Ep. 1957 Enotourism- a Social Media Journey to #1 with Dr. Laura Catena, Stevie Kim | wine2wine Business Forum 2023

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This is going to be a little different. She does have some slides, some visuals, but we're going to be a little interactive. So Any time, if you have an intelligent question. Okay. Let me repeat. If you have an intelligent question at any point, raise your hand high, And we have the two women with the poncho. Okay? You see it's in it's it's very thematic. Right? You raise your hand and we'll get the mic to you. Okay. So at any point, this is about social media. I mean, You guys, how many of you don't be embarrassed? How many of you do not know who loud or Katena is? Two, three, four, five people. So, no, a little bit more. Explain them. Yeah. Okay. Get the hell out. Okay. So first of all, Laura Katina, her Google CV is it's embarrassing. I mean, I'm sorry. You know, I it's She is what I call the Antinori of Argentina. So when you think of Marlberg, when you think of Argentinian wine, of course, is the Katina Zapata. I think they are absolutely the benchmark wine producer in Argentina. But it hasn't always been easy. I know that in it kinda started your career in nineteen ninety five. They were the first Argentinian winery to do the wine star presentation wine experience. Is that correct? That's right. Yes. Yes. Okay. Laura is the fourth generation. Is that correct? Fourth in Argentina sixth, we count the two in Italy. Okay. So, she's act originally from well, your family's originally from Marque. See. Okay. So she does speak a little bit Italian or a lot. Avastanza. Avastanza. Okay. But this will be in English. Okay. So they immigrated to, to stateside, your family. Yes. And then when did you really start making one your dad? Right? No. So my great grandfather called La Katena in nineteen o two. Planted his first vines in Mendoza. Okay. Look look at the audience. Look at the TV. They're bored. Is that is that what you say? I've been told that all the conferences lately that you're not supposed to talk about your great grandfather. Okay. Alright. So forget that. Okay. Yes. And, I mean, her accomplishments, personally. She's what we call in Italian secchi on it. Do you know that word? No. Okay. Sechi on me means someone who does extremely well at school, who's someone who excels. They get, you know, a plus in everything that they do. Of course, she's a Harvard undergrad, and then she did she got her medical degree in Stanford. I mean, come on. It's It's really sad. It's depressing. She makes us look all very, very bad. Okay? Okay. Stevv stop stop stop. Okay. But, you make me look bad because you have the great sense of humor, which admire more than any Secione. Okay. Thank you very much. But, but today, we're not going to be talking a lot about the wines or Viticulture. They also have a research institute We're going to be talking about social media. Okay. So her winery has been declared as the number one winery, the best vineyard in the world. Now who decides that anyway. But, yeah, should Do you wanna do a little presentation? I think we should put the slides on. Okay. Why don't we do that? Okay. So the world's West vineyards, I have to admit that I've had many producers come talk to me and say, laura. Do you pay for the world's best vineyards? And I want to tell everybody here that I did not pay anything. This is an organization that is part of, the fifty best restaurants, is everybody familiar with fifty best restaurants? That they give awards in Latin America, all over the world. And it's become very important for restaurants. Well, the same organization decided to do an award around wine. And you commented on Antinori. Last year, actually, the winner was Antinori, And it's an award that's given based on your reputation, the quality of your wines, and the quality of your hospitality. And when Stevie asked me to give this talk, I, thought I would talk about the the award and also talk about the repercussions it had in social media and how maybe our presence in social media helped us get voted World West vineyards. So to answer the question, basically this group of the World West vineyards, travels around the world, they have to have been to a winery to review it. And then there's a vote with a list of wineries, and then whoever wins wins. And I won it last year in Spain, which I think was a bit sad for the Spaniards because there are some really amazing Spanish wineries, but it's a vote. There's over five hundred journalists that vote for this award. So it was a huge honor. An incredible surprise, we were not expecting it. And I hope to tell you the story of why we were voted. And I chose social media because, you know, you're a group of, wine producers, wine journalists, people in the trade, and I know we all think a lot about how we do our social media. And, you know, right now, I'm trying to figure