Ep. 497 wine2wine 2020 Recording Session | Wine Competitions and Scores

Italian wine podcast. Chinchin with Italian wine people. Italian wine podcast as wine to wine twenty twenty media partner is proud to present a series of sessions chosen to highlight key themes and ideas and recorded during the two day event held on November twenty third and twenty fourth twenty twenty. Wine to Wine twenty twenty represented the first ever fully digital edition of the business to business form. Visit wine to wine dot net, and make sure to attend future editions of wine to wine business form. Hello. My lovely friend Robert Good morning. It's nice to be on a screen with you again. It's time for me to introduce you. Relax. It is. Have an odd one. Go ahead. Alright. So for everyone who doesn't know Robert And the shenanigans he gets up to, I asked him earlier tonight if there was a wine to wine that he had not presented at, and we couldn't find one. So I'm certain Stevie can correct us on that. So, Robert, you consult wine brands all over the world. You own your own wine brand that sells all over the world. You have encyclopedic knowledge that dates back to probably before I was born. Not really, but that's my story. And more importantly, you are a recovering wine critic, which makes it worthwhile for all of us to bring our coffee to the table and sit down and listen to what you have to say having lived on both sides. Of that kids. Thank you. I can go even further, Polly, because not only am I a recovering wine critic, but I'm also, and not quite recovering wine competition organizer because way back in nineteen eighty three. And I'll come back to this in a minute. With, a gentleman called Charles Metcalfe. We started something called the international wine challenge, which became the world's biggest wine competition, and I ran it in Japan han, and China, and India, and Russia, and all sorts of plays. And I'm still involved now with a wine competition in Germany called Mondersfini. So I have got a foot, either a current foot or an old foot in in the camps of the the title of this presentation. And I'm not used to giving presentations without PowerPoint, and I'm also not used to not seeing the audience. So I'm gonna come back to that because I think it's quite relevant. So I love Zoom. I love the fact that we can all do this without traveling using up all those carbon, all the carbon to to getting places, but, it's nice to see what who's out there and how they're reacting. Now before this, I wondered whether there was an event in Switzerland called chalk to chock chocolate to chocolate or something somewhere else called cheese to cheese or cars to cars or perfume to perfume. And I then went to look and see what you cause, you know, I haven't seen chocolate with I'm sure there is somebody giving chocolate parker points out of a hundred if you're looking, but I haven't seen it. But anyway, I went looking for chocolate trophies on, Google, and Google gave me lots of options. And what you can get is you can get Oscar made of chocolate. You can get all sorts. You can get cups you can get all sorts of things. And I looked at chocolate medals and they're they come in little tin foil and so on. There is no Google did not give me any evidence of any competition anywhere in which people win trophies for their best chocolate. I know they exist I know they exist in Italy and all over the place, but they're not important enough to get on from the first three pages of Google, which was full of chocolate trophies. So one of the things that isn't happening is people aren't buying chocolate because it's got a gold medal or not very many of them. Another piece of research I did was to ask around, and my friends and and contacts in the wine world and and elsewhere, to tell me what the following three names actually were, impact they they had what reaction we had to them. The first one was Jonathan Ives or Johnny Ives. And, actually, it was a small straw poll, but, half the people had no idea at all who that person was, and one of them had a vague idea. Then I said Greg Lambert one of them knew who Greg was, and I'm sorry about that because Greg's a is is is somebody I think it was a friend. And the other one was John Ango and no one who who John Ango was. And I thought this was quite interesting because these three people have had an effect in one way or another on our lives. One of them perhaps it'll let us know that Jonathan Ives is was the design chief at Apple, but nobody buying an Apple, an iPhone, or a computer, whatever things. I'm buying this because this is bald headed genius called Johnny Iives. Who's now sir Johnny Adams. They might or might know a little bit about mister Cook or mister Jobs or whatever, but not very much. John Angove is the person who gave us the bag in box for wine, in Australia. Nobody knows anything about him outside Australia and even there. And Greg Lambert, of course, many people here may know, is the father of Coravin, who I think, that's a game changer. But, you know, lots of people are very happily using their Coravin's happily without knowing. Greg Lambridge was. In concept, with wine people, think that everybody has to know who made the wine, where he lives, and whether he's got a beard, and whether he loves dogs, and all this stuff. Actually, there's a huge number of people