Ep. 1558 Lost Art Of Listening | wine2wine Business Forum 2022

Since two thousand and seventeen, the Italian wine podcast has exploded. Recently hitting six million listens support us by buying a copy of Italian wine unplugged two point o or making a small donation. In return, we'll give you the chance to nominate a guest and even win lunch with Steve Kim and professor Atilio Shenza. Find out more at Italian One podcast dot com. Xin Jin. Italian One podcast is delighted to present a series of highlights from the twenty twenty two White wine business forum, focusing on wine communication and bringing together the most influential speakers in the sectors to discuss the hottest topics facing the wine industry today. Don't forget to tune in every Thursday at two PM central European time or visit the point to wine dot net for more information? I interviewed Oscar recently before the opening of Italy. I got there, and I all started asking questions. And he said, but it's in English. She didn't tell me this. But what I like the most about Oscar is that he only knows hundred words in English, maybe a couple of more hundred and two hundred and five because I've just been to New York. Anyway, he managed to to communicate by using only one hundred words. And if you want to have a look at the video, it is on mama jumper shrimp for Oscar farinaity, and it's got one. It's got so many views, like five thousand views. I decided to invite Oscar this morning because this session is called the lost art of listening. I do remember him When I met him, he didn't own a smartphone. He had a very old Nokia thirty seven ten phone. I used to sell phones and thirty seven phone was one of the most powerful phones. I think you remember this phone. And he didn't have an email address at the time. I do remember about him at the time, and he's the real myestro, the master of communication. So they're like Oscar to share his version of listening, listening to others and listening to yourself. So ten to fifteen minutes for a Q and A session And you've got thirty minutes before the Q and A session. First of all, congratulations. The title is great. So the lost art of listening. It goes behind wine. There's a new form of weird humankind, and we could go back to the middle ages where the where men rose at the center. So we reinvented a new kind of era. Myself, I myself and I because we all talk about ourselves. And if you listen to a dialogue, there is someone who starts a speaking, and they tell their story, their issue, their problem, because I, I, and then the other person usually listens or pretends to listen. And he said, okay, it's true, but I, I, and they tell that they're sorry. They're issued that problem. It's always about ourselves. So the most common word today is I, and this is an issue in Italy because we all talk about ourselves and nobody listens to other people because we only care about ourselves and our own problems. So it's because of our interpretation of social media we consider social media and social networks as a tool to talk about myself. That's cool. Instagram Instagram stories. It's all about my own stories. I like telling people what I'm doing, what I would do tomorrow. We always talk about ourselves. So that's the end of the dialogue. And this happens specifically in politics. And it's got a cascade effect on all of us because we only talk about ourselves. So this is just the introduction, but listening is key. We created, place to listen to ourselves and to listen to others in Fantana Freda. It is called the the wood of thoughts. It's the last wood in the language region. And, Now there's no Biola everywhere in that region. So people can access this food. They can listen to each other. There are twelve steps, twelve stages. Each stage is about a specific value. These values are represented by a number of signs that deal with these topics. I think that I am, this is a starting point. It the whole pathway takes just an hour to walk along the pathway. And it is about wine and storytelling about wine. This is what I should talk about today, how do you communicate about wine? If you are so lucky and you were born in Italy, first of all, you should learn how to communicate. This is a huge issue. I mean, we are a fantastic country with so many positive things. The most positive things are our hands. Italians, hands are the best hands in the word. We are great in manufacturing, I'm referring to primary activities, agriculture, and it's the primary activity of humankind because agriculture has existed for fifteen thousand years since a guy was born where now Iraq, Iran, and other countries are located. And he was very lucky because he was born there at the time, and that region was very wealthy because this is where agriculture was invented And agriculture was an invention that changed our history as fire, for instance, the one point five million years ago. That's a book by Roy Lewis in nineteen sixty. It's a best seller now. And it tells the story of Ernest and Edward who invented fire and everything changed. There's another invention that changed history, writing, and fantastic, writing. It's Amercards that invented writing because he wanted to communicate with a colleague of his in another kingdom, and each kingdom had its own language And so he was the first global person and global people invent while others who are nationalists, do not invent anything. And, history goes back backwards. And that guy wanted to talk. He said, I wanted to start a trading with you. I don't want it to conquer you. Maybe I like to invent a language that unites us and every single time the other guy send a messenger. And he said, they don't understand that they are afraid that I might want to start a war. And so he starts craving some signs on clay, and there are six hundred twenty six tiles in the Aleksandra Museum, and