out, do I do TikTok? Do I not do TikTok? You know, I'm not I'm not But you're not on TikTok yet? I've done one TikTok. Okay. One. It's terrible. How's that going for you? I'm I'm terrible on TikTok, but I want to do it. But but again, what you will see with this presentation is that there is the day zero where you start. And at some point, you just have to do it and choose how to present yourself authentically. And that's what I'm going to show you today. So, here it is, West West Vineyards, Katiras Apata. This was an image that appeared on their social media for West West Vineyard. And here is the social media at our winery. So you're gonna see Katina wines, Laora Catena Alejid Malbec, who is, the winemaker that I co wrote the book that I was presenting fifteen minutes ago. And you will notice that he's got a lot more followers than I do. And, I actually started his Instagram. I came one day from the US. I don't know. Maybe how long ago did Instagram start? Does anybody know? I think it was less. How many? Eleven, two thousand eleven. So it just started. I went to Argentina. I said, Alejandro, here, you should do Instagram. You'd be so good. I I took his phone, I put him on Instagram, and he is so good at it, and an incredible communicator. And today, I don't know. Does anybody know a winemaker that has more than two hundred thousand followers? So he is really a sensation, really, really good at it. I was a bit lazy at the beginning, and then somebody actually challenged me, Hey, louder. Let's let's get, up to fifty thousand followers, and then I've been doing a lot more lately. But the one you know, Anogou, I'd like to say for the producers here, is that if there's somebody in your team, a winemaker, a viticulturist, that is better than you, support them because it's good for your winery. And what Alejandro has done on social media is just extraordinary. And he, I think, has, has brought a lot of attention to our wines and our winery because he's, he's really good at it. And you should follow him. He's, he's really quite fun. Two thousand ten, by the way. Two thousand ten. So I think I probably opened his around then. Okay. So this is when we got the world's best vineyard. Are you enjoying this podcast? There is so much more high quality wine content available from mama jumbo shrimp. Check out our new wine study maps. Our books on Italian wine, including Italian wine unplugged, the jumbo shrimp guide to Italian wine, Sanjay Lambrusco, and other stories, and much, much more. On our website, mama jumbo shrimp dot com. Now back to the show. This is the post that Alejandro made And, he actually didn't make it because he was stuck on an, in an airport. He said that, but he was with his wife drinking wine in a restaurant in Italy on his social media. So that's the other thing. You can track people on social media. He didn't make it because he didn't think we would win the award. And here I was getting the award. And what was funny about this image, you see I'm doing the John Lennon thing. That was, you know, I just was so surprised and happy. I thought I'd do something And my son used to do that when he would make a a a goal in football. And the crazy thing is this is the symbol of a political party in Argentina. We're about to go to elections this Sunday, and everybody in Argentina thought I was making a symbol for that political party. And The the thing I wanna say about this is you cannot possibly care about these things. You know, I don't care. Well, it's John Lennon, it's whatever. I was happy I made the sign. I got all kinds of messages like, loud. Are you for this bad politician or this thing? You have to ignore everything. I do, because, you know, it was a really good moment, and I was very happy. And there's Tim Atkins. Yeah. I mean, I don't understand. Go back. Go back one second. Everyone has like a coat and a jacket and you're kind of naked. It's going down here. You know, I was wearing a dress of my daughters that literally when I packed, and I didn't know I was gonna get this award. And so, yeah, I I forgive me for my outfit, but it it it was actually kind of cold. It was the evening in Spain. Yeah. I can see. I can see it by everybody else except you. Yes. Okay. It was quite fun. But you have your signature gaucho bureaus. The I had the gaucho bureaus. So this was the the post by the winery. And, you know, the comment I want to make that's a lot. Twenty seven thousand, you know, for for us. We don't get this many people every time. That what I have found about social media is that wine drinkers really want to be happy for you. They want to celebrate your wins. So at first, I thought, you know, is it bragging? You know, I was taught to be somewhat humble, but honestly, I find that in social media, put it out there, people want to celebrate you. And I personally, when I have friends, For example, if I see that a friend that is a summary and the restaurant gets an