who don't. And then I sort of looked at the subject we're looking at, and it's you know, it refers to scores. It refers to competitions. It refers to Instagram. And again, I've asked around around this, and that a number of people hate scores. They hate parker school. How can you be that precise to give a wine ninety six rather than ninety seven and next time you taste it, isn't it gonna be different? Another lot of people actually are very negative about competitions because if you put your wine at three competitions, you get three different results. And as a wine producer, I now do that, and that's exactly what I find. So I'll get a different score from Decatur Wine Awards to, the IWC, for example. And they also hate influencers because what right of these people to come from nowhere to to be, on Instagram or YouTube or whatever telling us what to drink. Celebrity wines. Absolutely. We all hate them. Peer reviews, the Vino or the people you'll get on a on a on naked wines or Berry brothers or whatever, people who know qualification telling us what they think about why. We hate them. And, of course, on the list, the latest hate figure is clean wine. We really hate the idea of of people selling wine as being clean. And the interesting thing about all of these, that that we all hate for these different reasons, and I'm not gonna go to why we hate them is there all actually reasons to buy wine? They're all being put out there. If I walk into a store in America and it's got ninety seven point sticker on a wine, that is gonna make me want to buy the wine. But it may well be that when I look at the Krug Instagram or the echem, Instagram stories, the wonderful photography in the imagery and the references to food and the krug ones, again, are giving me reasons to actually go and put down a hundred or hundred or whatever it is dollars on a bottle of krug or he can. And that brings me to the important thing that I think we overlook, which is why people buy wine. And we those of us possibly in this room, this virtual room think it's rational. We think that people are buying it because it's good or possibly because it's value for money. It that's that's why some people will buy it. That's why maybe five or ten percent maximum of the people buying wine will do it. But even those people, I think very often of buying it irrationally. Why do people buy? Why do people spend one thousand, five thousand a hundred thousand dollars on a watch? You can buy something that tells the time very effectively for five dollars or ten dollars, and your phone will tell you the time. Why do people do that? It is an irrational purchase unless you may believe that it's gonna go up in value or whatever, which it probably won't. It is actually something that you want that makes you feel good about yourself. That makes you feel you've achieved something, or maybe you are gonna pass it on to your kid, which is the patek fully preferred. And that I think is something that we don't actually can think about enough when we're talking about wine. We don't think about what is going through the heads of the people who are buying, who I know, who is buying, why. And then I began to think about why we how we got to where we are. And because as Polly has said, I'm very old, I was around in the nineteen eighties, and the nineteen eighties is an extraordinary time, the early eighties because things happened in the wine world that that changed everything. The first thing was the arrival of new world wines internationally. After the judgment of Paris, which is nineteen seventy six, when the Californian Bordeaux style and burgundy style wines did so well. And suddenly, we've started getting wines not just from America, but also Australia and Chile and later on, New Zealand, and, but also Eastern Europe, varieties. Secondly, retail changed. We had supermarkets. We had big retail getting into wine. Suddenly, the wall of wine appeared. We hadn't had that before in most of the world. And thirdly, crucially, we had baby booms. We had a whole new generation who are moving into wine, and wine was very, very confusing. So how did we make sense of it? Well, one of the ways we made sense of it was with competitions. We've had competitions in the past. Australia, New Zealand, and so on. But they were local in France, they had local agriculture. Suddenly, we had competitions. We started the international wine children, eighty four. Decantic came along afterwards, mundus vinny. It's been a whole suede of competitions. Before that, there was only the international wine spirit competition, which is a very good competition competition today, but wasn't great back in those days. And of course, Parker started late seventies, but really he took off in eighty three. And Parker took off largely because of Bordeaux, but he gave people the confidence to buy wine. We, with the international wine challenge, gave people the confidence to buy wine. But something else happened that we overlook, I think, when we look back to those times, which was those new retailers getting in, actually had another effect. They gave exposure to wine. They gave distribution to wine, but they actually ensured that we all had low margin. They were selling wine like soap powder, and they wanted us to make no money on it. And any money we would make would end up being stripped off