Ep. 466 wine2wine Session Recordings | Wine Meets Wellness

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. One to wine twenty twenty represented the first ever fully digital edition of the business to business forum. Visit wine to wine dot net and make sure to attend future editions of wine to wine business forum. Before I start, I have to tell you that I'm sitting in a room looking at my PowerPoint slide and nothing else. Which is one of the weirdest presentations I've ever done. So please bear with me while I go through this. But you may have seen in July this year a whole lot of publicity about the wine called Avaline, which was launched by Hollywood star Karen Diaz and her friend, Katherine Powers. Now the reason that this got so much, publicity wasn't simply that they were another bunch of celebrities launching a wine, but because of the claims that they were making about this wine, They called a clean wine, and the publicity said that they were going to take on the wine industry and introduce transparency to wine. And what did they mean by that? Well, interestingly enough, not only did did this take off. They sold lots and lots and lots of wine, but it turned out that at the same time there were other people making these claims in the media as well. There were these people, Feldman and Dunlop, who at the same time, through fall business insider, were also talking about a wine that was clean. And what does clean wine mean? What they were talking about was wine where they were transparent about the ingredients they were using in it. Particularly what they were saying is that commercial wine is full of additives and ingredients that are really bad for you and that the wine industry is not talking about it. And that they have made it their mission to force the wine industry to start talking about these toxic chemicals that are apparently in wine. Well, seriously enough, what's really What's really interesting about, both of these wines is that neither of the people who were producing them neither Diaz nor the the team behind Goodclean wine actually told you anything about where the wines came from. The whole sales pitch is about the fact that they're free of toxins. Now I was watching this, and I've been watching this for a while, and I've been noticing that in the United States, there was a lot of social discussion about wine additives, and I wanted to know where it was coming from. So I I did some research before this happened, and I discovered that there's four drivers of a new trend, which the wine industry really needs to understand. At the moment, it's a relatively small trend inside the United days, but many of the people who are proponents of this are launching attacks on the wine industry that the wine industry needs to know about, and it needs to know how to respond to. So first of all, where is this coming from? Well, there's four sources of, that are feeding into it. First is concerned for the environment as heard from Rebecca's book. Young people particularly are very concerned about sustainability and the environment. And part of that interestingly enough is how many people attempting to vegetarian and vegan diets because they know that a plant based diet is better for the planet. And this was where Cameron Diaz had really noticed something that she said that the wine was a vegan. When she started looking into wine, she was horrified to discover that wine sometimes in production uses animal based products like egg whites or isenglass, and she thought that the world needed to know. And, of course, these are very additional things that have done for hundreds and hundreds of years. But suddenly these things that for the wine industry are traditions are being presented as noxious. So there's the vegetarian and the vegan part of it. The second part of it is the popularity of something called the keto diet, which is really flow. It's one of the top diets inside the United States and has been for the last couple of years. It's a it's basically in short a high fat low carbohydrate diet, and anyone who's on it is really particularly worried about sugar. They want to kick any sugar out of their diet. So there's that. And then something called the clean beauty trend, which, I'll talk about in a moment, but it it's had an outsized impact on how people are thinking about wine. Clean Beauty really started about ten years ago with questions over whether there were toxic or noxious ingredients in in caustic formulations or not. And it's upended the world of clean beauty, of, of beauty in a way that's now beginning to affect other industries. And the fourth leg of this table of what's behind this is the course wellness trends. But wellness encompasses a lot of things at one end you've got very sort of science and health based, things like good nutrition, eating properly, getting good sleep, logo meditation, mindfulness. But what's happening is at the other end of the wellness trend, we're starting to see things which are pseudoscience, which are all the beginning to prepayment in discussion, and this is impacting is going to impact the wine industry. Right. So the major thing that the people behind the clean wine trend and associated wine brands is that they're making claims that these wines are literally either healthier for