award, I always highlight them in my stories because I love to be able to celebrate somebody on social media. So don't be shy. Okay. So a little bit about my what my father taught me. And it's it's really funny because a lot of these presentations are saying that the millennials, the, you know, the young people, they don't want to hear about the past. But I love to talk about my father and my my great grandfather from Italy and all this history. And my father has been the most incredible mentor that I think anybody could ever have. And when I started working with him, as Stevie said, I trained as a biologist and then as a medical doctor, so I didn't know anything about how to sell. I didn't even know what the word marketing meant. You know, I kept on hearing marketing this, marketing that. So one day I asked my father who has a PhD in economics. I said, papa, can you explain to me what is what is marketing? Is it the the advertising? Is it designing a label? And he said, There is one thing you need to know. Always try to be different. If you try to be the best and say you're the best, it would be very easy for somebody to come the next day and get, you know, a higher rating or a better award. And you know, they say, well, you're not the best anymore. But if you do something different, people remember and you always win. And I know this is kind of, you know, the first day of marketing one zero one class. They teach you this, but it's not so easy to be different in an effective way. So I'm going to show you here in this presentation a bit of how at Katena Zapata we have been different and how I think that may explain, you know, some of why we got this award. So this is from this book that I highly recommend. It's only about twenty pages. You can buy it online, and it's by James Webb Young. I think it's a book from, like, the sixties or seventies. It's an old book. But he gives this idea for producing ideas. And obviously, you know, you don't just read this book and come up with a bunch of ideas, but the method that he uses is the method that I use. Gather material, you know, being here, I am going to leave this conference with at least twenty new ideas, but not just going to wine conferences, go to museums, travel, you know, go to science forums, anything, you know, you will get ideas from anything you learn, throughout your life. Think. So you basically, you know, take notes, you study, take a break. This is very, very important. I find that, I don't know who who has ideas that you wake up in the middle of the night with ideas. Yeah. So I always go to bed with a piece of paper, and now you just use your phone, by my bed, I would say at least, you know, a third of any good idea I've had has been in the middle of the night or right when you wake up. I write it down and then I go back to sleep. And then the idea starts appearing. And part of the development that I think is really important is to seek criticism. I don't know if you can read this, but, it says, you know, refine and, rework idea, see, if idea meets requirements, expand idea as per criticism. I think this is one of the hardest things to do because we fall in love with our ideas. I fall in love with do you fall in love with your ideas, Stevie? No. Yes. So It's really hard to hear criticism, but you need to create an environment around you. You know, the people you work with, your colleagues so that they feel comfortable criticizing your ideas because I don't think I've ever had an idea that turned out to be good, that the original idea was the idea. It's always the second, third, or fourth version of that idea that becomes what what ends up working really well. So This is really, really important to receive criticism. I actually have another version about ideas. I always see ideas are free. Right? Because everyone has an idea. So many people have ideas. We have meetings. Everyone has an idea. But I say the ideas are absolutely free unless it's executable form. Then it becomes something important. But just having an idea is not enough. I agree with you on execution that often many people come with ideas, and not that many can execute them. However, I think that a really good idea is better than a not so good idea in terms of, you know, the the field of ideas, and often the execution is easier on an idea that that turned out to be really good. And some ideas are too hard to execute. So, yes, execution on the idea come in hand in hand. But if you have a good organization, Steven, I know you do, if we come up with a really good idea, we're gonna do the execution. And so I think that, yeah, don't go work in a company where there's a bunch of ideas and nobody's doing the execution because as you said, you're not gonna be successful. So here's you notice the winery, the shape. What is it? This is a pyramid. Right? So when my father needed to build a winery for, for our, our wines, that was near the high altitude region that he