us in terms of discounting as producers. And that changed the game as well because without margins, you can't actually spend money on marketing. And that's very interesting because if you look at the world of booze, you look at spirits and you look at, champagnes, those drink have twenty five percent. They put twenty five percent of their, their income into telling people how, all about themselves. And the interesting thing is they don't generally spend a lot of that time telling people about the scores they've got. They do all sorts of things, but a lot of it is emotional. Some of them do use it to learn about scores, and this was a story that I really loved when I was researching this, which is a brand called grey goose, which some of you may have come across, it does have links to wine even though it's a vodka because when it was launched by a guy called Sydney Franks in New York. He wanted to launch a vodka made in France because it was a cheap place to make vodka. And He said, oh, what are we gonna call it? And he said, well, have we what names have we got in our filing cabinet? And they had a name called grey goose, which was designed originally chosen for a leaf for our milk. And they said, well, use that. It's registered for alcohol. So they put that on their vodka. And he got it tasted, and he got a it it got the best rating from something called the beverage testing Institute of Chicago, which is something I mean, maybe a wonderful, you know, institute, but most of us hadn't heard of. But the important point of this story is Sydney Frank spent a lot of money, the twenty five percent margin I was talking about, of taking full page advertisements everywhere to tell everyone he had got this rating. That helped him get the wine into bars and into retail. But then the next thing he did was spend another lot of money putting his vodka into sex in the city. And it was Greg Goose being in sex in the city that really helped to, actually take it into the the stratosphere to the point that he was able to sell that brand for two billion dollars. And the the people who bought at Bacardi have just done something again a little bit different. They had pop up bakeries. Bakeries are a vodka brand. They had pop up bakeries in London where they were selling, bread, pastries, and so on made from the same wheat that's used to make grey goods. No relevance at all except emotional. What is better than bread? What makes you feel more handmade than bread. So what this this whole little journey is about is actually communication, which is doing all sorts of things at the same time for the same product. On the one hand, we have the rational aspect of We've got this prize from the beverage Chesting Institute. And the next thing is emotional. The people I love watching in sex and the city are drinking this stuff. And then last thing is, but isn't that doesn't say what it's whether it's good or bad. It's just this thing that you drink in Manhattan. And the third element is this. This is really wholesome, nice stuff made from wheat, and let's remind you of that with the bread. And that then brings me to the whole jist of where this, topic should be taking us. It's not should we be talking about sports or should we be talking about Instagram stories or should we it's actually maybe we do all of those or some of them. I think the wine one of the things that frustrates me a lot about the wine that's in the industry is that we're looking for a recipe. The recipe is, oh, it's obscure grapes, or it's natural wine, or it's it it's it's blends, it's whatever. And we we don't understand that the food world doesn't look for recipes. The food world has a huge range of different things going on out there. And somebody is doing falafels and someone's doing fish burgers and someone's got an Ethiopian restaurant. And if the Ethiopian Open restaurant catches the mood, we will have a chain of Ethiopian restaurants. And if not, we'll have one Ethiopian restaurant in one bit of Brooklyn that does really well. And the the world will decide But if the Ethiopian restaurant is able the owner of that Ethiopian restaurant, it's able to say, actually, I think Ethiopian food is only going to be interesting to one percent of the New York of the Manhattan diners. But one percent of Manhattan diners is a lot of people. If that of all of those people knew about my Ethiopian restaurant, actually maybe I'd fill my restaurant and have a chain of restaurants. And that brings me to the point that the I think that we as wine people don't think about enough. We make wine for ourselves for the most part. We don't think about who is going to buy our wine. So there's two things going on in parallel. Today. On the one hand, we have big companies, and we have Stephanie Gallow on yesterday, who's always fascinating. But you have treasury. You've got a lot of these companies, and they are making wine specifically for targeted customers. So nineteen crimes famously were designed for young men who didn't fit into the wine world, and it's become a phenomenal, phenomenally successful brand. Cupcake was made for a completely different demographic of people. And it's not as broad as saying this is made necessarily for soccer moms or young men. Actually, now as Polly and I have discussed often in the terms of consultancy work, we talk about personas. These