you or they're healthier for you than conventional wine. Now you can see this claim from the good clean wine people, which is the two young women that launched, their clean wine, that they literally come out and say in their advertising, but if you drink their wine, you'll have less likelihood of hangover. Part of the reason that they're saying that is because they are new entrants to the alcohol sector, they may not realize that making these kinds of claims is bordering on the flouting the law. But a number of these companies are actually coming out and saying that their wines are healthy and by, the conventional wines are unhealthy. So here's a company that's jumped in on this. There's a company called Wing, which is a data driven company. It started a few years ago. They look at they sell wine primarily online, primarily it's bulk wine that's been rebashed in different ways, and they sell it to different consumer segments. And I spoke to Brian Smith I found it earlier, for about another matter, I was really interested in how you do a technologically driven, wine company, and and the way that they look at consumer behavior, and then they design wines to fit different consumer niches. And just before I interviewed him, this wine suddenly popped up, the wonderful wine, which again tells you nowhere about where it comes from, other than it's from France or it's from Spain, but whose packaging is very close to being, about things like Biogenics, about histology, which is very popular at the moment. All of the brand imagery is around sort of nineteen sixties, the account culture, and there's the implication that there's a health and wellness vibe around this Brian Smith said to me the reason that they had launched this wine was because he lives in Los Angeles and he'd started to see the wellness and mindfulness trends spread really rapidly and that he thought that it was only a matter of time before wine needed to step up and and produce some minds that fit into this category. These wines have proliferated at an amazing rate. Some of them like lifelines, are very small players. This one mine and body is actually a low alcohol, low calorie wine that's just been launched. It's by a a big player. Interestingly, although these these wines are selling really well, they're actually technological products. They're not they're not traditional wine making. So in order to make this premium, low calorie wine, they probably used something like a reverse osmosis or something to remove the alcohol. To the right is fit fine, which is a very interesting wine. Again, it's it's wine that is not very different from any other wine that you might see out there. This particular one that has fourteen degrees of alcohol. So this is not a a low alcohol, low calorie wine at all, but because of the badging as to do with sport, it's actually a best selling wine at Whole Foods. Again, my magazine mining is wine business international interviewed the the guy who put this together. And he says, the the winemaking has been done to reduce any possibility that your feel lousy afterwards. So there's no, wine made with oak because oak can introduce some things called biogenic amines, which I'll talk about a little bit later, which can make you feel unwell if you if you drink that in combination with some foods. But again, it's not that they don't they don't make any deal about where the grapes come from. The the land it comes from, who made it is not part of the the the the the advertising. But yet, they've managed to build amazing community around them. This, they've managed to get people who are into health and wellness and fitness who have a a living their life around this brand, which is quite extraordinary. So let's talk about the keto diet, which has actually dried a lot of this keto diet really exploded on the scene in the 1970s. It was part of the sort of diets that were out in those days, like the scarsdale diet and the atkins diet. And it promises that you should eat only high fat and low carbohydrate and not very much protein. And actually, it's not that great a diet in terms of vitamin deficiency. Some some sixty people actually died in the years when it was very popular. So it it fell out of, it fell out of fashion, Oprah lost weight in the 1980s, but nobody was really using and accept some bodybuilders because to do it safely, you have to do a lot of supplementation and taking vitamins. But then in two thousand and three, a report came out in the journal science, saying that people were losing tremendous amounts of weight during this diet. And if they were careful about their nutrition, they could also remain healthy. Somebody called Tim Ferris introduced it to the biohacker Crown and bio is a very important part of this food. Biacking is kind of the male version of wellness. It's people using using techniques, some of which are scientifically dodgy, some of which may be promising to change their body. So it's things like people immersing themselves from freezing cold water. Ways boosting the immune system, or or using headphones that supposedly pump in different brain waves to help you concentrate better. It's that kind of technological approach to the body. And Tim Ferris is very well known in this community, and by him talking about the Diamond Joe Roadin