had discovered as the best region for making wine, The traditional area where my great grandfather had planted was around, you know, eight hundred meters elevation where it's too warm. So he wanted to go to the cooler climate to make more elegance balance concentrated wines. And so he had to find a style. And at first, he was rather tempted to build something Italian perhaps because we are of Italian origin. Malbec is a French grape. We went to California and visited all these wineries. You know, there's wineries that appear like, you know, a palazzo or a French building. And then he went to Central America just on a vacation. He was not going to look at wineries. And He was really inspired by the Mayan architecture and the pyramids, and he thought, okay, we're in South America. We have this Italian origin, but our terroir is very different. So he's had studied the mayans a lot, and they were a very advanced civilization who understood, you know, agriculture, math. They had a very sophisticated language, and he decided to take inspiration in the mayans, who are the native civilization of the Americas who who didn't actually make it to Argentina. We have the Incas in the north of Argentina, but he wanted to honor this civilization of the America. So this, you know, is a very different concept, right, to have a pyramid And, you know, today, you you get to this pyramid, and it it seems almost like a temple. It's it's really unusual, and people tend to not forget it. And that's why being different is really important because when you see something very different, you often don't forget it. And and part of our goal here is for people to remember what we say as opposed to the millions of things they hear. And it becomes even more important with social media because we're so, you know, bombarded with new information. This is a Bloomberg story about the the winery, which was very, very important because, you know, a lot of these awards, nobody cares. Nobody knows if it's important. But when a few really credible, journalists like Bloomberg, and I mean, this award for all the wine people here, in my opinion, was the most important award we've ever had, and we've had a hundred points and wine spectator things. But this award was commented on in the the normal press in the lifestyle press, in in Korea. In Italy, it was in several newspapers in Spain, all over Latin America and the US, in Australia. And, anyhow, I was very surprised myself because I had never seen any kind of wine news be be so widely communicated. And this is something that wine spectator did. They they, they picked the who they thought were the twelve most beautiful they called them chateaus, but wineries in the world, and, one of the wineries without was our here. I am with with Alejandro, the winemaker with the two hundred thousand followers. I told my social media team at the winery, guys, complete humiliation. If Alejandro has more followers than the winery, you know, what are we doing? So now they're really stressed out that they need to, try to compete with Alejandro, which is a healthy competition. So how big is your social media team? What is the composition? Okay. So our social media team is one person. And One person? Yes. One person and an intern. So we have a designer at the winery. One of them in those one in buenos aires where because we do our own sales in Argentina, like a lot of Italian producers, you you do your own distribution in Italy. We do that in Argentina, and we have a person in Mendoza. So many questions First of all, I see most of these slides are focused on Instagram posts. Yes. Are you doing other stuff? Yes. Instagram is your main Yes. So so this is a a very good question. In terms of you know, what do you do? Do do you do Instagram, you know, Facebook, Twitter, or TikTok? And my theory has always been to do one of them correctly. So we do mostly Instagram what we also post on Facebook, and we are in Twitter. And I think LinkedIn is becoming very important these days. And Alejandro, our winemaker, he's also on TikTok. He's ahead of us and everything. And, you know, I'm always, you know, talking to him about it, and he is just amazing. I don't know how he manages to make all these wines, and he actually does his own social media. He does not have a person who does it. And I can tell you that because he drives and does social media at the same time. Which makes me very upset. And and he he he doesn't do it when he's Do you have an insurance policy? Yeah. No, but I'm serious. I give you a very hard time. So, yes, I we have one person and we have a an intern So for people who are in wineries, how many of you have an intern program for interns that come and spend? Okay. So I see a few hands. I highly highly recommend that you have interns for social media. We currently have a UCLA graduate in design. She is fantastic. She takes pictures. She makes posts. Of course, her English is perfect, which