are effectively real people between three, four, five, real individual human beings with lives, with pets, with kids, with houses, with bills, who like this kind of music. And we actually think this is who is this wine for? Now you could either be saying we're gonna make a wine for this person. Or we can say, actually, we're not like that. We actually make the wine from our terroir. We make the wine that our father made, but it's still going to appeal to a particular kind of person. If I'm running an opera house and or a concert venue, and I'm putting on Bartok, or I'm putting on the sex pistols. I'm not expecting necessarily the same people to come to those two concerts, or I might get the same people, but they're gonna be in a different mood. So how do I market those? And in wine, we've not been very good at that. So as far as I'm concerned, what we should be doing is not saying, is it this, is it that? You should say, who are we talking to? Who is going to get this message? So in terms of my wines, for example, I'm selling wines, La Grande is ten dollars a bottle in the US, ten to twelve dollars. On our website, we have information about the vineyards. We're beautiful. In Minavoir, we've got beautiful, beautiful, two thousand year old wine region, and so on. Some people actually are fascinated to know about the history of it, not very many, to be very honest. Some people are interested to know about why it's got a black sheep on the label, rather more of that. Other people actually want to know about who the background and the the two at work, and there's some people who want the tech called details and when we did the picking and so on. And there aren't very many of those, but we know that actually by watching who is visiting the website, what they're looking at, with what in terms of the messaging we're doing, we know which bits of our stories are interesting to which people. So I was in New Jersey last year, and, early in the earlier this year, it should be before the travel stopped, and talking to Indian, owners of liquor stores in New Jersey. They didn't wanna know scores, which is great, because actually my ten, twelve dollar wine doesn't have any ninety five point scores for some reason. They were fascinated in Vivino. They actually liked the fact that we got a four four point one or whatever in Vivino because that was that was good a wine of my price category, but they were even more interested in the story about how my two partners and I had decided we wanted to take on Mondavi with a brand without any money. And that was a story. Now is that story going to appeal to people who are gonna buy my wine in a retail shop? Maybe not. But it appealed to the gatekeepers. So as far as I'm concerned, coming down to this, when we say what makes people buy wine, it's which people are going to buy which wine. And at that point, you begin to say, well, and why? Are they going to make the rational or the irrational purchase? Poly, as as a line that Poly uses, I love, which is what is the biggest competitor to a gym? To any particular gym, it's Netflix. And if I was showing you a slide, I prepared a slide for this, which one I'm not using. What is the biggest competitor to your wine? It's the half price sticker on another wine. Or and I love this in a supermarket. It's the screaming child. Because if you've got a supermarket shopper, remember, seventy, eighty percent of wine is bought in supermarkets by the people who are not the wine engaged. Actually, there's a high chance the person going through the wine aisle actually needs to get out of there very quickly because they are being dragged out of that store by a child who doesn't want to be there. I think we're on ten twenty. I'm not sure in my time. It's really eleven twenty your time in Italy. I think does that mean that I've come to the end of my bit, and I can now take the brick bat? Yeah. I have some questions for you. Okay. So when we're looking at things like competition stickers, do you feel and this is from the audience, do you feel that there is a moment when we overmark it? So one sticker is great too you can possibly get by with. The lineup of stickers on the the shelf tag or the bottle is over the top and turns off. The consumer who isn't I love that quest in those. And if you look online, there's a a South African winery called Sarunsberg, b e r g, Sarunsberg, and there's a great image that they've got one bottle, which has got more stickers on it than you can than you can actually imagine. And I dug down and I found on Instagram. They're not very strong on Instagram, but they're, no, it's not too bad. But they've got one guy. There's a Polish guy who's obviously keen on wine, but he doesn't he doesn't do that much on Instagram about wine. He's he's he's tattooed. He's a definitely he goes to the gym a lot top, but there's one picture of him holding the bottle with all its stickers on it. And it's got fourteen hundred likes, which isn't bad on Instagram. I think that the the the the point was buried in your question was who, again, it's for? I think there are going to be some people who are gonna say there's far too many stickers on that. I think there are gonna be other people who want to spend, a bit of money on the bottle of wine, and it's got lots of stickers. You think, yeah, why not? So okay. When I go to see