Ep. 1975 Bob Davidson | Voices With Cynthia Chaplin

Welcome to the Italian Great Geek podcast. Join us as we explore personal stories of travel and tasting with Italy's must know grape for idols. Chart your own course with my Italian Great Geek journal, your personal tasting companion to accompany the series. Available now on Amazon. With thanks to calendula and partners for their generous support with this project. Welcome to the Italian wine podcast. I'm Cynthia Chaplin, and this is voices. Every Wednesday, I will be sharing conversations with international wine industry professionals discussing issues in diversity, equity and inclusion through their personal experiences working in the field of one. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and rate our show wherever you get your pods. Hello. Welcome to voices. This is Cynthia Chaplin, and today I am so happy to have Bob Davidson with me. Bob is the wine training manager at Verison, the educational arm of Berkeley wine sellers in the UK, and he's focused on training and education to support gen z workforce. People born between nineteen ninety seven and two thousand and twelve, helping them to get into the wine industry and stay in the wine industry. So this is a topic very near and dear my current Bob. So thank you so much for coming on today. Real pleasure to be here. Thank you for asking me. Well, let's get your, sort of, back story a little bit here. You studied philosophy at eunice, and then you went into PR. So what was the path from PR to Verizon? How did you get into wine? Drinking, I'll be honest. It was, yeah, it was drinking. There was a lot of sitting around with wine when I was at uni, but I've always kind of been interested in food and drink, and my mom was always throwing into homebrew. So we did lots of wine and beer and stuff when I was growing up, and I was kinda saw the fermentation side of So, I mean, I got so you could say it's a winemaking background, but not not a usual one. Very cool. It would love to have. I mean, it was one of the home brews where you were putting things in the airing cupboard. It was exactly that. Yep. Yeah. I'd yeah. I'd I'd don't think I'd like the wine now, but it was, yeah, it was interesting to see it happen. So I was always kind of interested in it. And then, yeah, I was working, I was working in public relations for a couple of years, and then my friends started doing the immunigestic graduate scheme And then that seemed like a lot more fun than I was doing. So I went from a suit to a white van overnight pretty much. Perfect. Well, I think my I have an English husband, and I think he got in a lot of trouble at boarding school for trying to ferment things in airing cupboards. So I know all of that. But, yeah, so you moved on to Majestic. For those who are listening who don't know, it's a massive, wine spirits, alcoholic beverages retailer in the UK. And since then, your your wine career has covered all kinds of areas. You know, you did retail, you did fundraising at the drinks trust, fine wine sales, wine writing, working for a wine magazine and organizing for London wine fair. So how did you arrive, you know, sort of land up at Berkeley's sellers? And how did you get involved in wine education? Well, I was never really an educator. It was I just saw the job advertising. It sounds kind of interesting. I was not there at the beginning of Verizon as such, but I sold them their stand at London Windpair when they first came up with it, and I knew Clara quite well who, who launched it. And then it seemed like a nice company to work for an interesting project to to get involved with. And so, yeah, I know no kind of in education background. I just applied for the job and jumped in, and it's been, yeah, it's been interesting. That is so brilliant. I, for for people who listen to me, relatively frequently. I have four daughters and two stepsons. And I often say, you know, if you don't ask, you don't get, you know, people get sort of bogged down and I'm not qualified for this, if it sounds interesting, it's pretty likely that you've got some set of skills that are gonna go into that job. So I am I am always very proud of people who apply for jobs that they've never done before because that's the way to get ahead. So get on you. But it was some I quite liked the fact it was so it was an education model, but it was also they were quite, quite heavily bent on the commercial aspect and the application of it. So rather than education for education sake, but since there was, like a kind of a sales point of it. I mean, you know, I'm I'm quite like what we do as a job in the fact that you can see real benefit, tangible benefits with our customers and and in what we're doing. Absolutely. And I'm I've lived well, I lived in the UK for sixteen years, so I'm a big fan of Bergman sellers anyway. But, part of what I do in my life now is also wine education for WSTT and for, Beanitally international and Italian wine academy and things. So I'm super interested in what you're doing. Let's talk about Verizant. It's it's the educational program at Bergmans. And you have done this on trade education for almost a decade, but now Verazon's goal is to bring a new form of wine training to the on trade with a bespoke approach for the next generation of hospitality staff, which is very, very interesting. We know we need to do this. And You've said, and I quote, there's a whole generation of people working in hospitality who grew up through COVID and don't have that, or going out culture nor are they interested in learning about food and wine in the same way that people did a decade ago? Sometimes there are people who don't even know that wine is made from grapes, which is shocking, but I know it's true. We can't continue to assume knowledge that just isn't there. So this is, I think, all very, very true. So with that perspective in mind, how did you go about sculpting