is helpful because, m, Miguel, our social media guy speaks and writes in English, but never as well as a native. And we have now a house in Mendoza for the interns. We have harvest interns. We have the social media intern. We have somebody that helps us with databases and got more business intelligence. We had a a British guy recently. And I tell you, these interns have a lot of energy, and, they often bring a talent that is a little different, and it's good for social media because, you know, they're often young people in their twenties who understand that because they've grown up with it. So, okay, so this slide, now I want to move to a different thing, which is Malbec. So, who knows that Malbec is a variety that's famous from Argentina. Okay. So I think pretty much all of you, right? There was a day in the early nineties where no one knew anything about my bank. Maybe if you were a master of wine, you knew it was one of the five Baldo varieties. But nobody knew we made it in Argentina. There were no single variety of Malbecs from Argentina. And so, really, when we started with Malbec, it was mostly doing something different. Everybody else thought you should do cabernet sauvignon, chardonnay, or whatever. I remember telling my father, listen, the Australians are doing so well with Sharaz. Why don't we do Malbec? And my father's like, but is Malbec? Good. And, you know, why did the French get rid of it? And so what I did is I did a lot of reading about Malbec in the ancient books and France, and that's where I found this history that the main problem with Malbec was that the yields were low But actually, at the time of the eighteen fifty five pacification, there was more Malbec than cabernet sauvignon planted in the Medoc, which, when I go to to France and I tell people they say, oh, that doesn't surprise me. But Doesn't that surprise you? Then in in the nineteenth century, there was more Malbec than Cavanese Munon planted in the Midoc, you know, or Mircon? It's a luxury. Alright. And then if a luxury comes and the problem is that Malbec had a lot of problems with the set, the fruit set, and it has some problems with grafting. And for all these different reasons, it mostly doesn't get replying to it. However, right before Philocksmith comes to Argentina, where it's just very well adapted to the to the terrace. In Argentina, for example, if you're making, you know, cabernet sauvignon, Sierra, Bonardo, which is, you know, our our Italian grape, you you kind of have to pick the place. You can't plant it anywhere, but Malbec makes different wines. You know, some are better than others, but it makes pretty good wine in any terroir, different tasting, but good wine. So it really is a a variety. Maybe it's the deep root system that does well with not as much water with a mountain climate. We don't know exactly why, but it's it's one of these immigrants that, like, Stevie, in doing well as an Italian. You're a good immigrant example. Yeah. Korean American and it's Korean American in Italy. Yeah. Crazy. Look at look at what you've accomplished. Okay. So, Malbec, it was not obvious that Malbec was going to be this big thing. Right? But we went all out with Malbec, and this is a timeline that I created, and I wrote a book. Malbec Monambour is the the book I I wrote about I talked about today, but my previous book, Golden The Vineyards, talks about, the gone cruise of the world and mentions the Adriana vineyard, one of our vineyards with Malbec. And the reason for this slide is that nothing is obvious. So there was a time around two thousand and ten where, you know, Malbec had become very popular, and people were asking me Oh, what's the new thing from Argentina as if Malbec was some kind of a fashion. And I realized that we needed to do a lot of work to show the subtleties of Malbec, the terroir, Malbec, the regionality of Malbec. And, rather than switch to talking about other varieties, which was what everybody else was doing. They were talking about Toronto, Monarda. All these different things. I said, we need to talk more about Malbec. And this was a very deliberate, movement. And I wanna show this label, has has anybody seen this label? The Marrec Argentina de Vaux. So not many of you. So if if we were in the US right now, it would be at least fifty percent of people would raise their hand. So This is the first label in the world that tells the history of a variety on its label. And it starts with Eleanor of aquitaine, Anna Moschietta, my Italian Greygrandfather Filoxera is the third female. And then it's it's my sister. Filocksha mostly exist in the female form. That's why it was a perfect villain. And this has been our most successful label ever. More, if you put this bottle on social media automatically more likes than anything else. Why do you think? What is the what is your opinion? People just like the way it looks. They like they like the fact that it tells a story. They