they should have a look at these tiles where writing was invented. And, there was some resistance at the time that didn't want to have to write, that were very cultured, and, smart people like the Socrates that I didn't want people to write as Socrates are told, plato, don't write because writing kills brains, stops communication, spoils, memory, but plato wrote thirty six books, and a great books as symposium. These books are excellent, and with Hammingland style, and we had the opportunity to get to know Plato and, the doubt. The most important thing we No. It's that we do not know anything. Now we are so lucky. We're so lucky today because we could tell that we are those who lived the transition from analog to digital. This changed, life and global people invented that American guys, and they started a revolution and I invented a new word, a word we well, everyone can communicate where poor people can access education as, rich people. And then the start starting point was great, then somebody realized that he could become the richest person, of the earth, and he kind of forget about that. Then Wikipedia interprets this this revolution in a great way. So offering everyone knowledge without collecting our data without any advertising Wikipedia is fantastic. If you use a Wikipedia, please donate at least once a year, one euro to euros or ten euros, please do that. Steve, you can see there are people from Sicily who are speaking on the phone during the conference, you can do that. So if you were lucky enough to be born in Italy, you should realize that. So there are so many Italians here, many Italians who decided to be born here. There are people who forgot about that. There are people who decided not to be born in Italy, and so they are beasts, because you are immoral, not just because you were born Libya and in Burundi, you wanted to come to Italy, you know, you're a moron. You should decided to be born in Italy as I did. And so we should defend our frontiers. We should defend country where we did not decided to be born. We were just lucky to be born here. This country is great. You can do so many things because of generations of Italians who will much cooler Then we are think of what we had in Italy, who we had in Italy, think of the Roman empire, and one emperor had everything. And what did he do? He said, Why are there thousands of children who die in my empire? Why are there so many people that die in my empire? They starve, so he took half of his wealth, and then he calls his ghost writer. I can't remember his name. He was cool too, and he asked him to ride something. It was a sort of law to use rich people's wealth for to help poor people and everybody contributed. And he did great, think of Lorenzo Manifico, who enters in Andrea Delverocchio's atelier. He was great. He was a great artist. And as any artists. He trained at a arts school, and he was lucky enough because one of his pupils was botticelli. Another one was Perugino. Another one was Lorena. Another one was Lorena Dado da vinci and Gilando, they were all there. Lorenzo Manifical enters his artillery, and he says, guys, guys, first of all, you should trust your capacities because you're great. You should trust other people because they will understand your art and your art should become business and not the, hobby beauty should become the engine of our nation, Florence, then he wants a broad and a broad man to Milan. And so he said, leonard, he's he told leonardo, go to federico Memorial and create a bronze horse for him. He Leonardo went to Milan. He never finished his horse, and this is great about Leonardo Davinci. Wine to wine business forum. Everything you need to get ahead in the world of wine, supersize your business network. Share business ideas with the biggest voices in the industry. Join us in Verona on November thirteen to fourteen twenty twenty three. Tickets available now at point wine dot net. And what the Charlie should go to sixties, the fourth, that wanted to have something called the sixteen Chapel you start working there and you, travel around the world and take snapshots all for the wealthy because they have so much money. And they you can make a business out of it. And then put something of Tuscany in those pictures, in those paintings, of Tuscany always. So this was Lorenzo Magna the magnificent. We have incredible people in the history. Of Italy. And we are the descendants of these people, which means that we are great. We invented farming. We did there. We should read, read plenty of the old and others, we invented the meal. We invented so many forming tools, and also traumatic irrigation that worked better in the past than it does now. Even in drought years, Rice would, anyway, be grown, and life would continue, you know, that we invented everything possible, have this incredible skill. And where are we less good? We are less good at communicating. That's the point. And the French actually, took the lion's share due to that because they are good at communicating, and they have a great product. And produce. I always go to France to learn to communicate. I live, in France, for for long periods. I go there and learn. I copy. I have, I love France, And, you, can be in a place and, you, you are surrounded by wonderful places and wonderful wines, and they have not only castles. They have everything possible. I often travel to Toreen, from where I normally live. And before reaching Toreen, I you go through Moncaglieri, which is a small town, and there is one castle, which is great. It is astonishing, m, built by the savoy family at the end of the, sixteen hundred. It's a great manufacturing skill, becoming a castle. You see that And we refurbished and restored it wonderfully in France. They have nothing which compares to it. A great creative capability. And so much art in the castle, it is a