Ep. 831 Robert Joseph | Uncorked

Hello, everybody. My name is Holly 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. Two years ago, Robert Joseph and I traded our passports for microphones and launched the first pandemic wine webinar series, real business of wine. This year, we finally got to sit down in person for our first real life interview since twenty twenty. Listen in today as we talk wine thinking, marketing, selling, distributing, labels, branding, Oh, and just about anything else that comes our way. Let's get into it. Okay, Robert. We're right back to where we were two years ago. And in fact, I went back to my diary. You and I were in London together two years ago, then we were supposed to go to Georgia together. And then we were both we both happen to be going to provine, and all of that got canned And you and I decided to put our graying hair and tired eyes on YouTube or all of the wine industry to see. Fine. That's I went gray doing that. This is true. I did it publicly. It's all over YouTube. Yes. So thank you for being here with me today. I really appreciate it. Absolutely. And thank you for jumping in on my interview with Ricardo Pasco. It was nice. It was nice to have what felt like the team back together. That was lovely for me. And it was also I I love what the the best ones are doing, and I think that they represent quite a lot for what's happening in in Italy right now and has been happening for a while. And what I'm seeing now happening in France, which is really exciting. Okay. So we we've had VIN Expo. We've gotten to walk through all of those busy busy halls, which each had their own unique personality. It was fascinating for me. I think partially coming out of two years of of being confined, but also just seeing that from the fridge perspective because it's so vastly different to other similar trade shows. You went in, and that's what I wanna talk about today. So we all know you as the writer, as minigers, as, the wine thinker, as the presenter. You know, it is about the thoughts and future proofing the wine industry, but you own a wine brand. Cove. And and you are in that space as the owner of a French wine brand. And I I really wanna hear your thoughts on how if things change, what were you looking for? Are we going far enough? Is anybody going too far? Are some ideas just full of shit in practice? So he get down to us. What do you think about what we saw at the next bill this year? Well, I think that what we I think about French, which has always interested me out. I lived in France for six years, is the French say, oh, we don't do we don't revolution, we don't do revolution, we do evolution. Things change gradually, and I think that's absolutely untrue. I think what happens in France is that they believe that things are evolving, but every now and then we get such a an evolutionary hiccup if you like or jump or leap that you could call that revolutionary and that to me in maybe two years, between French shows, that as as a an impact, but there have been things that I'm now seeing happen in France that certainly were not happening three or four years ago. And the same thing in the past that we saw, which was I remember everyone in France telling me that Van de France, so van de France, the idea of blending wine from different regions with the great margins of unthinkable in France, appolations, what everything is about. And they hate Cresto suddenly we have this single van de France, and it is growing. It's growing fast. And, I know Validate Pissure who runs that organization in France. She's had one of the busiest stands at the fair. And it's booming and the fascinating thing about Land de France. Is that it's she's got all sorts of names, of people including producers in Bordeaux and burgundy, the Rowan and big companies and small companies, all of whom were latching on to a potential of doing something different, not necessarily following the rules, which, brings me into how I started all this sixteen years ago. Well, hold on. Hold on. Before before we get into La Grande, I have a question about that. So, okay, We've got French wineries that are embracing this. Do you think that this is profits? They just found that it was more profitable to go that route? Do you think that they are listening to consumers Do you think that they want to be unbound by the heritage that has confined us? Like, internal, external philosophical. Why do you think that we've got so many people taking this on board now? All and none of the above, I guess. I think that France is a philosophically, driven country, and it's a great moment in a conference. I don't know whether it really happens at a profitable moment where somebody stood up and from a new world and made them describe what they were doing. And, a French man stood up and said, so I understand, how what you're doing works in practice, but how is it work in theory? Right. The the the French model is based on a lot of the arising and beliefs in in in stock. And that is relevant because people that you would imagine being commercially driven, including French supermarkets, for example. Are part of that philosophical game. So you had consumers in France wanting to buy varietal wines. There was evidence of that ten years ago, and the supermarkets weren't giving it to them. Because the supermarket buyers didn't really want to believe in it themselves. That, Rosay, that's Rosay's for women and for the summer. So, you know, we don't focus on Rosay, and then go back in history Champagne rose. It was just the chorus girls. You know, everything is boxed in its little category. And then somebody somebody works out that, oh, krug and Don Perignons seem to be selling the rose champagne for quite a lot of money. Maybe we could take that seriously. One or two companies were beginning to sell these Van and Sepage rattle lines successfully in France. Maybe that would work, but it takes time. And unless you get, the disrupt is the disruption is gonna happen either by a disruptive