an education program that's really dedicated to gen z at Verizon? Well, we didn't necessarily do it specifically to Aimat's gen z. Suppose, let let's take let's step up a bit. So I never come I never had an education job before. And I approach everything like you're doing life by being a massive nerd. So I just wanna look at all the possible best available evidence there is and all the science. I can relate to that. So yeah. And so I wanted to look at, you know, what is the best way method of of teaching So, we put a behavioral scientist to work on this with us. Realistically, the core of what we teach is is the same as everyone else, wine is fermented grape juice. But what's different is how we go about it. So I looked at the most effective training methods, and they are generally emotionally led. And then that just happens to be particularly effective for gen zed. It's effective it's effective for everyone. But it particularly does work for for gen zed, in terms of hospitality. And we've got to look at, you know, what, twenty, thirty percent of them don't drink any alcohol at all. So how do you get them excited about wine? How do you get people excited about something that they never even gonna experience? And what you can't, but you can get them excited about the concept of service, and you can get them to feel what it's like as a customer. And that's how we approach things. So the gen z particularly, they want to feel a certain amount of, self efficacy as well as the scientific term. They wanna feel like they put control over their job. They wanna feel something like getting something out of it. And we give them that. We get them to build their own language around it. We get them to feel, you know, from the point of view of the customer. So it's it wasn't necessarily that we went in looking specifically for gen zed. It's just that that happens to be, you know, the the way that we approach things happens to work particularly well for that generation. And also, you know, realistically, they are the bread and butter of what we do. It's so true. It's absolutely true. And we all know that, you know, as you said, a lot of gen z isn't drinking alcohol right now, and numbers of, you know, new people coming into wine drinking are going down. So, you know, obviously, COVID had a big impact on our as well for many reasons, you know, financial, logistical, mental health, job security, how we sell in buy wine in general, you know, sort of direct to customer, versus hospitality. So now the pandemic has passed, we know that on trade, the sector dropped in in what they were selling by twenty five percent, especially, as I said, at the entry level, at new new consumers coming in. And it's interesting something else that you said, and I'm gonna quote you a lot in this because I've been stalking you with the violation. You push That's missing. You push back against the perception that gen z has lost interest in wine. You know, you you said there's not a shift away from wine. There just isn't a shift towards it, which I really think is such an interesting and, like, crucial point to understand. As you said, just because you don't drink it doesn't mean you can't relate to it or the history of it or the culture of it or be able to sell it. So, how how are you sort of addressing this? You said self efficacy and building their own language and and getting control, How are you training people? You know, how does the the verizon system work and sort of shift their attention into wine, even if they're not drinking? Well, we Well, we we focus more on the concept of service. So, it would be unethical to try to get people to drink alcohol if they don't. We have but there's I think we all know that alcohol is pretty bad for you, but realistically. Yeah. But we can still get people to understand the concept of service and care about the concept of service and understand how important wine is as part of that. So, like, I mean, the example I'd usually give is there are plenty of front of house staff who are vegetarian, but they can still talk you through the state menu. Like, there's no reason that you have to be able to to drink wine to really know about it, care about it, and understand its importance. So we get people to look at it from the point of view of the customer and understand the the emotion that goes with going out and having a a good meal. We do different kind of exercises like, one we've been doing quite recently with people is, you know, I've been offering some chocolate out. And then halfway through the group, I get a better bar of chocolate out, say, oh, would you prefer the better one? And then they all now they realize what it's like to re recommend the premium wine won't have ever experienced that for themselves. They'll never have gone out and bought a more expensive bottle of wine, but they do get their chocolate better, then they can understand what that's like from the feeling of a customer. So That's a very cool concept. So yeah. So this is this underpins everything we do. We we don't go in, trying to I think the mistake that lots of the wine trade makes is that we need to educate to inspire people. No. No. No. No. You need to inspire people, then you can educate them. So we we make them care about the customer care about the importance of service. Understand how it feels when you go in and you've got someone who's like, oh, I don't know, or they just say house or whatever. Like, you realize how disappointing that is. Once they feel that, then they're like, oh, this is why this matters. And then they get the satisfaction of of serving people. So it's not necessarily that we get them to, you know, enjoy wine or like wine. It's great when that happens, and it does happen sometimes. And obviously, we go in with different foods, and we get them to pair things, we get them to try and get them to experience it. And there's a fewer than we do get that