marvel. And imagine if it were, in in in France, then they would have, indications about, the chateau de Moncalais starting from one hundred kilometers away. They would even drive an exit for the motorway leading there. We only have one sign, a postage in, in, in, on the motorway, writing that there is a radar control for speed, because we are very good at, forbidding things because we are lazy. It's very easy to forbid things. So you simply, open a a law code and copy what it says there and make a sign re writing, a speed limit, radar control. And we don't advertise our beauty in order to advertise beauty. You have to be educated. You have to read. You have to commit yourself. We are too lazy. Laziness is one of the negative features of Italians of our country and of our people. And, so we need to, be better on that front and also to tell the story of wine better. How should we narrate wine? How do we do that? Well, lately, we have improved on that in that respect as well. And we have been successful. We were really below zero in the eighties. Possibly, we were the worst wine producers in the world. Wine did not taste well at all. And then there was a sort of rebound effect because we hit the the bottom, and then we had this rebound effect, and we managed to, in a way, metaphorically kill our, competitors in Marceola, even in the Langer area where it come from, we would, improve. At at the time, before that, people would compete, to be the worst. The methanol was a scandal. Methanol was taxed lesser than, I think alcohol. And, people forgot to to read about the dosage and, so they did not, know that if you put too much methanol, people get blind and may die. And that was really hitting the bottom that happened not only in the area I come from, but all over Italy, we had a decrease by sixty to seventy percent of sales in wine, a disaster. It looked like the end wine for Italy. And then We, start again from scratch, and we start producing well in the longer area and everywhere in Italy. And when you do that, in the country, which boasts the highest biodiversity on earth, with this incredible manufacturing capacity, then you're capable. Of producing the best wind in the world. So when we communicate wine, the first thing we should do is this is the identity element for us in Italy. It is the element that marks out our marks out our identity. It should be our flagship. And you see, one day, I interviewed Grounder, and I started the interview, and start by the way, I started in the wine business late. Was born in Alba, though, on the twenty fourth of September during harvest, in nineteen fifty four, which was a good, yeah, and harvest, but not a excellent, my father was from Barbara, my mom, from Barolo, and I'm not kidding. So that's destiny. But we did other things, electronic, appliances and household appliances. That was my gig at the time. It is not so that, I did not have a smartphone in the beginning because I was not able to use it, of course not. I was simply against using, let's say, appliances in general, devices in general, as a fashion something which you simply do because everybody does. And I think that they should improve life instead. On the first of April two thousand, I was at Uniello Troney, which is a store in Rome, And, we opened we had opened recently. It was a great success. And on the first of April, I would, play a trick on on my client, so because this is traditionally in Italy on the first of April. And, there were the first cell phones. It was huge devices. They were like more devices and they were so expensive. They their price was, let's say, two hundred fifty dollars at the time. And, so, on the daily, which is called the Messenger. I I published one snapshot of a sale, and, I wrote this also works as a TV, and there was a small satellite dish on top. And then I invented one thousand functions. They it even had a a toothbrush that could be extracted and you could brush your teeth and also razor blade. So I said this is the self phone at, let's say, fifty dollars for the first time ever, and only today, first of April at Toni in Rome. And then I wrote a very small close at at the bottom of the page, rising. You you, of course, understand that this is a joke. You should look for a cell phone or for a phone that is good at making calls and not all the other things. You buy a washing machine because it washes well and not to brush your teeth. Well, at six thirty in the morning, people were already queuing up at the store one kilometer of people queuing up and people in Rome got angry at me when they understood that it was a joke. But it worked because people spoke about us. We have to speak about wine as the identity element for our country. We are the first producer, leading producer of the world, fifty thousand hectares in the world, more or less. And, the French produce less than we do. The first thing we should tell about is our terroir, of course. And that, again, is that an identity element we have one thousand local varieties, we produce, wine everywhere in Italy. In France, they have two hundred twenty two. They have fantastic areas where they make wine, but not the entire country. Is dedicated to winemaking. You know how things started in France. So the competition between the Romans and the Greece, you know, we remember Caesar. He he did it, eight campaigns in Gallia, which was part of France. And, he would always find an excuse having to fight to the kings at the time. The point was that at the time, people in Gallia lived wonderfully in provence that they He would find things that then, painters like Picasso, Bancog or Matisse looked for. It was the light. It was Gallian arborencis and the other one, the area. Of Milan and so on and so forth was of no interest of all. And then he would go from to Galicia. It was a place where they could eat a wonderful