French business or Frenchman and there aren't enough of those. There are now more than the works generation change which I'll come back to. Or it's a foreigner. And so some of the most successful or outsider, if you like. And some of the most successful things happening in French, swine have been driven by outsiders or one kind or another. And and in some sense, you are one of them. I mean, you did live in France, but you are You are an Englishman. You have a brand that is led by three Brits producing French wine for the broad market globally. Are you a disruptor? Yeah. No. I mean, there is Is it a disruptive brand? No. We were disruptors before the word disruptor born being disruptive was really commonly used because in two thousand and when we started this two thousand and five, I wanted to make because I didn't know it wouldn't it wasn't easy to do. I thought, Hey, let's go and compete with Mondavi and Harghees and all these New World brands because I'd seen how successful they were in the UK, amongst other places. I thought, and France wasn't doing it. There were very few successful in fact, including European brands that delivered large volumes consistently of a wine that people can buy and enjoy some. It's all much more complicated and there are all these things about when to drink it and how to drink it and that one sounded label. And I thought could we why couldn't we do that and we had no money, and I didn't really understand that you couldn't start a brand like this without lots of money. And so what happens? I talked to Hugh Roman who I've known for a long time who've made wine and seventeen other countries. And I've known his skills. I've given him as a journalist and a organizer of competitions that had given him various prizes or handed over various prizes that he was a fan of what he could do. And we talked about doing something together over the years that we talked about maybe making a small little project that most people think of on me making wine. And we thought this would be fun to be easily big. And then I knew, Kevin Shaw, who was superstar, label designer already working in London for a number of brands, outside the UK. So he did go to CFT for Michelle Roland. And he did Henry's gin. I think it was around that time. And basically, the three of us at Wright will pool our talents the thing I already understood, I've done a book on wine labels. So I understood the value of packaging labels, and I knew we couldn't afford to pay anyone to do it. So making the label designer a partner, this was the first stage in the game. We all knew we needed to find the production partner. So having a wine maker is fine, but you need vineyards. We didn't have any money to buy vineyards. And in any case, to be honest, the project we had in mind involved far more wood and far far more vineyards than you'd ever be able to own. Now in Australia or in, states, for example, you would just say, right? I'm gonna buy grapes from lots of different places and you get a winery and you do France, you can't do that. There aren't people who aren't from selling grapes and the way you see them you work. On the other hand, what you have is cockroaches and you have cockroaches, like ours with six thousand hectares of land and one thousand two hundred members and lots and lots of different grapes and, soils and altitudes and so on, and more importantly, and skills and great equipment, but more importantly, an attitude that worked. So we also wanted to try and do something in Bordeaux. And to be entirely honest, that was a nightmare because we never found the people in Bordeaux who had the openness of spirit to try and do something new. Whereas the people we found in, to see Jean David in Lobadoc, were really ready to try something different. But when we started to go through the probability of being the concept of what we were talking about, other French people said you are mad, you will get bust. This is not how things are done. And the name of the brand, the the the the the the black sheep on the label was reflective of the fact that we were the odd ones out, we were the and one of my friends John Hegarty who also has a vineyard in the region. His advertising agency had the black sheep as its logo, by chance, and his line was when others zig zag And that's what we were doing. So you said something, you said I didn't know it wasn't easy to do. And I actually wanna talk about this because this is something we encounter all the time, right, with this romanticized view of wine brand ownership that we're gonna do it, and it's gonna be magical, and we're gonna have a wonderful lifestyle, and we're gonna travel and eat and drink without the understanding of how much business is involved in a solid long lived enterprise, whether it's the research, the development, the partners, the capital, the evolution. I'm curious if when you're walking through something like VIN Expo, do you see younger brands, newer brands that are coming in with better business acumen? Are we learning anything as an industry? Yeah, again, yes and no. I think that we now have business wine business. So you go back to the days when I first started, judging wine, looking at wine, at an amazing proportion of people making wine haven't been to winemaking school in those days. They'd learn from their father or whatever. And if he made wine well, they learned that and if he didn't, they didn't. So now we've got a complete generation of being to wine school. We've got another subset now who've been to wine business who will have some kind or at least have done subtle any. It's a subset and it's a small subset, but it's it exists and what's interesting is in every region there are now more people who's got a business eye than would have been the case twenty or thirty or forty years ago. However, you still have a lot of people who've inherited their business who got into it for various reasons. So that there's less business acumen than you would see in a place like Australia or California or