The Future of Italian Wine is in Good Hands

October 16, 2018 By Mike Veseth in Italian wine, wine, wine awards, wine education, wine research, wine science 1 Comment

award Deborah Gelisi wiped the tears from her face, took a deep breath, and continued with her presentation on the importance of sustainability for Italian wine producers. It wasn’t an easy thing to do.

Deborah’s audience was in tears, too. Her classmates and teachers at the Scuola Enologica di Conegliano. Her winegrower parents. Even her 12-year old brother, the fearless goalkeeper of his youth soccer team. Over at the head table the city’s mayor was misty, the school’s director was teary, Rai Uno journalist Camilla Nata was a little choked up, and I was a pretty emotional myself. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

Stories about rooms full tearful people don’t usually feature on The Wine Economist, so you probably have some questions about what was going on and how this relates to this column’s optimistic title. I’ll try to answer the questions one by one.

Who is Deborah Gelisi?

Deborah Gelisi is an 18 year old student at the Conegliano Wine School, which is Italy’s oldest enology and viticulture school and, according to our friend Paul Wagner, probably the largest wine school in the world. Founded by Antonio Carpenè in 1876, it provides education and training for young students who have chosen to work in the wine industry. The school has a long list of distinguished alumni including notable Romeo Bragato, who was instrumental in the development of wine industries in Australia and New Zealand in the 19th Century.

Deborah comes from a wine-growing family. She gets up early each day to work at Podere Gelisi Antonio, then takes the train from Pordenone to Conegliano for classes, reversing the commute in the afternoon for more work and, of course, study. I don’t know when she sleeps.

Why Was Everyone Crying? Bad news?

Deborah was being honored as the first recipient of the “Etilia Carpenè Larivera International Scholarship,“ which will provide her with the opportunity to expand and deepen her wine knowledge through international travel and study and jump-start her career in wine. efx-s

The scholarship was inaugurated this year to mark the 150th anniversary of the founding of Carpenè Malvolti, one of Italy’s most distinguished wine producers. Its founder, Antonio Carpenè was the inventor of the process of secondary fermentation in autoclaves that gives us Prosecco.

Carpenè Malvolti honors its past in many ways, which you will discover if you spend some time at the new visitor center in Conegliano, but as a family wine business it is all about building for future generations. That’s why the photo above shows Deborah with Rosann Carpenè Larivera, the fifth generation of the famous family, along with her daughter Etilla, the rising sixth generation, for whom the scholarship is named.

What’s the Significance of the Award?

It is good to honor students and to provide valuable educational opportunities, of course, but it is important to see this award in broader context. Deborah’s award was part of a project called Generazione DOCG, which aims to invest in the future of the region through its young people. Everyone was crying (and then celebrating) because this isn’t an ending but a beginning, both for Deborah and for the region.

The next generation of Italian wine producers will face many challenges, as we discussed at the VinoVIP meetings in Forte dei Marmi in June. The industry is fragmented, lacking the strong brands that could build help open markets and build margins. It won’t be easy to make progress given intense competition everywhere.

But there is real hope. Rising wine professionals like Deborah Gelisi and her student colleagues can make a difference in the vineyards, cellars, and markets. If Deborah is an indication, they have the knowledge, drive, determination, and entrepreneurial spirit that will be needed.

And they have the backing of their families, communities, and forward-looking wine firms such as Carpenè Malvolti. With this team supporting and encouraging them, it is easy to see that the future of Italian wine is in good hands.

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Congratulations to Deborah Gelisi. Special thanks to Carpenè Malvolti for inviting me to speak at this awards ceremony. It was an honor and a pleasure.

The IKEA of Italian Food & Wine? Welcome to FICO Eataly World

July 31, 2018 By Mike Veseth in Italian wine, wine, wine education, wine magazines 1 Comment

eataly1 If you have ever visited an IKEA store I’m sure you have vivid memories of the experience. The stores are huge (30,000 square meters on average, I’m told, although there’s one in South Korea that’s almost twice that size).