a movie. Do I the fact it's got twelve Oscars and three cesars from France and whatever? Do we say, oh, no. Don't tell them how many different awards it's got? We don't. If I've got a book that's got twelve or fifteen different great reviews from different critics, Do I say, oh, no. I only use one or two, though. And the other thing that's interesting about competitions, so this is very relevant, is that there are, credible and less credible competitions. Let's be honest about it. IWC was definitely, and then I had like Summa Dusvina, are are among the credible ones. There are some that aren't does the consumer know the value of each sticker? Do they know which award is which? I think you told me about a and a New Zealand wine that was the only hundred point wine in New Zealand, which came from something that nobody right? Canadian. Right? With all deference to to to Stephanie Gallo, barefoot has on its neck something saying the most awarded wine brand in America. Now barefoot hasn't had gold medals from the greatest critics as far as I'm aware, but it's one lots of medals from lots of people. Actually, I'm standing in the store. It gives me the confidence to buy that wine. And that's what we need to think about. It's the person whoever they are. What is gonna make them feel more confident? And maybe a lot of stickers works for some people. Okay. So another question from the audience is, would you agree that submitting a line to a competition is the easiest possible way to gain international attention assuming that you win? I know that you have, you have a No. Yes. And no. If you don't tell people, you've got it. No. Point one. If you tell everybody you've got it, yes. But if you tell everybody by sending an email saying, hey, we've won a gold medal or whatever, you will be surprised how quickly that hits the bin of the average journalist everybody else. We don't read that stuff as writers very much. But if you spread the word, the interesting thing about competitions, and increasingly, I have to say the Vavina ratings and so on, is actually with the gatekeepers. So if I wanna go and sell my wine to a Swedish monopoly, or I wanna sell my wine to a British supermarket or whatever, I send them saying, are you interested? Because if I send them an example, it could probably get straight in the bin, I may have to contact them directly. I've got this wine that's had these kinds of awards, and they will say, oh, yes, okay, Decanta, tick, Iwc, tick, or whatever. Yes. I'll taste it. If you say I've got ninety five points from all these people no one's heard of, they may take no notice. So, yes, it is potentially. It's a very quick way. It's a shorthand way, but my point about it is it's cheap. It it's cost money, but it's relatively cheap. And it's a lazy way if you don't spend the effort on actually telling people. So we have a few more questions from the audience, but I wanna jump in with one of my own. One of the issues that we know about professional reviewers is that they often can get set in their ways. You're gonna get the same points or the same band point year on year on year Do you think that, user generated content, Instagram, Vivino, is actually more flexible and and can give you, a more realistic breadth of variety from year to year of a brand? I, again, I think there's that you're you're going for the recipe, saying is it a or is it b? I think that the the the the five percent want to know what? Tim Atkins or Janice or whatever. And they've got great faith in that person. The of the the rest of the people, I think. Actually, a broad answer is very useful. Bear in mind, by the way, very quickly, that we have this idea. A lot of people in here, imagine people standing in a store, checking your wine before they buy it. Nobody does it. Very, very few people do that. But to your point, I was in Vietnam last summer, last year. And going to places we've never been to, I used a lonely planet guide, a rough guide, and, TripAdvisor. And you know what? They all worked. I can't say which of those worked better. I was very glad to have the man on the ground, woman on the ground from from the rough guide or a lonely planet, but I was also very glad to have thirty five people or fifty people telling me that this restaurant in da nang was a good place to go for fish. So both can work, but they may not work on the same people. So based on your experience as a consultant working with brands who adopted digital. Alright. So there's the caveat estate. No recipes. Nobody's asking for a recipe. Can you make any generalizations or recommendations about what kind of consumers veer more toward competition, and points and what kind of consumers veer toward user generated content. And I'm gonna I'm gonna be specific on that. We're talking about wine lovers, new drinkers, experts, wine heat. It's a wonderful old That's a wonderfully complex question. And I think I think again Yeah. Four minutes to do that one. Yeah. Well, basically, I think it's when you say competitions, I think that there are a lot of wine geeks out there who have decided they like the Deacanto wine. I mean, Deacanto is a is a geek is geek territory. They'd admit that, I guess. And so Decanta readers will do the Decanta wine awards. And so the five percenters will do that, and the IWC may fit that. I think the people who actually just