New Zealand where many people borrowed the money or had to raise a capital in recent times and have to have a plan of some kind to get it back We, when I just said that we didn't know how difficult it would be. One of the advantages that we had was that because scale was originally part of the plan from day one, it was never let's make a few hundred bottles of two thousand it was always, you know, how can we get bottles online in supermarkets? That meant thinking that through a day one. So why why we're still here? What brand has has gone on to to succeed as much as it has? Was that we went and found distributors right at the beginning. That's been part of the business. Now, to answer your questions, sorry, did you put your parenting? I still think that so many of the exhibitors I'm seeing as an expert still imagine I make nice wine. I put a nice label on it. Somebody's gonna come out and buy it. Well, well, hold on. So you said we knew from day one that we had to get our wine on grocery store shelves. Now we have huge, shade given in the wine industry to use, you know, kind of like the vernacular of my kids for brands who want to make extreme broad market brands who want to be on Walmart shelves, who want to be on Aldi shelves, you know, that they were like, oh, this is not fine wine making. How are how are you seeing or are you seeing a difference, a change in this where we're going from sort of, oh, it is all about artisan and fine wine production to, oh, look, actually, we do need to be in broad public spaces in order to be profitable and financially sustainable for a lifetime. I have to difficult. Be careful about this because, I've lived through this period from the When I first got into wine, certainly in the UK, I'd be living France for a bit, but in the 1980s, it's what I would call, I like to call the summer of love of wine. Where we in the UK really discovered wine and happened in the states a few years later, but it was a moment where there was huge excitement. And actually when I think about wine and supermarkets in my romantic vision, it's at a time where there was a real excitement of new wines, new brands, new producers, all sorts of things in those supermarkets. Those supermarkets are are to use your word of a shadow or a shape of shadow of what they were, the range of wines, far it's interesting and to be brutal, I really don't necessarily want to be on a lot of those shelves today where I might like to be on them, but it's not gonna be the competition I'm sitting against is not as exciting. I think we have seen this polarization in the last five or ten years, particularly where you've got, on one hand, you've got what is selling, if you like in broad market, most of which is designed for broad market, but without much passion and imagination in many cases, and in some cases with lots of that, you've then got the fine wine, which is obviously burgundy's of ludicrous prices and other regions and so on. And then you've got this third area, which is if you like the natural, wines that are not necessarily being bought because they taste better in classic terms, but they're being brought on the values that they're carrying in terms of winemaking, the winemaking they may taste better for those people who are buying them, they may taste worse. But those are three, I I see a three corners of the triangle. And then I'm gonna bring that down. I'm gonna break that down into, marketing language. What we have is we've got, We have prestige brands. Right? So that's our fine line. And we have what you're talking about is we've got, purpose driven brands, and we have profit driven brands. So prestige, purpose, and profit. I'm not saying that this is a Venn diagram where nothing ever overlaps, but, you know, do you feel like what what do you feel like the intersection of those three spaces are? Can you be purposeful and profitable. Can you be purposeful and prestige? I mean, we all know you can be prestige and profitable. So we probably don't have to go down that particular fine wine route. Although you and I could argue that. So, yeah, You see, I don't like it. I can describe the polarization. I think it's it's essentially unhealthy and unhelpful. So Gallow for argument's sake, very cleverly is in all of those cameras. And has got some very smart wines that they they make from Central States and us in in California. They they know which bit they want to do. Right. But what well, hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Yeah. But La Grande noir, I can say, because I know you and love you, is not Gallo. Right? There unfortunately, sadly, for you, it's not Gallo. So how does a brand that is not one of these just powerhouse brands in wine. How do they walk this space between profits, purpose, and prestige? What does a brand like yours, prioritize? To come back to your point. No one brand is Gallo because Gallo is an umbrella, if she likes. Within the sort of my world of France, one of the people I admire who I guess is a competitor that I have huge admiration for, is Gerard Badfran. Because Jirabertron is making, on the one hand, he's making Rosier that sits alongside our Rosier in US supermarkets, beautifully packaged, very nice, provence style, but actually looked it up Rosier, very profitable. But he's also now making a hundred and fifty dollar Rosay from a single vineyard in Longerville, which is the most expensive Rosay in France or possibly the world. And he's got a lot of things in between including a wine he's making with Banjovi, so if you like a a celebrity wine. Now all of the the point I'm trying to make here, which I think is important, is understanding who each wine is for. So back to to to La Grande, We have now organic wines within the range. For people who want to buy organic romar, that is something that we know that the distributors and their customers want. Now we're not gonna make the entire range organic On the other hand, saying no to organic isn't necessarily the answer either for it. So it's actually