hear the story from a friend who tells them the story. They look for the label. It also easy to say, Hey, it's the label with the four women. You know, it's easy to remember. And it's been just an incredible success. And the point I want to make, this is my sister Adriana and her husband Gustavo and my little nephew Antonio. A in the wine business. She's not. Adiana is in the wine business. And this is how I got her in the wine business. Uh-huh. So she's this is her graduation from Oxford University. She has a PhD in history. And when I was having this problem with the box, is anyone stupid in your family? I mean, this is terrible. No. We we just study a lot. I think I'm not sure how smart we are, but we do study. But, so I went to my sister who was a professor in history And I said, Adriana, tell me, how do I tell the story of Malbec? Because all these people are asking me, what's next after Malbec? And Malbec is this two thousand year old grape? How could it be replaced? And she and I thought, She was always criticizing my PowerPoint. She was saying, oh, you you do terrible PowerPoint. You know, the little sister, they're always criticizing you. And I said, Adiana, this is your opportunity to make the best PowerPoint presentation ever. And she says, louder, I have a better idea. Why don't you put that story on the label? And what I what I wanna tell you with this anecdote is that with ideas, you use everybody in your family, in your entourage, like, ask people for opinions or ideas because there will be somebody around you that knows something that you don't know, and you need to use them for your creativity and for your execution. Because I needed somebody to write that story who knew the history and who could tell that story. And she's actually at, a lot of what she does is art history. So she actually came up with, the design and the the idea of following the allegories of the continents. Does anybody know about the allegories of the continents? No. Right? I'd never heard. I mean, I've seen them in a museum, but it would never cross my mind to do a label, a wine label with the allegories of the continents. Right? And this is where talking to a historian is so helpful. I always say if, you know, if you're wondering your wine family and, you know, your your kids want nothing to do with wine, like I did, I wanted to be a doctor, let them study whatever because everything is useful. And this is her husband, right? He is a playwright. So I said, okay. My sister helped with the label. Let's see if her husband can help us. And he wrote a play, which was performed. This is Tina Bastron. She's a a beautiful, wonderful British actress. And we have performed the play all over the world. This is in Singapore, actually, at Kanchita. She's performing and he wrote a play, a fifteen to thirty minute play about the history of Malbec, Eleanor of aquitaine, and Anna Moshete that switching from one to the next. And it was a really different way to tell the history of wine and very, very successful. Oh, I I will skip because we we are how many more minutes do I have? How many more slides have you got? About five. Okay. Let's, we have about ten minutes. Ten minutes. Okay. Okay. So this is, the reason I have this Oldvine, I got this Oldvine hero award last year. And the reason I wanted to show this slide is that this is an idea that started, you know, maybe, almost twenty years ago. I was at the Naples Wine auction, which is this big event in America where people pay millions of dollars for experiences in in wine country. And there was a very famous person there, Ober de Villain from burgundy, and I went to talk to him about my pinot noir clothes, the vision clothes that we applied to amendosa. And he looked at me very politely and said, basically, those are crap. That's terrible stuff, the dijon clothes. He said, it's all about massage selections. And he was telling me about the massage work he was doing with Pinonois in Burgundy. And I was standing next to him. This was in the mid nineties, and I realized, oh my god. We have the massage selections of Malbec. Our family has a selection of a hundred and thirty five cuttings. All our vineyards are planted with massage selections, Argentina's vineyards are ninety percent, Masal, ninety two percent ungrafted. Does anybody know that? So we've got basically about a hundred and eighty thousand hectares of ungrafted lenders in Argentina. And until I talked to about the villain, I didn't realize that this was something of of any importance because it was what I knew. And that's the other comment I would make is you know, what you know from your own region. I don't know. Talk to people from other regions because they think very different things. Now I was talking about old vines and ungrafted and Masau selections for twenty years, and nobody seemed to care. Until recently in Europe, it has become a very big thing, and I was just at the master of