Each store is organized around a journey that customers take from room to room, space to space, category to category, pausing only at the restaurant for Swedish meatballs before passing through the check stands, their bags and carts filled with Scandinavian-inspired home goods.

IKEA of Food and Wine?

FICO Eataly World, located just outside of Bologna, Italy, reminds be a bit of IKEA, especially because of the journey its visitors take. But there are many differences, too. Eataly World is much larger than an IKEA store. At 100,000 square meters (over 1 million square feet!), it is more than three times the size of your typical IKEA and almost twice as large as that Korean super-IKEA. Food (and wine) are at the center of the experience. And Italy, not Sweden, is the guiding star.

Sue and I visited FICO Eataly World during a recent stop in Bologna, where we lived for a semester some 20 years ago when I taught at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies Center there. We’ve visited other Eataly locations in the past — New York City, Milan, and the much smaller Eataly Bologna located in the historic center’s famous market, just steps from our old apartment on Via Pescherie Vecchie. But this one was different in more ways than scale.

FICO (Fabbrica Italiana Cantadina) Eataly World is located outside the city core, close to the convention centers that draw thousands of visitors to Bologna each year. Lots of free parking and regular bus service from the train station makes it easy to access. But the location on the outskirts changes things a bit — Eataly World is a stand alone culinary theme park destination where the other Eatalys we’ve visited have been more integrated into their neighborhoods.

The Eataly stores in New York and Milan bring a whole Italian market, with shops, restaurants, and vendors of fish, cheese, salumi, fruits and vegetables and so forth, all under one roof with all the hustle and bustle you would expect. The central Bologna Eataly is a little different — the bookshop is the main feature that I remember — but that’s because it is embedded in a historic bustling market just off Piazza Maggiore and does not need to recreate one. The food court, located across the alley from the main store, is a fine addition since our last visit.

Eataly World’s vast scale suggests a grander vision. There are dozens of shops and stalls featuring distinctive foods from all over Italy, and 45 “eating points” — kiosks, cafes, restaurants — serving regional cuisine. There are 20 acres of small demonstration farms and vineyards, so you can meet the pigs and squeeze the grapes, and some of the final products are actually produced on site. We ran into a group of small children who watched in fascinating through a glass wall as a robotic baker made batch after batch of tasty cookies.

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You can make of Eataly World what you like — a place to shop or hang out, a place to eat and drink, or even an opportunity to exercise (you can rent bikes to shorten your journey time inside the big building). But education is an important function, too, both the organized classes that are always on offer and the one-to-one conversations with staff at each stand.

What About the Wine?

One of our goals in visiting FICO Eataly World was to see how they dealt with Italian wine. This is a big task as Italy is home to hundreds of grape varieties and thousands of wineries. I nearly went crazy trying to narrow the wine list down to a few important wines in my book Around the World in Eighty Wines. It would take an IKEA-sized facility to do real justice to the diversity of the wines of Italy — and that is more space than even Eataly World has to spare.

That said, the wine program we found was very good. There were 2000 wines for sale, organized by Italian region as they should be, ranging from modest to noble. More to the point, there were 100 different wines available by the glass or in flights.

A knowledgeable young staff member ascertained our interest in learning about Lambrusco and arranged a small tasting of two completely different ideas of the wine, both quite dry but one dark and powerful and the other lighter and fruity (see photo below). It was a good experience and a good way to learn about the wines and have fun, too.

Wine calls for food and there was a nice Bolognese restaurant attached to the wine shop — one food/wine option among many at Eataly World. We had lunch at a foccacia shop (we saw the foccacia being made in front of us). I had a sandwich with Mortadella and a glass of that dark Lambrusco — great combination.

So What?

So what should we think of FICO Eataly World and its ambitious wine program? Well, what do you think of IKEA? Personally, I find it kind of bewildering with the crowds, noise, and its cornicopia of products, most of which are irrelevant to my life. But I like to go there — yes, for the meatballs — because it isa place where I can get ideas and stumble upon things that I didn’t know I would like. It surprises and delights more than it confuses, I guess.