learning from the market evolving with it and giving people what. Either they already know they want for what we feel that they're going to want as the train. Do you make mistakes? Yes. And we make lots of I mean, lots and lots. You're one of the only people I know who'll talk about them. You know, brands will talk about their mistakes. So the first easy mistake we made was calling our first wines, our first white wine is a chardonnay, and we put that onto the market, and it didn't work because in two thousand and five, in the US red brand and red lens and white lens were tiny. And so you were we had a capillary sera or shiraz as we go through it at the time. And chardonnay and they were over there. Our importers said, actually, if you wanna sell chardonnay, we'll sell that wine, call it chardonnay. It's eighty five fifteen. It's legally chardonnay. So suddenly now it says Sharave on the front and on the back label, we say Charave Yani, but that was a issue like an initial mistake for the US market. Second, interesting mistake we made was, along the way, was in packaging because I hate natural corkes. We were our importers said please put wine in natural corkes. Is that okay? Maybe that we tend to know my cork, which was at least more reliable? They said, no, we like natural courts. Our customers want natural courts. And, then everyone said, hey, let's try screw caps for everything. And, yeah, I was really delighted. We put all our wines and screw caps. These are twelve dollar wines, which are the idea what we're trying to do with our twelve dollar wine, which is important to this whole story, is we're trying to give people a fifteen to twenty five dollar experience for ten to twelve dollars. So the the labeling, the whole thing is supposed to make them feel that And the screw cap just wasn't gonna cut that. Now now we understand why you're so anti screw cap. I'm not. Sorry. Absolutely not. We use screw caps on our whites and our pinot noir, and I love screw caps, but I understand why the consumer who is trying to buy a twenty five dollar wine for fifty for fifteen dollars, and it's in the case of a cabernet sauvignon. Doesn't want a cabinet serving in the screw cap because he's putting it on his table at home in front of people whose only experience of wine is with a a cork screw product. I wouldn't say natural cork. And the screw cap looks cheap So basically we're not doing him any favors. So we've now gone back. Now we'll use GM. And it's still it looks like a call. It behaves like a call, but he or she still gets to use that's good that the courses receive. It's actually putting yourself in the shoes of the, end user. And then lastly, if you've brought the stakes, it is the relationship that you have and or don't have or the and the distributors you have and you don't have. So one of the subjects is I don't even wanna teach you talks about wine and so on. I often ask people, so tell me what letter d is important in wine, and that you see them hearing it go, oh, died is high. Dourou. Dourou. Anything else, and eventually somebody goes, distribution and very lucky if I get anyone to say distribution, they don't even want to do that. One of the words I've never heard is depletions. Now depletions is the most boring word in the world, but it's actually what it is is we manage to sell a container of wine to somewhere. And you're sitting down reeking your champagne and you've forgotten all about it and six months later, a year later, somebody says, Hey, if those guys ordered another container yet or not, and they haven't. Well, the reason they haven't is because the wine is sitting in their warehouse. So to me, one of the first things you need to do as a producer is to keep is keep track of whether your wine is actually going to people's homes or restaurants and certain being drunk and that's a bit like being in a restaurant and imagining if you're not noticing the plates coming back from the tables heaped with food, you're not noticing the fact that people aren't enjoying their meals. So something that, yeah, I know you and I have discussed this, and it's a big bug booth for us, is that it's not just distribution, but it's historic distribution, it's balance of power and distribution. It's good communication and distribution. It's clear reporting. Like, distribution is the number one issue that we deal with with our global clients because we're so removed from essential data. I mean, whether it's consumer feedback, whether it's consumer data, whether it's depletion information, you know, and and it is it is a challenge that sometimes just seems completely unconquerable because we know we have to have the distribution. Right? So what is it going to take? Is it going to be brands dictating new terms of distribution relationships, at which point, who can do that? Is it going to be distribution realizing that there are an awful lot of fairly shitty distributors out there and them actually learning to compete with each other for the value of their services, how do we change this? Because it seems pretty entrenched to me. And I think that it's it's a very good question, and it actually allows me to move into your territory a little bit because one of the problems is is you're relying if I'm selling wine. We sell one in sixty four countries now. There is no way that any one person or indeed any organization can employ enough people to really understand what's happening in Poland, what's happening in Bauchino Fassil or what's happening in Brazil. Every one of the markets is different. And so you are reliant generally on what your distributor is telling you. And so, basically, the fuel distribution says, no one in this market likes Yongnier. We make it very good to come here. You accept that he's not gonna sell in the Yongnier for you. And then one day, you'll be talking to a competitor and they'll say, hey, you know, in x market. We're doing brilliantly with our beyonde. And you go, hold on. I thought people in that country don't bring