wine symposium and people were talking about that because it is such a as, an important thing for biodiversity, right, for climate change, we need genetic diversity. And these Masa selections in Argentina are, like, you know, vineyard gold. I I like to say that for Malbec, Argentina is the old world, not the new world, because we have these ancient pre fill ups to our selections, the biodiversity and the ungrafted vines. And all I wanted to say was that if you have some idea that you're really passionate about, and nobody cares, don't stop talking about it. Because if you really care about it, and it's important, just continue. And someday, you might get this Old White hero award because it's an important topic. And currently, it's all of a sudden, it's fashionable, but I've been talking about this for twenty years. This is just to we we were in the top one hundred with one of my wines, with old vines. It's called Luca. And, I just wanna share with you that people really do wanna celebrate you. I can't believe I got I never get eighteen thousand views for anything, and it was just some little simple video saying thank you. And, it's important to to share your successes with people. It's not it's okay. You don't have to be humble when something really good happens. This is the book that I was talking about. Here's Alejandro, the the social media guru. The the book was a bestseller in Argentina. It it was actually very successful. This I I do just want to show this. It was Malbec World Day, and we didn't have a I just feel like I I can speak Spanish the way your father pronounced Isn't he? So Yeah. It's Nate. So I I was just at another conference in Portugal and everybody keeps on saying, stop talking about your grandfather. I mean, is my father, like, one of the cutest people you have ever seen Like, he's adorable. And so everybody loves him. When I post a photo with him, I get trillions of likes. Talk about whatever you're passionate about. Somebody says, this is now fashionable. This is not fashionable. You don't care. Be authentic and talk about what you care about, and people will see that. This is a hundred a hundred point. The comment I wanted to make here is I think the photo is really bad and it's blurry. But I posted it anyhow because it was the photo I had. And my advice on social media is, you know, if you don't have the perfect photo, post anyhow because it's a time thing, you have to do it when you get the award. This is, I might skip through this. We have a wine called elegant microbes of the earth, in Latin. And the reason it's in Latin is because I thought that these terroirs should be classified like Linneos classified the species because they are a new kind of flavor from a specific place. And, at first, I was told. I remember I was with these very fancy French journalists, and they said, laura, you cannot have the word bacillus on a label. Like, it it might mean that it's contaminated. This this is the one that's been around for, you know, a long, maybe sixteen years. And no more. Eighteen years. And, you know, today, everybody's talking about the microbes and the soil. So, again, you know, if you think something's important, go with it. And everybody calls itmundus, and nobody's ever commented again about the the word Vasilos. And and and the the name comes from the microbes. We did a microbial study and found very different and interesting microbes, and a microbe that had never been described in the world in the soil of this vineyard. And so I thought we should honor that microbe on the label. This is our new restaurant, which has a concept called wine first, where the menu is wine, and the pairing is food. So the food is the wine, and the and and, you know, the the food the real food is the pairing. We have one food menu, seven wine menus, and it's been really successful. We do, you know, seven different glasses of different wines. We have one menu called the roller coaster where you go from, you know, red to sparkling, to red, to rosé, and people love it, and again, it was doing something that was different. You know, wine as the food instead of, the food as the wine. And this is a little bit about the wine experience. One last comment is wine and music. So, I love you know, playing music while I drink wine. I think a lot of us are, you know, fairly obsessed with music, and and, you know, it's to me wine and music are two of my sensory experiences. And so we were doing this tasting, and we had a lot of thought about, you know, should we pick particular songs? Because what we do is we do one wine, two songs. We pay the we play the songs. And then the guests choose which is the best pairing. And it's so much fun. And at first, we wanted to have like a a playlist. And then when I was talking to the tourism guys at the winery, they all had so many ideas, and I decided to make it open. That they could pick their own songs depending on the group of visitors. And