Damascus moment, but Realistically, it's much more important if they understand why wine is a really, really crucial part of their job. Are you enjoying this podcast? Don't forget to visit our YouTube channel. Mama jumbo shrimp for fascinating videos covering Stevie Kim and her travels across Italy and beyond, meeting winemakers, eating local foods, and taking in the scenery. Now back to the show. Yeah. It's that that's a very, very cool concept. I think looking outside the box that way is so interesting. I I've had wine students who don't drink, and they're just interested in the in the science and the history and the culture and sort of the whole the whole concept behind it. So but the the chocolate idea is is super interesting. You mentioned that you also brought in a behavioral scientist who I happen to know is, Rachel SKuse to help design the new courses. So what did she bring to the table? You know, why why was her input so important to the program? Because I think There are not a lot of educational programs out there in the wine world that do this, and and I think that this could be a really important step in the future of wine education. So what was what was Rachel's role? So she came in to explain, well, she actually helped design the exercises that we do with people and design the concept around, like, things like cocreation, where, a lot of, a lot of programs will go in and explain, and you it's, and tell them what words to use for certain wines. We don't do that. We get them to build their own language around it. And that's totally different for each venue, and it's totally different for each, group of people that you're training. But also, that means that they get a control, and they can relate to it better. So, I know, one place we did recently, they described a chardonnay. It's tasting like where there's original, but I wouldn't say that. But I was like, yeah, it does caramel organ, fair enough. And that's their way, but then because they came up with that, they're much more likely to remember it, and they're much more likely to feel control and comfortable using it. So Rachel helped, design the exercises we use, and helped, talk us through the most up to date science in terms of learning. There's a lot of programs out there that use totally out of date science like learning styles. Learning styles were defunct thirty years ago, and yet there's still education programs that use VAR County monthly and all that sort of stuff. And that's nonsense. It's like running something on Windows ninety five. Like, why would you do it? There's so much more up to date science and so much better tech, technical stuff out there now that we can use. And I just I find it a bit weird that people are doing this already, you know. You are so singing my song. This is this is something that I think is really, really important, especially given the cost of a lot of wine education programs, it makes no sense to stay in this, you know, just because it used to work doesn't mean it still does. So, I love that, and I love the idea of letting them develop their own language because language can be a huge barrier and really keep people out. That's something I've been fighting against for the past sort of four or five years. So, the program now has got three parts. I I love it. It's called roots shoots and fruits, fabulous names. So tell us how does this work, and what's the goal behind the program? You know, now it's up and running? How many people are you training and supporting? You know, what are the main features that you think are making it attractive, you know, aside from this sort of concept of allowing people coming into the trade to develop their own style and their own language and sort of control of what they're doing? You know, do you have do you have some hard data on success of people who are going through your program so far? Yeah. So when I came in, there were about six or eight modules for Verizon, and the the content was great. But it was designed before COVID. So, they was designed to be done between service. And that actually isn't the case anymore. There aren't big Fridays, etcetera anymore. And then also there wasn't necessarily a dedicated learning journey. So if you did one, what happens next was her in order to it? So we came in and we re re restructured it. Rutes is the very basic one, and that is very much. This is a grape, wine is made from grapes. And quite often you'll get one, like, oh, I didn't know that. Or when did they put your oranges in and all that sort of stuff? I know. Yeah. We can laugh. But actually, there's people out there who don't know that. And why would they? There's no reason for them to if they've never experienced it before. So roots is very basic one, and we explained this is how wine's made, and this is kind of some of the the flavors you can experience, and this is why it might happen. Then we do shoots, which is much more focused on service. So there's, we talk about the science of food and wine matching, we talk about general service. And it's all It's all pretty flexible. So it depends on the if it's a gastro powered transmission, start place, obviously, it'll be different. So we folk, that is quite flexible, but it's all based on service and then fruits as a full day course where we go through about seventeen mines of the major wine styles around the world. We talk about some of sales psychology, working on the, a guy called Robert cialdini, who's a professor on his factors of influence. And we get, realistically, it's it makes him a bit alien, but actually we could get people to have a load of stock phrases and questions that we really help them in their arsenal of service and help them, you know, premiumize people's experiences. So we do we get them to do a load of exercises around things that they might not have thought about. And then after fruits, we've got a, I've done about alumni, how you describe