beyonde. Our importers told us they don't. And then you've gotta go back to the drawing board and find out whether it's just because your competitor is making it better or different beyonde to yours. It suits the market better. Maybe his decision is about it. Now the one thing that we do have, and that's why we can move into your field. Today, the information is more available. You can actually, if you can spend a little bit of time a little bit of money, you won't be able to globally, but you can say But is it really a little bit of time and a little bit of money? I mean, like, come on, let's face it. Is it a little? Because it's actually a lot. It's a lot of time, and it's a lot of money. Yes, but it depends if there's a, like, it's like losing weight or getting fit with doing the answers of gap between doing nothing and really doing it properly. And even doing something is a step towards doing it properly because actually when you do a little bit of something, it's gonna give you more of a taste of doing it properly. So I'm I'm gonna actually disagree with that, and I'll tell you why. So what we've seen are brands, and this is not exclusive to wine. This is more the size of the brand and the amount of time, effort, and money that they have to invest. Okay? So their currencies. They do something what I'm going to unfortunately call half ass. They do it with a minimum amount of either knowledge or guidance. They invest in it. They get poor returns, and they assume that the poor returns are because that particular solution doesn't work. And I think that that is a huge problem for forward momentum. I think it's a problem in any there's I think it's always been a problem. You could argue that even fifty years ago, whatever, somebody wasn't advertising their product. It wasn't using whatever the advertising tools of the day were available. They placed their first advertisement in a local newspaper magazine. It didn't work, and some of them stopped advertising. I think it's something that you could argue goes with the territory of leaving your comfort zone and doing something different. However, what I have seen not just with ourselves, but seen it in, in other places. Wine companies, and our biggest problem that we don't have a lot of money. We don't have very good margins and we don't have a lot of money either for research or marketing or anything. But if we take the bit of money we've got, we put a person on the ground in America. And the person we've got on the ground wasn't great, actually. But they the point about the person on the ground was they were not the salesperson. And their job is to go around talking to customers or potential customers and sound you have the market. And I was talking to another couple of competitors because you meet people at first. I've been exposed down for a beer, and we'd all been doing the same sort of thing. And we all agreed that it'd be great to have ten people on the ground in the market besides of America because you really can't scratch the surface. But having a person there whose job is not to sell wine necessarily, he he should help to, if he should help to facilitate sales, but part of their job is to come back to us and say, Hey, your vionnetes, our vionnet is not doing very well, but our competitors is doing brilliantly. We need to talk to our distributors. So you talk about mistakes. Our rosé, which is now doing pretty successfully, we initially let a lot of people put it in a clear order glass bottle and it got attractive. But very soon, looking at all the shelves, all the provence bottles, not all of them, a lot of them are very nice. So we said, right, we want to change our bottle shape. And our distributors said, ah, no. No. No. We don't need to do that. It takes more room on the space on the shelf and so on. So we didn't do it for a year or two because we were waiting for them to give us the green light to do it. And our guy on the ground said, you know, you really should be doing and on year two or three of that process, we said, right, we're doing it. We should have done it on day one. So it is actually a combination of, yes, listen to your distributor rather than listen to no one. But b, get other information. So, you know, wearing my other hat with with miningers, my business at National, one of the things we're trying to do is to give people quick reads online where you can say I wanna know about the Brazilian market or the Polish market and just get something in there. Now if you, if that interests you enough, then maybe to your point, you can go and buy a one thousand ten, two thousand dollar report on that country and do something else. But at least you may know more than nothing. What I'm taking away from that is we have, right now, surf fate of data coming at us. Right? We've got I I think a heavy reliance or belief in quantitative data because that's what we had access to for so long. What I would counter, based on what I'm hearing from you, but also just the work that we do is that social media and the internet, emails, websites, events, you know, we now actually have even if we are operating in global markets where we can't have tasting rooms and pop ups and location, we do have access to qualitative data and that we need a better way to gather and to analyze, to read, and then to react to qualitative data. Do you feel like that that's valid representation of what you're saying? It is totally valid, but the the big problem is that we tend in this industry, and it's probably true in all industries to to, focus in on the data we like. So if I'm making an orange wine, I'm gonna hook on to everybody's report. Anything I read read anyway that says orange wine is really taking off in Japan or London or whatever. And an open, you know, I'll get six or seven of the right people are saying it's great and it's working and so on. That may or may not actually be reflected in the the the real market, and it may be that yes, there's a market for orange wine, but there's only market for a