my one last comment would be, when you work with people, you know, don't don't try to micromanage people because people's best creativity comes when they, can show their own passion. And I think this is so important in hospitality that everybody that works in hospitality has their own passion and and let them shine through that. Of course, they need to tell the story of your winery, which has certain elements, but then the rest should be their own personality. And in this wine and music, I mean, sometimes we have opera, sometimes we have you know, a Brazilian music. Sometimes we have rock and roll or jazz, depending on the tour guide. And it's it's our most successful tasting. We also have a a wine blending session and something about family. And I'm gonna oh, final thing. So sometimes a post goes very badly. I'm gonna show the do I just press play? Okay. So look at this video. Okay. So what's wrong with that image? What's wrong? Well, it's not very sustainable. Right? Okay. So I had been walking by the ocean, and I had had this vision, you know, and I'm not that good of a photographer. I'm quite bad. But I'm I've gotten better at doing social media, but I thought, won't this be so beautiful? This bottle with the the waves going around? You know, I was thinking of, you know, the bottle in the olden days, you throw the bottle with the message. Okay. So I go to I wake up in the morning really early, but you see that's very good lighting. And I go take this video and I put the bottle, and the bottle falls. Of course, I'm watching it. I stop the video, and I run-in. Obviously, I am not going to let this bottle. Go in the ocean because, you know, I'm I'm not a crazy person that's gonna pollute the ocean. However, if you watch this video, you think that I just let that bottle go and that I'm the worst person you've ever met. Right? Like polluting the ocean with the bottle. So I make this post, and I had to get in the car and drive two hours. And I start getting these crazy calls from the winery, like, Laura. It's like emergency emergency emergency. And so finally, I stopped the car, and they say, there is, like, the social media, everybody's writing all these terrible things about this post that you are polluting the ocean. And I'm thinking, Oh, of course, I picked up the bottle. Like, who would not pick up that bottle? And anyhow, what I'm saying is, I I answered all those people, and I think, I mean, obvious, they if they didn't believe me, I don't care because you know, I picked up the bottle. But what I'm saying is, there is gonna be a time where you're gonna do something potentially really dumb and whatever. Forgive yourself and, you know, don't don't beat yourself up over it. Okay. Great. Listen, Sam. Yeah. Let's give it up for Laura Katena. We have fifty five seconds, but I will, open the floor to, a question to the floor. I've intimidated everybody. Okay. But what is, I mean, I guess the whole point is you are leveraging also the wine tourism. Right? What we are that's kind of the the the magical, you know, coinage of wine tourism, and no tourism. Okay. But what is sustainable wine tourism for you? Yeah. Well, we actually brought the sustainability code to Argentina. There wasn't one. And, it's now used by many, many wineries. And we have, sustainability in everything we talk about at the winery. We, you know, we walk out to the vineyards. We show work we do with cover crops, with, preserving water, with you know, the biodiversity, this plant selection I've been talking about, we, are now doing a new campaign with lower weight bottles where we're introducing three hundred and eighty gram bottles of fairly expensive wine. And so at the restaurant, we're going to be doing like an education campaign for the customers, and, we have reduced our wake by forty percent of all our glass in the last ten years. And this is something that we communicate So, I mean, we we have a sustainability certification, and it it's part of the language when we're talking about the wines. My big topic now for sustainability is the whole wine and health topic, which I think is part of the the the overall sustainability of wine as a industry. If you Google, laura Katena, wine, and health, you'll get a lot of information about that as well because you don't say necessarily wine is great, right? Because you're also a medical doctor. Yeah. Well, I I think wine and moderation is great. I can say that confidently, but wine and not moderation is very bad. And that would be another hour that we don't Actually, we don't have time for that, ma'am. So I'm gonna close-up this session because we have institutional session coming up of Verona Fieri here in fifteen minutes time. Thank you all very much, and she'll be here for Q and A privately. Listen to the Italian wine podcast wherever you get your podcasts. We're on SoundCloud, 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 costs. Until next time.