fish and He built a villa there, and, he would, simply have a wonderful time with, girls from the place, which apparently were astonishing as well. You see, when you, Julius Caesar, went back Rome. People started saying, men, close your women inside the the the your home because, he's back. He was very heterosexual, let's say, and he loved drinking and eating well. During the second campaign, he brought vines from Aquila to France because he did not like the, one he could find in Marseille. It was wines from Greece. And, he he disliked it strongly. So he brought wine to the places where he did the campaigns. So also including France, and then we had the middle ages, the dark ages, so they are called so they were for Italy because it was the the the beginning of a terrible religious, tragic period. We even put people on, arson, including Jordan Bruno. We were, worse than during the crusades during the middle ages in Italy. And then during the first half of the twentieth century, we did terrible things. Leaving that aside, we should talk about terroir. When I started the interview, I told you about earlier on. My first question, and it was more or less two thousand eight at the time, so quite a long time ago. Anyway, I I remember that, the first wine I bought was Maledy wine by La Roche. And it is a wonderful book, where she writes wine is business. It is great business. The only, tough period is the first two hundred fifty years, and that I was aged fifty three at the time. I thought I will never make it. I thought that the only way to make it was to study. I'm really, a person who wanted to find out about things. If you don't know something, why not study? Why simply listening to people who tell you, well, I did fifty harbors before understanding things, but they never studied. If you study, you can do better than than people with the practical experience. Of course, you have also to be together with people who work in in in in the vineyard and be together with winemakers and be there when there is that magic moment of, starting a harvest when, everybody is quarreling, and it is a wonderful full day. The winemakers fight with the the harvesters. One person from the from the winemaking lab says, well, we You you you have to wait a bit more just to acid, but the person in charge of the harvest wants to start harvesting. So it is two conflicting interests that clash. And there are risks. It might be that the weather changes that the rain pours down or the temperatures drop. If you want to learn about why you have to be there and look at the farmer borrowing with the winemaker, and it is a wonderful fight. It is a romantic dialogue. It is a real dialogue, but people do not speak about themselves. They speak about wine, and you have to start in addition to doing that. So I thought, well, why not writing a book? And I did so. It sold very well. It is called the story the Corado Italian, wine, I love you. And, I sold a bit in, in Italy, and the three hundred thousand copies in the United States, and they tell about twelve famous families, in the world of wine. I traveled all over Italy to speak with them together with Segaroyashi, who it has is my age, and he's from Japan. He looks twenty years younger So he would taste the wines with a guya, with a gram, with others. And, says, the one from Susigaya was his name. Okay. And, we wanted to speaker of wine and the only speaker of his horse and, the name of the horse was a ribo, and he changed his life. He told me, I want to find another ribo. That's the the point in my life, and we wanted to taste a Sasekaya. Instead. Wine to wine business forum. Everything you need to get ahead in the world of wine, supersize your business network. Share business ideas with the biggest voices in the industry. Join us in Verona on November thirteen to fourteen twenty twenty three. Tickets available now at point wine dot net. He talks about wine, and I wanted you to understand more about these families, eighty two generations, Skyer, nine generations. I wanted to understand why they got there, how they got there, the relationship with their children, with their fathers, with the soil. I learned so much. And Grana told me French talk about terra because they don't have any terraar. And this is true compared to us. They have less soil and less terraar. I mean, they have a great to work per se, but if we compare them with us, they don't. We should talk about biodiversity. We should talk about, the indigenous Vinance. We should talk about, the, supply chain. Every single element in our life is part of the supply chain. Consider the life supply chain. I am talking. I am saying words. It's the musical part of life, the central part of life, but what's the supply chain, feelings, thoughts, words, actions, products, just like a tree, roots, trunk, and branches, branches are the words, and the leaves are the actions, and the apple is the product. This is the life supply chain, telling words, which are the children of my feelings. I guess you got it. You might agree or disagree with me, but you do understand my feelings. How I feel. These feelings create thoughts, and I am socrates. I can change these thoughts, but then when I talk, I reveal myself. And this is essential. This is about farming and food. Once the food supply chain, farming, processing, kitchen, plates, and, Italy in two thousand and seven, talked about all these in business terms in two thousand and seven, There was no TV program about food, unlike what happened in the past. Things have changed, and Italy talks about food talks about Italian food in a structured, sentimental way, farming, processing, kitchen, as in cooking, and plate. And, you should start farming to enjoy food. And, if we talk about, food, what we enjoy the most is wine because alcohol is great. Alcohol is fantastic. It is cool if you can