dozen of them. And fifteen or twenty people have already turned up there with theirs and I'm gonna be number eighteen. And it's not gonna be as easy as the qualitative data made it seem to me because I wasn't actually saying, yes, okay. In Berlin, they're drinking orange wine, are they drinking orange wine in Munich and ink alone and all these other places. So I think it's it is quant and qual together, but with a clear view of saying even if I want people to drink my Vionier, which I do. I've got to accept that my Vionier is a harder sell than my rosé, which we know both through quantitative and qualitative data, is a popular settlement. I I thought that this was something that really stood out for me being at VIN Expo. It's easy for any of us to be in a space like that. And to see everyone who's in our section of our hall as our competition. Right? And in fact, this is if we're talking about quality and and quant data or business insights, This is the space that I notice successful wine brands are leaping into, which is not identifying with other wine brands as their competition. Like, they're identifying with other brands in other sectors, you know, it might be beer and it might be spirits, but it might also be that they identify themselves as part of a luxury market, or they identify themselves as part of a a movement, or they identify as part of a purpose Right? So they're not a wine brand. They're a purpose driven brand. Coming from the experience of being part of a cooperative, like, how much is how much does that purpose matter to the grandeur, and does it? I will be honest. And so then in the past, you know, it's always That's why I can ask because I know you will. In the past, it's always mattered because we really love working with the people we're working with. And at every level, and these are because it's it's it's actually a collection of corporates. It's a manager of each cooperative, and each one is responsible to all the members that they have to deal with. And it's at a very human level. And so we've done things like trying to bring sustainability into the whole business and introducing them to what's happening in New Zealand and elsewhere before possibly anybody else is doing and it'd be a cooperative We had to have buy in from the growers. It wasn't a question for the boss saying, Hey, everyone's gonna do this. We had to actually persuade a lot of people, who weren't necessarily, aware of of the trends, and reasons, and so on. So on that sense, we were aware, but I think increasingly today. And I have to be very honest, the cooperative wine agriculture in general, but if you're talking wine movement in Europe, which is still responsible for half the wine, it's huge. Nobody really none of the the wine writers, I know give it a fraction of the the, awareness it deserves. Generally, they were bad. If you go back to the eighties and early nineties, the quality was appalling. And the reason that, my partner, Hugh Roman got to work in seventeen countries was that retailers in the UK and elsewhere. Sent people like him in to make wine in cooperatives that were otherwise making it badly. So there is a there's a real background history of of the cooperative movement not having the reputations on I think that your, to your point about purpose today, whilst an awful lot of people are really focused in on, but maybe lovely if all wines made by little families on medical estates and so on, it doesn't work. Their distribution model. Someone can do it, but it's not really scalable across a country like France, Italy, whereas the cooperatives are potentially the strengths of some of those countries So basically, I think today, we are far more aware of that human level than we were and the and the purpose of it and to date. To me, sustainability is as much at a human level that all of those families and people in those villages who actually want to be in the wide world, as the chemicals and everything else we're putting into the soil, but let's be honest about it. In the future, far more Vidiculture is going to be done by machine. And because it's not much fun, it's all very well people sitting in London and you walk imagining these. I've actually been out there in those vineyards in January and February and pruning vines and so on. You know, if there are other things you could be doing in your life, you might well want to do them, and it's a nice little machine that you can go and do that. The same thing was to machine harvesting. Like, I get so annoying when I hear people sort of waxing and they're riffing about wines should be picked by by by human beings. Which human beings? You know, we haven't got lots of people who are available in August or September. Every year, who ready to do that for two or three weeks. So, you know, generally, I talked to a, an Australian the other day. And with this this for the somebody at journalists were saying it wouldn't be a news, hand pick, hand pickers, or we could pick by hand. And they said, no, we don't. We don't buy machine, and they said, well, Getting the people, they're all cambodians. You want your your grapes picked by hand in Australia. The chances are they're not gonna be Australian so we're gonna do it. And he said, actually, the machine does it as well. He's selling a thirty or forty dollar wine that wins trophies. And he said we've done the tastings, the machine versus the human human picked, wine rates. They're exactly the same. Now there are certain styles of wine or a certain styles of vineyard and so on, where that won't necessarily be the case, but just and this people won't, this because I only hope this a few days ago myself. Until now, machines could only pick on the flat on a more or less flat land. But I've been talking to somebody who works in Portugal. We've got some steepest vineyards in the world and there are machines now that can do forty percent slopes. And you have to design the vineyards to accommodate them, of course, but but if you've ever tried being in those