and then you've got their boss, and then you've got the legal department. And so, you know, you have to account for every single word that you use. And eventually, you begin to internalize what works and what doesn't. It used be the same in newspapers before they went broke, that you would put something in, and then you would have a fact checker who would be on your ass saying, where did you get this from? Justify it. You'd have the sub editor who would say, look, paragraph two shouldn't really go there. Your real story starts up here why don't you swap this around? And then sometimes you'd have an in house council who would say you can't say that that's defamatory, we need to do it a different way. And through all of that sort of brutal process that would sometimes leave you in tears, eventually you learn how to be a self editor and you do it. Now, and for one of the things that's happened with the collapse of the media is that you don't have those layers of of people who are all giving the writer a kick up the backside. And no writer has ever learned to be a great writer without going through that process. Yeah. That's very true. It's brutal. I mean, you know, you get you write something that you think is brilliant and, the editor said this is rubbish. You know, you talk about something that we don't wanna talk about. Don't need to talk about. It's, you're not being clear about what you're saying. Do it again, and it is hard. So, I'm with you on that. At, one hundred and ten percent. What about, obviously, you're talking about structured structured wine writing. So there's a a an editor commissioned a writer to write something for a specific magazine. That's very, very structured. What about wine writing in the in the wild west online, blog dogs, whether we're generally speaking, there's no edited behind. That's just one person sitting down at their computer writing something and publishing it online. There's some really great one writing out there. I've come across some stuff online, which is fantastic. The difference between what I think of as a professional writer and somebody who isn't is that they can do the fantastic writing every single time they post. And what happens when you're always your own master, when you're your own editor, is that, the quality varies a lot. And I think that's one of the big problems. The other problem is the nature of the internet itself. The internet functions best as a very intimate relationship between reader and writer. So it encourages an eye, the first person, and it encourages a bright and breezy style. And so people write bright and breezy. Now unfortunately, that voice is the same voice as the voice of copywriting from advertising. It it tries to make an intimate relationship between the writer and the reader, so you'll stop and you'll listen to what's being said. And in in the hands of somebody who really knows what they're doing, a really good essayist, somebody who's very conscious of this, the first person intimate style could be a fantastic way of communicating. But if you haven't thought it through at that level, bright and breezy style becomes facile. And unfortunately, that is what a lot of internet writing does. And it's often it often takes down people who I can see are very talented writers, but they've they've gone into this cul de sac, which is the Bright and breezy. And so one of the things I do with the magazine is I won't allow first person, not because I don't think there isn't a place for first person, sometimes there is. But if you force somebody to write in third person, it forces them to go deeper whether they're aware of it or not. They think losing their personality and their, their individuality. But actually, when the story comes back, they've always gone deeper. What is the future of physical wine magazines like miningism? I mean, you publish online and you publish in paper form. What is the future? Are they both gonna five? Well, they sort of have to. If you look at what's happened around the world, there's no print publication that I know of that started as print and went online and survived. Or if they do survive, they get skimpier and they get worse. There's something about print, even if, like, I personally choose to subscribe to things on the iPad, but having something in print gives it added gravitas and prestige, which is one of those curious things. So when the day comes that, vogue, for example, is longer published in print when you can't see fashion in glorious inks and in glossy paper. It will be a it will be a huge loss. Hopefully, that day won't come. So you still think there's a future for traditional print journalism? I hope So, I mean, everybody is scrambling at the moment trying to work out a way to to deal with it, whether it's going to have to be something like something like a government stepping in and doing a BBC style thing, whether it's going to be private donors it's, you know, wine writing is part of this, and it's one one of the reasons I'm quite passionate about it, even though on the one hand, it's about it's about food and drink and it's about leisure time. It is nevertheless part of a great tradition of free speech, and if we let that go, we've lost something, you know, precious and crucial. I mean, is there something important? Obviously, if I write something on I'll I'll do a post online on my blog, for example, our website, wherever it is. Normally, there's no editor behind me. It's just my thought spending mistakes and everything. How important is the editor to to keep not just for accuracy, but, or or grammar, but also for sort of decorum to make sure that nobody gets offended or libelous state first of all, I have to say despite what I'm saying, there is a place for, you know, for first thoughts and, you know, that's what the internet's very good at, and I'm not at all suggesting that that that should stop. It's just that, it shouldn't be to the exclusion of everything else. When you're talking about editors, I think the problem is actually reverse. I think people are too timid and sometimes they need an editor to give them permission to be a bit more hard hitting and to say things that need to be said. Social media has made this a lot worse. We live in a culture now where you're always on show. You've become a brand. You become very aware of your brand you become aware of other people's brands. Everybody thinks that they've got a right to their own dimension to be discussed the way that they want. And so, people are gradually becoming more polite and more timid because they don't want to do anything that won't get them the likes and click and retweets on social media. So sometimes you actually need an editor to push them to say, you're doing publicity for this person, and I don't want publicity. I want the story. And sometimes, and that means asking them hard questions sometimes. But you can also get likes online for when people will talk in English term complete bollocks, and you post into actually what you just said on your Facebook post is completely wrong in the fact. And I'm gonna show you the fact x y