I kind of like FICO Eataly World in the same way I kind of like IKEA. Based on our single visit, it seems full of stuff that overwhelms but gives me ideas and a chance to stumble on something I wasn’t looking for (the Sicilian shop and its great cannoli and espresso).

But there is a big difference between IKEA and FICO Eataly World. Ultimately IKEA succeeds when it allows its visitors to find their own voice, in a way, through the designs that they choose and the products that they bring into their homes. That’s a big challenge and it says something about IKEA that it is so successful.

But Eataly World sets even a bigger challenge. It wants to tell the story of Italian food and wine and that topic is so vast and complex that it makes IKEA seem simple by comparison. I am not convinced that Eataly World really does justice to its mission, but how could it? It was fun to visit and see which elements of Italian food and wine culture stood out and which ones did not.

Sue’s take on Eataly World was quite positive. It was like a giant first-class IKEA food court where you wanted to try everything even though that would be impossible to do. She especially appreciated the educational components and loved the family-friendly animal exhibits. She thought that, taken on its own terms in both the food and wine components, Eataly World represents Italy very well.

Will we go back to Eataly World on our next visit to Bologna? I dunno. We were there on a quiet Friday morning. I’d like to visit the place when it is busier just to see if it feels like the Bologna market when it is crowded, which is pretty much all the time. But that Bologna market neighborhood is fantastic — Italy World — and I’m not sure Eataly World can compete with it!

If I had to choose between Eataly World markets and the real markets in the centro storico of Bologna, there is no question where I would go. I’d be having a glass of Pignoletto frizzante wine and a plate of Mortadella at Simoni’s Laboratorio on Via Pescherie Vecchie every time rather than taking the red bus out to the fiera district.

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Here is Sue’s photo of two very different ideas of Lambrusco. Enjoy!

2vini

Review of “Our Blood is Wine”: A Film about Georgia Qvevri Wine

March 27, 2018 By Mike Veseth in wine, wine education, wine history 10 Comments

Our Blood is Wine, directed by Emily Railsback, released by Music Box Films, 2018. Available as video-on-demand via iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, etc.

Our Blood is Wine is a fascinating look at traditional wine-making in Georgia (the republic, not the U.S. state) and how it survived the traumatic Soviet era to be widely celebrated today as a natural wine icon. This documentary has been made with the same restraint and respect for tradition that the Georgians use in making their qvevri wines. The wines let nature tell its story to a greater extent than most wines do. And the film lets Georgia tell its story in a very natural way, avoiding unnecessary intervention. Highly recommended.

I admit that I was a bit concerned when I learned about Our Blood is Wine. Georgia is unique and I worried that the film would treat it with the generic techniques that are so often found in wine films — sunny vineyard scenes, the changing of the seasons, pick-up trucks with faithful dogs. You know what I mean. These scenes are charming and beautiful, but they are clichés. They could be anywhere, so they end up being nowhere. Wine films are filled with them.

Georgia is different, special, so the film needed to be different, too. Sitting at a key geopolitical crossroads, Georgia has experienced invasion, occupation, and foreign rule repeatedly and yet somehow the people, their culture, Christian religion, unique language and alphabet, have all survived. Georgians are survivors and the same is true of their wines.

Our Blood is Wine shows the hard work and sacrifice of artisan winemakers in Georgia instead of sunny vineyard scenes. We travel along with Chicago-based sommelier Jeremy Quinn, our inquisitive guide, but he is not the star of this show. He usefully yields the screen to the Georgians who have created these wines, preserved the indigenous grape varieties, and crafted the fantastic qvevri themselves.

One thing that keeps the film moving is the fact that we mainly see people at work and often (as in a scene where several sweating shirtless men carefully move a large, awkward, heavy qvevri into place) the actions speak as loud as any words ever could. The hard work contrasts with the beautiful Georgian music that forms the film’s soundtrack.

The Soviet era, which the film shows through archival footage, was particularly hard on Georgian wine. Georgia-born Joseph Stalin made sure that he had a constant supply of good wine from his home region, but the rest of the country’s wine industry was not so lucky. Private vineyards were seized and industrial wine production replaced private cellars to satisfy undiscriminating palates elsewhere in the Soviet empire.