see a sticker on a bottle saying it's got a gold medal from somewhere, whether they see it online or see it in the store, it's just a reassurance. And it's what I call, in essence, it's due diligence. When I when you buy a house, you get someone to look over and find out whether it's the roof's falling in or not. If it's got one or two stickers on it, it's probably all right when I look for a book on Amazon and if an if a thousand people have given this book four stars. Okay. Some of them are fake and some of them aren't, but if I if enough them four stars and now what I always do is I look at the negative reviews, and see what sense they make. So I think we've got to divide our groups down into the Geeks, and even the Geeks are not one group because we've got Bordeaux Geeks, and burgundy Geeks, but we've got orange wine and natural wine Geeks. And some of those people are absolutely they hate the critics, some of them. They hate the competitions because they're an anti the system. And some of those people would love peer reviews, but not necessarily the Vivino peer reviews. But what I have said, I did see some quick, quick, quick, quick, Interestingly, Vavino is just when you look at the the the grafted of this world, get the same kind of ratings on Vavino as you know, as you know, as you would expect them to get from top critics. I mean, high reviews. Okay. So I wanna ask Matteo's got a great question in the audience, which is what about reviews or user generated content to give a clear indication to consumers about the occasion to taste the wine that you're selling? For instance, a big dinner with a fiance or summer drink at a pool. You've talked a lot about we spend at different times in different ways. I love it, and I think it's one of the things Instagram does so brilliantly. I think one of the things I don't think Gram, I don't go and check wines on Instagram. I don't think many people do that, but it's when you actually see people sitting around a pool with the bottle. You think, oh, yeah. That's what I I'd love to be sitting around a pool. And if I were, I'd have that bottle. I think Instagram does that. And I think what I'd like to to to say quickly on this, is that, so yes, occasionally it's going to become more and more important, and I think imagery through things like Insta makes that relevant. But one thing you've got to remember is that if unless you're careful and depending whether you're spending money on Instagram or you're letting it happen organic, people are only going to see wine focused images on Instagram if they are in a little bubble or a big bubble that has got wine in it unless there's a hashtag wine or hashtag wine drinking or hashtag Chardonnay or whatever. They may not see it. And that's one of the things that's quite interesting in the krug and Ekem stuff. It's they're straying off into the worlds of food and lifestyle and pulling people into their products in a way I think is far cleverer than what I'm seeing from quite a lot of the wine world who start with wine and don't necessarily see outside that bubble. Okay. So let's wrap up with a fun question. What do you think the future of wine on TikTok is gonna be? Well, I think There are Gary v in the room. I think TikTok is fabulous. I was slow to it, but not as slow as some people have been. And I think that it's interesting. I mean, Snapchat, just what I'm at it. Let's not forget Snapchat because the news this morning that you could get a slice of a million dollars a day between now and Christmas for putting something on Snapchat that goes viral. And the the interesting thing about these is the discipline that they they require. You have to be quick You have to be engaging. And I think that it's the opposite of so much wine writing. I've judged a lot of wine writing, and it is so boring. Most wine blogs are paulingly boring. And they're all about writing people who are interested in wine, writing to people who are interested at why. The great thing about Snapchat and TikTok is doing something that is going to attract a lot of the people that you want to talk to. And you don't you're not gonna talk to everyone. It may be a small small part of the market. But as the market gets big, that small part may be huge. We are at eleven thirty one. Do we get to keep talking or are we gonna get are we gonna get shut down pretty soon? Let's keep going with some questions from the office. Well, somebody closes the door, they'll throw us out. They'll close the door so we'll keep going. So do you feel like just to actually share your expertise as someone who's been involved with competitions for so long, and we just got the, yes, we're about to close. So some of these we can get into hopefully in fifteen minutes when we swap sides of the screen Yep. And talk more about digital marketing. I look forward to that. Please come back. Paulie knows so much more about this stuff than I do or anybody else I know. See you then. Thank you so much. Thank you. Listen to the Italian wine podcast wherever you get your podcasts. We're on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, Himalaya FM, and more. Don't forget to subscribe and rate the show. If you enjoy listening, please consider donating through Italian wine podcast dot com. Any amount helps cover equipment, production, and publication costs. Until next time.