it. We're starting to design events with people after they've done that, for actual private tastings and other things. We want to keep that reengagement. So we don't want to just go in and train them once. We want to keep them coming back and then learning a bit more and keep eager to learn for the next step without overloading. Right. And then yes. Sorry. Go ahead. Oh, and then, also earlier this year, we launched our first e learning platform. So it's via an app called ADApp, and it's, it uses a lot of the same psychology that Rachel's worked on, so she looked on help designing the app, and, some of the exercises and quizzes and games in that are based on, her work. And this is, yeah, something that we can't constantly building as well. So last year, in person, we trained about two and a half thousand people, two thousand six hundred, I think it was off my head. This year with with the e learning platform ring for about twenty thousand. Wow. That's a huge goal. That's fantastic. I I'm I'm gonna keep my eye on this. I'm very interested to see where you're going with this. You said you wanna instill this in for service and and build a wine community and make sure people see this as a career and not just a stop gap job, which I really feel for. I think, you know, in the UK and US, people tend to view service jobs that way, in Italy where I am, it can't it's much more thought of as a lifetime career if you want it. So how's it going? You know, do you see a light bulb moment in your students? You know, do you see them actually go from roots shoots and fruits and and go into a career path where they're feeling happy about it and planning to stay? For some of them, we we don't wanna force people through it if it's not their calling. But for those who do go through it and we do keep in contact with them, we absolutely do We do see them, like keeping contact with this. They're keen to learn more. And realistically, they're gonna be the bar managers, restaurant managers of the future. And then for those who don't and for who it is at stopgap, at least we can give them, you know, a bit more comfort in a job, like then, give them a bit more control over it, a bit more enjoyment in So Sure. When you feel confident, you you do a better job. You present yourself better and you present your product better. So there's an absolute direct correlation to that, whether you stay in that job or not. So, knowledge is power, as they always say. Absolutely. And it's it's an inclusivity point of view as well. So there's a lot of, like, a lot of DII stuff. They talk about, I mean, color or sexual orientation or gender or whatever. But I think things that get missed are things like cognitive ability. Some people just aren't as smart as others. So how do you if you go in with those of technical information, that just really alienates. Some people would have different reading ages. Some people have just totally different life experiences. So I think what we do is much more inclusive for everyone that we go to because they've got much more control over how it's, you know, what they come out with, the the language that we use, and it's it's much more flexible for each of the different groups that we go through. This is why I love the sound of this program because, you know, people tend to ignore, you know, things that are quite important socioeconomic differences and backgrounds and, you know, did you get to go to a fantastic school or a horrible school? You know, all of these things really impact, you know, who you are when you first start a job. So think ignoring those, we do that at our peril. And I think it is part of DAI. I really do. So that's why I love this program. On the same topic, I know Rachel said that, she's very focused on creating a psychologically safe space within the training environment, I agree with this. So I just wanted to ask you, you know, what does this mean for you? You know, how does this concept work at Verizon? How do you create, you know, a psychologically safe space for for doing training? Well, there's there's a few ways. One is that we literally say verbatim. This is a safe space, when we start them, and we, you know, we get people to try to be creative. We do a kind of We we we cover it up as an icebreaker exercise, but we we normally start by saying, well, who here has been out for an ice meal somewhere, and then normally someone has. And then we get them to talk about it. And then how does that make you feel? And then when it's one thing you must and telling them what it's like. It's another thing hearing their peers talking about how it makes them feel because it's, you know, they can really relate to it. So then they're invested. That's how we kind of start things off. And then, you know, we never tell people that they're wrong. We get them to, you know, we encourage them to be creative. We get them to try stuff out. We'll guide them. Like, I've had some quite weird answers. One guy picked up the wine and sniffed it. It was like, oh, it smells like my man. And I was like, okay, fair enough. Probably don't send that to a customer. But there's, you know, we we we don't, we don't tell anyone off it. We we wanna make sure that they they feel comfortable talking about it. First of all, with each other. And then when they get comfortable talking about with each other, they can talk about it with other people. Yeah. I think that's great. I think that's great. I I think that's really important in the classroom that nobody is afraid to open their mouth and say something. And you know, a good educator can take that comment. You know, this smells like my man. Okay. Why? What kind of cologne does he wear? You know, does it have eucalyptus as it got wood notes, citrus notes? We can work with this. So Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. There's no there's no wrong answer. I I love that. So, you know, before we go, how do you see