show, which is a popular podcast, this this took off from it's now America's favorite diet, but the key and most important thing about it is that it relies on low sugar. And the other thing is once people start using keto, they actually find it more difficult to metabolize alcohol, so relationships with wine ranges. So one of the biohackers who was really interested in this is a guy called hot white. And he discovered after he went on keto that he had to stop drinking wine because of this metabolic effect. So he started looking for wines that he could continue to drink. And he found, he's he's from California. He found some natural wines from Europe that were low alcohol, very low in sugar, did the job he started introducing it to his his bio hacking friends. And pretty soon, he had a really big business. And now it's a huge business inside United States. It's a subscription service for Natural White. But if you look at what the, the thing under performance leaders what's really interesting is, again, he's not selling the wines as being part of the land or the watching. He does talk about that a little bit. But for him, what's really important is that all of these health gurus have said that this is the right wine to be drinking with Key show. Now Todd White isn't somebody who's just running a business. He's also putting a lot of advertising out there over social media, which is denigrating commercial wines. He talks about how much they contain sugar, And as you can see from the picture, he actually makes it appear as though wine makers are dumping actual cane sugar into the bat as opposed to, talking about residual sugar. And one of the products that he's been particularly, attacking is anything that uses a thing that is in states called Mega Purple, which is a grape, grape concentrate, which is sometimes used in really cheap wines for, for color and to add residual sugar. What's really dangerous about some of these companies is when they talk about other winemakers, they're talking as though everybody out in the market is using mega purple. They're talking as though everybody has really high residual sugar. It's a technique that's called disparagement marketing or denigration marketing, which is to make yourself look better by denigrating the competition. In the case of Todd White, he actually believes it. I've spoken to him, he's very, very passionate about health and well-being. He's very passionate about his bio hacking. It's also something of conspiracy theorist. He gave a talk last year, and he he gives a number of these talks, but he tells people that the wine industry is actually colluding to make people unhealthy. And one of his claims is is that the reason that alcohols have gone up is not because the parkerizational climate change as we would think, but because big wine companies are actually adding more alcohol to get people more addicted to their product. He has quite high reach. And unfortunately, what he's discovered is that the wine industry is hiding some things. He often sends other wines off to laboratory to be stood for their loss of alcohol and sugar, and he often finds that the alcohol that's on label, there's no relationship to the actual alcohol inside the the the bottle and that the sugar and alcohol is much higher than it's stated. He's becoming an increasingly important person. Now I want to move over and talk about clean beauty, like, what's this got to do with wine? Well, it's very telling that Cameron Dyer's partner, Catherine Powers comes out of the clean beauty world, and the two women that started the Good Clean wine company actually started are actually petitions who own a spa. Now what happens in two thousand and nine was there was study done about an ingredient called parabens, which is a preservative in cosmetics that stops cosmics from getting funguses and going off and oxidizing. And in a, a study that was done on breast cancer, some of their horror discovered that a slide that had breast tumor cells on it was absolutely riddled with parabens. As to what they esteemed was that there was a relationship between using parabens and developing breast cancer And when this got out, it isn't the the the beauty industry into free fall because everything had parabens, this this, this preservative. So there was a real rush to get rid of parabens. And also to get and let's begin to look at other ingredients. So, well, maybe we've got other ingredients that are really bad for you. And a whole, a whole movement has sprung up, which is to remove, anything that's chemical from beauty ingredients, Now, unfortunately, in order for beauty ingredients to actually work, you need some of these ingredients. And it turns out that they weren't bad for you anyway. When somebody went back and looked at the paraben study, they discovered that not only was the paraben turning on everything in the board. It turned that the slides were using had actually been wiped with a cleaner that had parabens in it. So it wasn't that the the the breast cells had so many parabens in it. This is the slide itself. But this didn't change anything. And so this has kicked off a whole movement to move towards natural ingredients and to get rid of anything that's got a chemical name. And unfortunately, in some cases, people are using worse