Traditional wine-making practices survived through home production and even today most Georgian families make wine for their own consumption, some of it very good. Georgian wine consumption is high by U.S. standards. The rule of thumb for a party is two bottles of wine for each female guest and three bottles for each male. The domestic industry is necessarily focused on export since it is hard to compete with homemade wine for local sales.

There are, as I wrote in 2016, three wine industries in Georgia today. Some large producers focus on sweeter wines (which can be very good) to sell to traditional Russian and former-Soviet markets. Another industry has grown up around exports of clean international-style wines made with indigenous Georgian grapes. And, finally, a relatively small craft industry exists to satisfy the growing global demand for the natural wines made in qvevri — traditional hand-made clay pots that are buried in the earth. These wines and the people who make them and love them are the focus of Our Blood is Wine.

Sue and I were delighted when, at the end of the film, the art of Georgian wine was driven home through the work of an artist who actually paints with wine and the juice of the grapes instead of oil or watercolor. Saperavi art? Could it be, we wondered? Yes! The artist was our friend Elene Rakviashvili, who helped us to learn about Georgian wine and culture when we visited in 2016.

Our Blood is Wine is worth seeking out for what it teaches about Georgia, history, culture, politics, and of course wine. One of the best wine documentaries of recent years.

It’s Here! “Around the World in Eighty Wines” Now Available

November 1, 2017 By Mike Veseth in book reviews, Shameless Self-Promotion, wine, wine education 9 Comments

9781442257368 I have been waiting for this day for a while! My new book Around the World in Eighty Wines is officially released today in hardback, e-book, and audio book formats. If you pre-ordered your copy it should arrive very soon. Can’t wait to hear what you think of it.

Actually, if you pre-ordered on Amazon.com you might already have your copy — those sneaky guys started shipping a few days ago. But the Kindle and audio versions are officially released today. Hooray!

A few early reviews have already appeared on Amazon and elsewhere. Many thanks to Tom Mullen for his favorable review on Forbes.com. I think Tom really captured the spirit of the book and I appreciate his kind words.

Wine-Fueled Adventure

Sue and I have been on a wine-fueled adventure for the last several years, circling the globe to speak at wine industry conferences and to do research for The Wine Economist and my books. At times I guess we felt a little like Phileas Fogg and Passepartout, hurrying from one fascinating place to another.

And so, inspired by Jules Verne, I decided to collect our adventures in this new book. The book’s path and Jules Verne’s itinerary are a bit different, although they do intersect in several interesting places. Here’s a map of Phileas Fogg’s route in Around the World in Eighty Days, starting and ending in London.

80days

And this is the Around the World in Eighty Wines route. London is the start and finish line for this race, too.

As you can see, the wine route is much more complicated. That’s because Jules Verne was interested in speedy travel, so straight lines and direct routes were best, whereas I am intrigued by the stories that wine tell us, and I am willing to go to some trouble to track them down. So detours, interruptions and a bit of back-tracking are inevitable.

A Surprise Plot Twist?

globe Fogg and I both face strict constraints, however. Eighty days. Eighty wines. And we both beat the odds to achieve our goals, albeit with the help of a last-minute plot twist that produces a surprise ending.

Surprise ending? Well, I told you I was inspired by Jules Verne, so I could not resist following his example to assure a happy ending for my readers just as he did for his. Can’t tell you what the plot twist is — it’s meant to be a surprise!

I hope you enjoy reading Around the World in Eighty Wines as much as Sue and I have enjoyed the journeys that produced it and the wonderful people we met along the way. Cheers to wine, travel, adventure, and Phileas Fogg!