manage it properly, meaning not getting drunk. If you can manage wine consumption, zero point five, that's the threshold in Italy, not to get arrested, but then it could change according to different regions. And alcohol is great. Alcohol is fantastic because as cicero said in Vino Veritas, so the truth lies in the wine and socrates did that. He was a vegetarian, but he was no nazi. If he was invited to dinner, and he was offered to me that he ate it. But he wrote a great thing. He said we should stop eating beef, otherwise, and meat. Otherwise, there will be wars because it means that there will be troubles and, Socrates. Why was he the greatest? Because during this symposia, people drank a lot during the symposium. It was like a talk today. So this symposium symposium was held at somebody's place and the host chose the topic for reasons, love, eros. So the connection between spiritual love and physical love, it was about politics, analytics, ethics, and they drank a lot. So they got drunk. And this is where two things were discovered, then everybody collapsed, but Socrates because he he was a greatest philosophy, because he understood his limits, and wine is great as spirits are. And wine is the best drink in the world, and they should stop here seventy billion. This is the sales, the wine industry. Coca Cola company, hundred and ten billions. Pierre for hundred and eighty billions. Why is the wine market so small? Because There are many countries where wine is not common like Africa, Asia, palm, China. They don't drink it for religious reasons. So for other reasons, for their history, their tradition, And sooner or later, they will get to it. So they will start drinking wine. I'm fully persuaded that in forty years' time, everybody will drink wine, so my son would be seventy. And I assume three hundred billions. We just opened the third Italy in Dubai, and we have drink license, alcohol license, and everybody drinks it. So three hundred billions, this will be the turnover in the wine market. And so Italy and France will not be the champions any longer, and Italy and France account for forty five billions today. And the French are better communicators than we are. So this is why they sell more We're getting closer, and the average price is a double our price because you can sell something better. If you communicate it effectively, it's not about cheating. It's about a storytelling we lose value because of, how it is communicated. It's really about storytelling. It's only about storytelling, but storytelling should be based on research. Should talk about the Tarara, the supply chain, what was what was done in the fields, in the cellar, in the winery, the packaging, and the people, the people we should talk about family histories and wineries histories. This is what we should do. What will happen when we get to three hundred billions in terms of market. There will be other places in the world that will produce much more wine than we do, and they will have more hectares than us. And we've got the problem of climate change We will find a way to produce grape wine. We would find a way even if it will be hard. It's easier to handle wine than rice, for instance, rice struggled because of the lack of water. And what are we supposed to do? The French and us, we should be legendary. We should create legends and myths, and will be legendary There will be families that can afford open a bottle of Italian French wine, but to become legendary, you needed to have an identity identity is key. Identity is key once again. If I say close your eyes and think of a Mercedes or it'd be M W. You can do it, close your eyes and, think of a shared. It's harder because it does some several things. So identity, identity is key. And the friend should do have their own identity. It's called a Terrar, and it's harder to beat them in terms of storytelling, and, which identity do we have? We are great in terms of clients, for agriculture. And so Our identity should be clean, green. You can disagree with me. You can agree with me because, there are specialists who say, why why should you do that? The ad our identity is organic. Because if you open a bottle of Italian y, you will die later than if you open a bottle coming from another country, we will not be that dramatic, of course, but it can be great. Not only in terms of wind, but in terms of climate change, and climate emergency, we are the best in Europe for plastic recycling and wood recycling. We rank first in the world. We have grades, forty seven percent of our energy is produced from renewables. So we should install PD systems longer waterways, we should install wind farms on islands. And if you do that in two years time, we can get it. Think of green Italy. You can do that in two years time, you can create we can create our own energy. We can recycle everything. This is what we should talk about. It's a a green country. It's a country where only organic wine is admitted, and we should tell the word the story, and it should be mandatory in the specifications of all wine consortia. We will get there. But we will get there later than other people, and we when this happen, we will say we are such fools, and I'm sure that we'll get to that in longer later than the frontal court guys. They will be the first that I will introduce this mandatory obligation about creating organic wines. In terms of quantity, in terms of quality now, they agree they do great bubbles. We need to be quick identity, speed, respect of the supply chain, studying your, your history, your tradition, and working your ass off. And think about Socrates said. The true wisdom is knowing that you do not know. Listen to the Italian wine podcast wherever you get your podcasts. We're on sunk out Apple podcasts, Spotify, email ifm, 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 until next time.