zed as this, this, this, this, this, this, and this. You are completely wrong about what you're saying. You also get likes as well, don't you? You do. But as a as publication or as a as a professional writing, you absolutely don't want to be in a position where, you know, the crowd is coming to tell you how wrong you are. And and if you are actually wrong, if you haven't done basic due diligence, that's not a situation a writer wants to get into. If you're talking about controversy, that's a different thing. Yeah. Controvision will bring you a lot of a lot of, clicks and comments. It's alright. So what's the future for mining as as a print publication? The publisher, Kristov Minor, who's quite visionary, actually. He was the one that started this. He's a big believer in print. So print is going to be part of the mix. And, you know, we're we're also in Germany, and the German media generally has been a lot more resistant to digital than elsewhere in the world. In in what way, if we're putting pay, regulation or or just not wanting to to sec not wanting just to put everything on, give everything away, content away for free and seeing that print business decline. No. This there's been a whole lot of things, and I'm not talking about my own publisher here. I mean, I'm talking about some quite big flagship publications. You look at Dash Beagle, for example, which is a flagship magazine, current affairs magazine, the website's barely changed in years or since two thousand three since I first looked at it. I think there's a general Germans are much more concerned about privacy than other people. There's a very strong concern about digital life and privacy. So there's much more resistance to, Facebook and Google, and that's at a legislative relative level as well. I think Germans are quite practical. They want to see, you know, they haven't seen people make a lot of money out of online, so they're not willing to invest a lot of money in technology until they see the results. And of course, to do it properly, you do need a really big investment. The biggest lives that you can do it all for free and make lots of money. It's not true. Yeah. Sure. You need infrastructure behind it. Even if it's, the electronics side, they're actually putting posting stuff online. It takes a couple of clicks, right? But actually the editing and the, and also layout as well, design, which is often forgotten, isn't it on, in online, whereas, obviously, for you as a a sort of publishing a wine newspaper, you can't can't afford to have a photo that's that's not straight on one of your pages. Is there anything anything else that we've missed, although you want to add to what you already. Obviously, you're ferociously, and, I'm very glad to hear it sort of pro the print side of things. I I prefer a print magazine. I like, you know, if you're sitting on the loo, for example, I'd rather have that than an iPad. I mean, if that falls into the loo, that's disaster. So I'm sorry to say that on, but it's true though. And I in the bath, you don't wanna get electrocuted in the bath by having some electronic device in there. Well, I suppose so far I've been very, you know, I've been very critical of of various things, but I should say, privically on the good side that the amount of talent that has been unleashed is really fantastic. Online. Yeah. That the fact that people who would never have had a chance to have their voices heard can have their voices heard. And that the amazing thing is is that with all of the millions and millions and millions of pages in the world. If you speak with a a authority voice or a funny voice or a rare voice or, you know, you have a different point of view, people will notice you. It's amazing. And and that wasn't that was never true before. So So do you think the they can actually open doors for independent writers who've never been published in a print magazine before to get maybe hired. Absolutely. I I I found people online that I I look at what they're doing and I think, oh, this person's really got some talent, and I've offered them gigs in the magazine. Yeah. They've accepted. Oh, that's good. So what what is your parting piece of advice as an editor to anybody that's gonna write anything whether it is in print or online? Show it to somebody and show it to somebody who you can trust not to just, give you compliment about it, show it to somebody who's opinion that you trust, who's going to tell you the truth about it. Right. You want an honest editor or an honest friend, somebody who can look at it and say, I I don't have a clue what you're talking about here, or I got really bored at this point, you know, find that person and, and use them, you know, they call them beta readers, find a beta reader. Okay. Well, we've got several beta testers listening to this podcast, and all of my bumbling questions will be edited out, and all of your very eloquent answers will be kept it's been fascinating to talk to you. Fascinating to meet you as well. I know you've edited some of you. You you were you were you edited by someone who's just unrecognizable. I spent so long in my article, but it was great. Were you upset? No. Not at all. No. No. No. Because you got all the you distilled all the facts and, that were in there and any any facts that maybe weren't a hundred and ten percent relevant were not in the make were were not in the article. So, yeah. So would you write for us again? Yeah. If you get, I'm desperate. I know I've been a bit in the street trying to, you know, an impoverished podcast host, you know, no one's hiring me. No, of course, I won't do that. Oh, that's my other piece of advice. Don't give up so easily. Lots of people pitch me for the first time, and I can't take lots and lots of stories because it's just not the room. And often people pitch me stuff that I've already run or whatever. So I say And then at the end, I always say, if they're a good writer, I always say, but the door is open, and they never come back. Well, there you go. Anybody that's a budding wine writer? And literally, even if you've never been published before, get hold of, listening, you can find miningers online, miningers wine business international, as Felisti Carter, at the it. It'll be brutalized. No. If you get four hundred emails like a Monday morning, you can blame me, but, I agree. I think it's, I think the nice thing about having new talent coming into one writing to one writing myself is it keeps you, keeps one on one's toes. And, and that's what it's about. I think when there's just one or two voice, I think we suffered from that in wine journalism, maybe recently with sort of a dominant, maybe, possible critical view about wine styling without naming names that I think had a really negative effect. I think we're coming out of that now. So, yeah, the more the merrier and hopefully more magazines as well are yours. Thanks for listening. Thank you, Matthew. It's been a real pleasure to see And I will I will you on Monday morning and you get sixteen article ideas from me. Okay? Fantastic. Follow Italian White Podcast on Facebook and Instagram.