floats, picking those grapes day after day for two weeks, actually the machine is going to be relevant. So what we're really talking about here is this push back against the idea that wine is a commodity or wine can be commodified. And hold on. Just bear with me on this. Because what we don't talk about often enough in the discussion of sustainability is financial sustainability. You know, we actually must have better, more sustainable financial models for the global future of our industry. We cannot we cannot do better. We cannot give more. We cannot pay more. We cannot hire more. We can't market more. We can't distribute more. We can't, you know, grow more if we don't have better financial sustainability models within our industry. And yet, The, discourse that we see in the industry, it may not be public discourse, is that the more profitable we become, the more of a sellout we are. Can I just pick up because you use the word that that I find first anyway, which is commoditization? We don't want wine to be a commodity. Why has always been a commodity. Why has been a commodity for as many thousands of years as it has existed because essentially people bought. There's lots of images of hundreds and hundreds of barrels of wine people went out to buy hundreds of barrels of French wine or Renish wine or sac or whatever it was, and it didn't have a producer's name on it. It was what was turned, but there were some merchants and the merchants saw that but it was you bought it and sold it like orange juice or coffee or anything else. Now today, you think, oh, it's not quite like that. It's much better. We have appylations and so on. If you stop and think about it for a moment, The Swedish monopoly every year or LCbo in Canada, the other market there, they have tenders. You know, we want to buy cabernet sauvignon with oak or without oak wood. That's a commodity. And we want to buy geoffrey Chompetton, or we want to buy Chateau Neurf du par or Shabbly or pinot grigio. They're all commodities. And when I lived in burgundy in the eighties, there was a fix that was a price per barrel or per liter, of each village in Burgundy and Proullini Malachee, Chevron, Pamela, they all have a price, close the price bracket, and essentially the people who made the people who made the highest volumes per hectare, we made more more wine per vine and spent the least money on oak did pretty well with that because they got the minimum of what was a pretty narrow band. And the guy at the other end actually was being penalized, and that's when some of those people, and Burgundy is a great example of this. Some of those burgundy producers actually stop selling their wine to the merchants and started bottling themselves. And so what you have in burgundy, and this is what a lot of people won't wanna hear, is you have brands. Romani Conte is a brand. Amar Russo is a brand. And if you like is a supreme brand, because if I want to buy burgoy in Blanc or in Eligote, which reminds I could buy for very few, dollars. If it's got a loire label on it, I'm gonna pay a huge price because the loire brand has transcended. The rest of it. She has, if you like, de commoditized, the product that is generally still commoditized. Okay. So how many years have you been going to VINexpo? One hundred and five. I seriously can remember, I I really can't answer it. We've literally worked it out, but it was certainly in the eighties, and I actually took heart in a TV program, local TV. I don't know how local or national it was with the head of an expert. I mean, the debate is whether the expo should allow in foreign companies. Give us a French fair for, essentially, for Bordeaux and for the French industry. And ironically, that is what had just gone back to being in Bordeaux. So history. All these years of rocking up to VIN Expo, and brands. Have you seen a change when you walked into that room this year or those four rooms, are there more brands in that room? I mean, I I'm thinking about that that Bordeaux hall that was just unbelievable. Right? You go through the the I guess it's the three other halls, each other halls. You walk in, and it's like, you know, I I in my head, I think South Coast Plaza, because I'm a Californian, It's like the south coast plaza of wine. There were brands in that room. Are they all big brands? Are small companies become or small small producers becoming brands? Okay. So the two responses that is there are labels and there are brands. And the brand to me is something that isn't a commodity. And by which I mean if I go out and buy some coffee, I don't care whose coffee are buying or some potatoes. The moment I care about who grew potatoes, it's left, being a commodity potato, and it's become a branded potato. Important thing about brands to me is one one sculpture member, there's a target audience. So those burgundy brands those burgundy labels may not look like a brand to lots of other people. So anybody who doesn't know about burgundy, they're just a name on a label. It may well be that that person who only produces a few thousand bottles of cases in one year is a strong brand to his target and he doesn't want and can't go beyond that. However, those are the minority of the picture. So to your point, most of the wines out there are labels A few of them are brands and it is very hard to tell which is which unless you actually are right within their little world who their target audience is. Last thing, I've saved my favorite question for last. This is just fun to talk about, and we did a whole real business of wine on this. Labels. Holy shit. The labels, the the, merchandising stands. I mean, I've got picture after picture on my phone because, yes, there's still so many of those, like, old tried and true French labels, but there were some fabulous labels this year. I think that's been easily got there first, way way. When I was reading my book on labels, France was dull as everything. Italy was beginning, and you think it's everyone does good labels. That. That's