Verizon going in the next few years? You know, you're you've got a goal of training twenty thousand people this year. That's a hell of a lot. Know, what what dreams have you got for the program? How are you gonna keep up with Jen Z mindset and the next, you know, Jen Alphas that are coming after? What do you see yourself doing with Arizona over the next couple of years? But the e learning platform's a big one. That's what we're really pushing at the moment because there were, you know, realistically, they're a digital first generation. Like, they look at stuff, and they want to do do things in short block learning, and it's trying to how do we capture that attention for, you know, five or ten minutes at a time. Maybe they're on the tube or whatever. So yeah, the Elon platform is a massive push. And then a very core tenet of what we do is everything is based on the most up to date science. So we're constantly looking at new research that's coming up. We're constantly looking at what more aside as can we do, what other things can we do to make things more effective as training. And that is that's not not just for gen zed or or or the office coming up, that's for that's for everyone. In theory, you know, it's a it's it's a feature, not a bug of what we do, that what we do is the most effective training we can possibly do. So they we are constantly looking at ways we can evolve. And also without sounding without sounding too hubristic about it, I really hope that this is how training for everyone else. So I really think this is a pivotal moment for wine education. We need to start looking at much more effective training techniques. Everyone's looking at the content. They're worried about, oh, should we do stuff on biodynamic wine? Should we do stuff on orange wines, whatever? Yeah. Okay. That's important. But it's much more important to know about how you're training rather than what you're training. I think people really need to look at the the methods they're using. They really need to look at, you know, jumping up the exercise that they're doing and stop using outdated training techniques because it's not really helping anyone. That that is incredible. I think you are bang on the money with that. I know that, you know, we're looking at at new things that we're developing, on my end, and looking at things like gamification and and all sorts of things because as you said, the the people who are doing training now, are the digital generation. I know in my own family, my kids range in age from twenty four to thirty two. And, you know, they I think they their head would combust if they didn't have a phone in their hand. So rather than fighting against that, I wanna make use of that. So, yeah, I think, looking at at how you train is is super important. I like what you said about how you're doing it is almost more important than the content. Which I think a lot of people would would, you know, old school people would push back against that. But it's true. We have to catch their interest. We have to get them involved before we hit them with, you know, all the heavy stuff. So, I think this has been a really interesting conversation. One of the most interesting conversations I've had about wine education for a while, how do you feel about AI in wine ed education? Well, so to I think AI, as far as I understand it, it will only be copying what is already out there. So I think it's fine. We when we do training in person, we get a number of the exercises we get people to go and research the wines we're we're we're we're talking about. So rather than just give them a load of notes that they have to read. It's much more impactful if they go and research something on the wine himself. And then they might find something interesting that I didn't even know before. And then we do get them to use Google. We get them to use chat, DPT. We get them to use AI for things like that. So for a research point of view, I think it works. However, I don't think anything will ever replace that personal, emotional touch, which is know, first and foremost of what we do. Everything about is about, you know, the the feeling for the customer. So in terms of content, yeah, it's interesting. In terms of research, yeah, it's interesting. It definitely with some of the e learning stuff that we build uses AI, will it ever replace being in a room and discussing your feelings? Probably not. That was the answer I wanted. So thank you for that. That was perfect. That was what I was hoping for. So, Bob, this has been great. I really appreciate your time. And I'm so happy to hear about Verazon. Next time I'm in the UK, I'm gonna call in and visit you. Thanks so much for coming on today, and good luck in the future. I I'm gonna check back in and hear if you managed to train twenty thousand people online in twenty four. I'm I'm excited for you. I think, yeah, absolutely. And also if you're around, please do come along to one of our sessions. I think it'd be really interesting for you to see what we do. It's as I say, the content isn't that different. It's still fermented grape juice. Like, where? Whatever you spin it. It's still just gonna be fermented grape juice. But, I think some of the things we do are definitely more interactive and a little bit groundbreaking in terms of education. Well, I am always up for learning something new. I am a total nerd myself. So, anytime I can take a class especially something innovative. I'm I'm up for that. So I will be in touch with you next time I'm coming, to the UK. Thanks a lot. I really appreciate talking to you today. I've been delighted. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for listening, and remember to tune in next Wednesday when I'll be chatting with another fascinating guest. Italian wine podcast is among the leading wine podcast in the world, and the only one with a daily show. 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