quality ingredients, and in some cases, they're they're moving into botanicals, which are actually becoming endangered. So it's very significant. Some of the entrance into clean wine come from this background. And the other thing about the clean beauty movement is that it's pseudoscientific. It's it's using language from the world of alternative health and civil science about toxins and some, which is not supported by scientific and medical understanding. And lastly, I'd like to talk about this company, which is called scout and Sella. Now, Spat and seller is a really, really interesting company. It's what's called a multi level marketing company, which in itself is quite a, controversial style of business. It's where, instead of employing people as salespeople, the company recruits, consultants in the old Avon model where somebody chooses to sell it to their friends, and then they make a commission on what they sell. But also if they can get somebody else to sell the product, they get a commission on that person's sales as well. It's very difficult for consultants to make money. The idea is that you sell them a product that they really want to consume themselves. So it was founded after a lawyer called Sarah Shagonix said that she really loved wine. She wanted to retrain as a seller. She had Salia, she had been a lawyer, and so she moved to start training as a smellier, and she quickly discovered that every time she went out drinking, she began to feel sick. And even when she reduced the alcohol, she still felt really sick, So in her origin story, she goes to lots of doctors. It's really hard to find out what she did. Sometimes in the media, it says she went to naturopaths. Sometimes it says doctors, it was probably naturopaths because they said to her, it was the toxins in wine, it was the additives and the wine making process that was making her sick, not the alcohol. So she set out, she says, to start this company where she only sells wines that have no additives and no preservatives. It's just wine. Interestingly, she doesn't claim it's a natural wine. I've tried to find out from the company whether they use things like inoculatively yeast or natural yeast. They won't answer media questions. The wine is bulk wine. Again, origin is not important. They don't tell you who makes it or where it comes from, and the wines are very high priced. But the the, the big selling point is that they're, fermented to dryness that there's no residual sugar in it. This has struck a nerve with consumers, even though it's quite a difficult sales model, in its first year of operation, it made twenty million dollars, and it's on track this year to make sixty million dollars, which is an astonishing growth. And anyone who says you can't make money and wine should have a look at this model. But again, what they're using is what's called disparagement marketing, and what's really dangerous about this is because of their model, which is getting ordinary people to sell the wines. So I think at the moment, they have some thousands, maybe three thousand consultants across the United States. Their individual consultants are not professional salespeople. So what they're doing is they're trying to sell through Instagram and social media, and they're using these memes. And they're doing it to attack normal wine, and they tell their friends not to drink conventional wine because If you can see, this this thing about, you know, that our wines have zero grams of in, added sugar, it's tended by actual people and not mass produced by industrial agricultural methods. We don't make wine in the laboratory. Of course, they're suggesting that everybody else does make wine in the laboratory. And the most concerning thing about it is they keep talking about the two fifty commonly approved additives like ferenos cyanide or mega purple or GMOs. I actually went in and fact checked this. There are no GMOs that are legal for use outside the United States. And inside the United States, although GMO use, in theory, are legal. There aren't actually on the market. Ferano cyanide I had to look up was used a long time ago, in Soviet winemaking to remove heavy metals from wine, from iron. Again, you can't even buy Ferano cyanide, and it's being removed from the register of legal additives. So these these claims are not actually true. But they're being spread far and wide and fast through social media. So first of all, we have to ask the question. I mean, are they right? Is conventional wine toxic? And and I was really interested in this. So I spoke to a woman called Doctor. Krena Stockley who is a pharmacologist. She's one of the best known in the world. She creates, she she works with lawmakers to talk about what is legal to use and not use in wine. So every country has a registry of legal additives and processing aids. And this changes as scientific understanding changes. And what Doctor Stockley told me was that in the last twenty years, winemaking has become so good that a lot of winemaking additives have actually been removed from the registers that winemakers today use less processing agents than they did forty years ago simply because Viticulture is so good. Secondly, what she told me is that there are no toxins as we would understand it in wine apart from ethanol itself. Wine is an