Around the World in 80 Wines by Mike Veseth

Table of Contents

Part 1: From London to Beirut

1. London: The Challenge is Made and the Journey Begins

2. France: Which Bottle? Which Wine?

3. Italy: Batali’s Impossibility Theorem

4. Syria, Lebanon and Georgia: The Wine Wars

Part 2: Rounding the Cape

5. Spain: El Clásico

6. Any Porto in a Storm

7. Out of Africa

8. India and Beyond: New Latitudes, New Attitudes

Part 3: High and Low

9. Shangri-La

10. Australia: The Library and the Museum

11. Tasmania: Cool is Hot

12. Southern Cross

Part 4: Sour Grapes?

13. Napa Valley Wine Train

14. A Riesling Rendezvous

15. Cannonball Run

16. Back to London: Victory or Defeat?

The Wine List

Look Through the Rainbow: Cyprus Wine’s History of Boom and Bust

June 27, 2017 By Mike Veseth in economic crisis, history, wine education, wine history, wine markets Leave a comment

rainbow

We were sitting in the sleek, modern Vlassides Winery tasting the wonderful wines of Sophocles Vlassides and hearing his strong views on wine, Cypriot wine, and his own ambitious winery project, when it started to rain.

Weather can be complicated in these mountains and soon the sun began to shine through the showers creating first a simple rainbow, then a richer multicolored arc, and finally a pair of rainbows nestled together. From our winery perch we could see both ends of the rainbow (where pots of gold are said to rest) firmly rooted in the vineyards below.

Rainbow, vineyard, pot of gold — what a perfect metaphor for Cyprus wines, I thought. But the sharply analytical Sophocles Vlassides (who studied winemaking at UC Davis as a Fulbright Scholar) popped my mental bubble. Rainbows are pretty, but we were really looking at the wrong thing. If you want to understand Cyprus wine today, don’t look at the rainbows, look through them to the mountain across the valley.

If you look through the rainbows on Sue’s photo above you will see the remnants of dozens of terraces that once were planted to vines that, along with hundreds of similar vineyard areas, formed the basis of the great Cyprus wine boom.

The Surprising History of Cypriot Wine

I had never tasted a Cypriot wine before we arrived in Pafos for the Cyprus Wine Competition. You might not have tasted one either because most of the wines are consumed in Cyprus these days and only a trickle enters export market pipelines. But this wasn’t always the case.

Cypriot wines were once well known and some even famous in European wine circles according to the Oxford Companion to Wine‘s history. Pliny the Elder, the Roman “Robert Parker,” praised them, for example. Cyprus fell under Venetian influence for a time and its wines circulated widely. I have a reproduction of a book called Wines of Cyprus by Giovanni Mariti that was written to explain Cypriot wine to international consumers. It is dated 1772. and was first published in Florence. wines-of-cyprus

Commandaria, Cyprus’s signature sweet wine, commands an important role in the country’s wine history. Indeed, Wines of Cyprus talks of little else. Along with Tokaj, Vin de Constance and a few other treasured sweet wines, Commandaria was a “King of Wines and Wine of Kings.” Ironically, my book was written during the period of Ottoman rule when the Cypriot wine trade and the industry itself slowly declined in importance.

Cyprus came under British administration between 1878 and 1960 (so UK electrical plugs are needed and autos drive on the left side of the road). Cyprus “sherry” became an important export during this period — we saw a few old bottles at the Cyprus Wine Museum in Erimi Village — but this trade has faded away, too.

Look Through the Rainbow

A variety of circumstances led to a boom in production and export of cheap basic wines and grape must concentrate (some of which was reconstituted and fermented as British wine) in the years after the British exit. The grapes to make these wines (international and indigenous varieties) came from the vineyards we saw (and many others like them) when we looked through the rainbow at Vlassides. Yields might have been high in those days, but it is pretty clear that production costs were high, too. No machine harvesting on steep terraced slopes.

The Cyprus export boom collapsed in two stages according to the industry people we talked with. Competition from cheaper New World producers such as Chile and Australia crowded Cypriot wine out of some markets. The collapse of the Soviet Union drained dry previously reliable Eastern European markets for basic wine. The Cypriot bulk wine boom went to bust.