the danger I'm doing work in moldova. There's lots of great labels on moldovan wines. Having a good label now, you know, it's like having a good singer or musician where there's loads and loads of them. How do you stand up? What to me is fascinating about from the arts? We talk about labels. Buffalo shapes, you know? Or Bottle shapes. Yeah. And that's do you need to change, but nobody is really focused on the fact that one region went out in a limb with bottle shapes and hasn't really been followed by anyone else, but because they're different, and that's provence. Because until provence roseate really came along, the only There were some label games being so so some bottle shapes that were interesting in Champagne because you had dom pairing on some of the others. So that was a place where you did it and there's no accident or coincidence that Champaign houses belong to the company's own perfume businesses and spirits businesses. But the rest of the world still went on and then all we have is the heavier version of the existing bottles, a little bigger border bottle loop. And then suddenly, provence comes along and says, Hey, we can do some different stuff. And so Jarabertron, has got his wonderful, you know, sort of pyramidal shape and lots of things ago. Mhmm. And the other thing that I really want to listen to you, if you wonder what I noticed this here at an iceberg, in the Bordeaux area, there were all the Bordeauxs in burgundy Bockers. And all those and those vines in both your bottles with single grape varieties. So pure Malbec and pure thirty pure calories. That's that is revolutionary and five or ten years ago, if you'd said twenty one, you know, that's what's gonna happen. And people would have said no, but what was interesting is that the one of the cooperatives, universities who bought these four, as I said, burgundy bottles, single varieties, very boldly labeled. They produce those at a chateau they own, which also has its own traditional border style, bordeaux traditional way. The traditional line is selected for seven euros fifty, the burgundy bottles are thirteen. So that just ends everything that anyone would still notice and be careful at this because I'm not. I that's the if you like the rack rate, that's the price they're asking. I have no way of knowing how well those wines are selling, how they're being accepted in the market. Sure. And so on, but it is a fact. And in terms of to to come back to what we're doing, not in terms of labels, but it kind of is. Ninety eight percent of what we do at the wrong law is IGP Bander P. We have a small amount of reserve, which is AOP, AOC, which under the longer dog label. And that's been working very well. Four years ago, monoprene, who are one of the more dynamic French retailers, anyone in Britain, those waitrose, they will sell them more interesting wines as a supermarket, a supermarket level. Came along to us and said we'd like your cabinet, your cabinet, Sarah, we'd like to buy it. We were happy with your price. There's only one request. Will you take the IGP off and put van de France on? Rand de France is in theory a lesser appellation. It's the lowest level in theory of those. And we said, yep, sure, you know, if you would buy it. They've been buying it. My wine is on sale. In every mono free in France with a with a wine range, and we've been in there for four years. If something's working, we are one of the least expensive Van de France in that in that range. We are selling for four euros ninety five, which in France is not that cheap for the sort of daily drinking sort of age wine. You can get a lot of appalachian longer dot wines for less than that. So why is our wine selling? Why did they ask for that and why is our wine selling as a Van de France? Because Van de France is now a disruptive. So segment if you like within the market because so many people who are trying to make wine doesn't fit into the old model. They're trying to make an orange wine, a natural wine, a rose at a place that doesn't make rose, a wine with a bit of residual sugar that doesn't have it. The whole range of wines that don't fit within the old model. And what they're doing is they say, okay, I'll call that Van de France. So Van de France is growing within France and it's growing in its original design as an export model. It's really taking off and we're actually working along with it now. I'll put verbatross on our lines in markets that want it. We'll go whenever designation works, but it shows how things are changing and how, you know, when we were starting the room, we were the black sheep. I think now there are a lot more black sheep out there along with us and the good news. You were the o g. You were the original granular. We were the original ones. And I think what I'm pleased to say in a way is that yes, it's gonna be tougher for us to keep being a bit different, but it's better for consumers because they're gonna get more experiences. That's a really lovely way to wrap this up. Actually, because the thing that you and I talk about whenever we talk about wine business, which we talk about it all the time, whether it's recorded or not, is we have to be more consumer facing. We gotta love our people more, you know, and if we love our people more it grows our brands, our labels, our businesses, our regions. So thank you. Thank you. It's great to do this. It's not for the system. It makes me dearly. It's so nice to see your face. Absolutely. We we did so many of these on video and the video won't go out But as always, I appreciate your your extreme cleverness. I think we need to just make this a series. Like, every couple months, we do an interview with Robert on what are the super are awesome things that you're thinking about right now, and it can be like our real business of line part two for the Italian line. It's a deal. And that's a wrap. Thanks for listening in today, and a very special thank you to my friend, Robert Joseph. 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