extremely safe product. It's highly regulated more than any other food stuff. And there is nothing in wine that can do you any harm, even if it's a residual of something. And I said to her, well, what about combinations of things? If people are using yeasts and enzymes and you know, PPV to remove color, could the combination cause you damage? And she said, no. The problem with wine, that the unhealthy thing is ethanol. There can be one problem though, which is interesting. And she said it was biogenicamines. And this seems to be culprit in some new world wines, that as you do malleactic fermentation, it can produce these compounds called biogenic amines, which, one of which is histamine, can give you a slightly unpleasant reaction. Interestingly, it's not the wine itself that will make people feel lousy. It's what they eat in combination with the wine. So the, these histamines are also found in things like, cured meats, in cheese, in fish, in some vegetables. So if you're standing around in an afternoon and you're drinking a, a chardonnay that's had an allergic fermentation from a warm climate area and you're snacking on cheese and starcuterie and some sorts of vegetables, You're actually getting a an accumulated dose of histamine that is gonna make you feel really unwell by the end of the day, but it's not the wine. It's the combination of everything that you ate during that day. Unfortunately, that's a very complex thing to have to tell consumers. It's much easier for these people to simply say conventional wine is unhealthy. Okay. So now we come to a question of that clean wine companies are making an enormous amount of money. So should, is this an opportunity for the wine industry? Is this something that the wine industry should also, jump on? One of the most interesting things is that Sarah Shionics in one of her powerpoints said that she discovered that Nielsen was saying that people would pay more money for things that were free from than they would for things that had health ingredients. So what do I mean by that? So if you can put on a packet of something that it's it's GMO free or it's aluminum free or it's tiger free, you can charge more money for that product than if you actually, have healthy ingredients inside it. So is this an opportunity? Should people be saying my wine is, you know, radiation free or whatever? And I think the answer has to be a no. For one very clear reason. There's a study that was done in twenty sixteen that really clarified this more than anything that when you start disparaging and when you start making fear based marketing, it doesn't drive people towards your product. It actually ruins the entire market. There was a study done in a low income community, which had been, which had been bombarded with messages about organic fruit and vegetables. And the organic fruit and vegetables people said, we don't spray pesticide on our, fruit and vegetables. So if you choose us, you can be guaranteed that you're not getting any of these nasty toxins. And what happened is people who didn't have a lot of money on one hand couldn't afford to buy organic, but they became really frightened of what conventional fruit and vegetables might have on it. And so they just stopped buying fruit and vegetables altogether. So let's talk about pesticides. Is pesticides something that we should be really worried about? I spoke to the LCBO in Canada who test a lab test every single wine that comes into their region, which is over twenty two thousand a year. And they said they tested for pesticide residue, and of the twenty two thousand six hundred wines that they tested last year, they found twenty that had pesticide residue on them. So going down this fear based message is is not only dishonest, but it has the the possibility that it will actually bring the entire wine market into distribute. The other problem is all bottles of wine look the same. If you start if people start to say that there are some wines which are good for you and some wines which full of toxins, consumers cannot tell the difference. All of the bottles look exactly the same. The other thing is that making health claims about alcohol is absolutely against the law. Under the Trump admin the body that was responsible for this to TTB has been fairly toothless. It hasn't gone after people, but under a Biden administration, we can expect that they're going to follow through on some of warnings. So what should the wine industry do in the face of this? I honestly believe that this clean wine phenomenon and some of the associated claims that have been made out of it. It's a very small niche at the moment, but because of the rapidity with which it's moving across social media, I think it is a dire threat to the wine industry that we have to take very, very seriously. So in the face of this, and in the face of the fact that trying to explain that wine is not full of toxins that takes more words and and more time than just to go, my wine doesn't have GMO in it. What can we do? The first of all, you need to know that consumers of these of these healthy wines are not interested in the sustainability story. They don't care about, where that wine was made. They don't care about the territory. They don't care about the, the family that made it, all of those cues simply don't work with this audience. What does is the green message. So the more that you can talk about the greenness of the way you farm, and if you use the word about the health of your land is a really important way to talk about it Secondly, the the the critics of the wine industry have got some points. It turns out that the wine industry has been very poor and very dishonest about talking about alcohol and sugar levels, and it's time that we did talk about them and put accurate representations of what they are on the labels. And lastly, it's time that we started to talk about the wine making process. And maybe the wine trade has been at fault there. Over years, we've presented the idea of wine as this new colleague pastoral, family, green thing. But ever since Louis Pester discovered the secret of fermentation two centuries ago, chemistry is an integral part of what makes winemaking work Now the wine trade's been really good at making some chemical names sound really positive polyphenols resveratrol. And I think it's time that we talked about the fact that as well as being an art and a craft, wine is also a process of chemistry. And that rather than giving in to people who are phobic about chemical names, we need to explain, how the the chemistry of wine actually works. It's obvious that people are interest who are interested in health are interested in some of those stories. Lastly, another thing to be aware of is that it's really important to take this seriously because at the end of twenty twenty two, possibly, wine labeling is finally going to be a reality in the EU. And once the EU does it, the new world will have to follow suit because they want to export to the EU. So what does wine labeling mean? It means that anything that has been used as an ingredient in the wine, whether it's an inoculated yeast or an enzyme or ascorbic acid or, you know, sulfur sulfur compounds or whatever will have to be on the label. What will not be on the label is, processing aids is something that is added to one and then removed. She doesn't have to be talked about. Is this going to scare the pants off people? Actually, no. The co op in the UK has been doing this for years and years, and it turns out people really don't care. What they do care about is they do now, they care about the alcohol level, and they care about the sugar level, and they care about transparency. So that is my talk on clean wine. I hope that you will take this seriously. At the moment, it's not something that European consumers are particularly caring about, but where California goes and where the United States goes, the rest of the world often follows. Thank you very much. Certainly have, a number of challenges. And for those of us who are, you know, in the wine trade in the US and seeing a lot of these brands grow particularly online, I think it is absolutely something we need to take seriously. Have a question for you as it relates to, a lot of the brands you're talking about have a very heavy focus on community and on social media from that, building that kind of collective consciousness. Can you speak to that? As it relates to messaging and how, brands are talking to wine drinkers that might be a little different. Well, what's really interesting is that a lot of this content is being generated by wine drinkers themselves. It's not coming from the companies. People who and and it's really because people gathering communities for fitness activities. And so, it's becoming more and more usual that when they do that, they're sharing wine with each other. And so It's actually an organic process that's happening rather than a marketing process that's happening, which is really, really interesting. But by the way, I should say the guy who puts fit white fit vine together has been very thoughtful about it. He's done all the research such a debiogenic amines. And so he's he's moved to remove anything from the wine that could be, a problem. I I and I I, you know, so I think I think there is also some really interesting innovation going on in wine. It's it's not all bad or negative. But the thing that is really negative is the disparagement marketing. And and having communities of people who are coming together, not just to talk about wine, but to disparage conventional wine is something that we should be really worried about. Okay. We have fifty five seconds left. If you had, a big bag of cash to go and invest in one of these clean wine companies, who would it be? It would be wink, actually. The fact that they're a, a technology and other drip company, they're really clear about what they do, and they're they're very innovative. And I think the second one will be dry farm wines because on the one hand, I think Tog might I I I've listened to some of his conspiracy theories and just rolled my eyes. But I think he's also a I think he's also a good actor in terms of he picks good wines. He he pays people on time. He pays people really well, and we need more of that than wine trade. Wonderful. Alright. Well, with that, We're gonna leave on that note. I'm gonna go and get some money together. And thank you so much for joining us and, spending an hour together. Thank you. Bye. Bye. 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. 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