A Quality Revolution

The movement from unmarketable quantity to desirable quality began in the 1980s, according to the Oxford Companion, led by the “Big 4” producers: KEO, SODAP (a cooperative), ETKO and Loel. Change accelerated after 2004 when Cyprus joined the European Union. Subsidies to cheap wine exports ended and uneconomic vineyards like the one we saw were grubbed up.

The contrast between past and future was clear to see as we talked wine with Sophocles Vlassides at his modern facility tasting the tense, structured wines that he makes from international varieties (perhaps reflecting his UC Davis training) and indigenous varieties, too. Sue and I took home a bottle of his excellent Syrah and Panos Kakaviatos, who was in our media group, opted for an unexpected Sauvignon Blanc.

What is the state of the Cyprus wine industry today? Are there pots of gold at the vineyard rainbow ends ? Or have I stretched this metaphor a bit too far? Come back in two weeks (after Independence Day) for observations and analysis.

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In the meantime, here are some rainbows for you to ponder.

“Your Wine Questions Answered” is More Than Just a Great Wine Book

September 20, 2016 By Mike Veseth in book reviews, wine, wine education 3 Comments

51f7cvacx8l-_ac_us160_ Més que un club is the motto of the Barcelona soccer team. Barcelona is more than a just soccer club, according to its ardent fans, it is a commitment to values that extend well beyond sports. During the dark years of Spain’s Franco dictatorship, supporting Barcelona was a way to make a pro-democracy (and pro-Catalonia) statement.

Més que un wine book?

Jerry Lockspeiser’s new book Your Wine Questions Answered: the 25 things wine drinkers most want to know is more than a great wine book, it is also a way to make a statement and change the world one student and one school at a time.

All the money that Lockspeiser’s book generates will go to help build primary schools in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Jerry writes that

In 2010 I visited Sierra Leone with international development charity ActionAid. Sierra Leone is one of the world’s poorest countries and education is fundamental to improving lives. When I came back from the trip I suggested to two wine business friends that we create a wine brand and give all our profits to finance the building of primary schools. We set up the Millione Foundation, created the Millione brand, sourced a lovely lightly sparkling Rosé from Italy, and set about selling it.

So far we have financed the building of five schools, educating 1500 children. The more books and wine we sell, the more schools we will build.

This is obviously a very good cause and a great way for wine book buyers to support a worthwhile initiative. As I wrote in the final chapter of Money, Taste, and Wine: It’s Complicated, sometimes wine can be more than a nice drink. Sometimes it can help change the world one cork or glass at a time. I was talking about some inspiring initiatives we saw in South Africa and now Jerry Lockspeiser extends this model from corks and glasses to books. What a great idea.

Jerry at the book launch event at Daunt Books in London. Sold out 100 copies in an hour.

What about the book?

So what about the book? Lockspeiser is pitching his book to wine newbies — people who like to drink wine but don’t know much about it and want to learn more without too much pain. The book works for this audience — each brief chapter answers a typical wine question in two to eight pages and ends with a “one gulp” summary.

The goal is to make new wine drinkers more confident in their choices so that they enjoy wine even more. Jerry never talks down to the reader because, after all, everyone is a newbie at some point. Wine should make us happy and this book’s cheerful, helpful tone underlines that fact.

But Your Wine Questions Answered is not just for newbies. Jerry Lockspeiser knows wine and the wine business like the back of his hand and he knows how to talk about wine, too. Reading this book is like sitting down with Jerry and having him tell you about the world he knows so well in an informative and interesting way. This is so much more than a bluffer’s guide!

Here are a few of the chapter titles to give you an idea of the the questions that are answered here. Sometimes, as in the chapter on Cabernet Sauvignon, the initial question is just a way to open a door to larger issues (naming wines by their grape varieties, for example, as opposed to their region of origin).

WHAT IS CABERNET SAUVIGNON ?
WHY DO THEY SAY SOME WINES HAVE ‘A HINT OF GOOSEBERRIES’ ?
WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CHAMPAGNE AND CAVA ?
WHY DOES FRENCH CHARDONNAY TASTE DIFFERENT TO AUSTRALIAN CHARDONNAY ?
HOW IS ROSÉ MADE ?
HOW LONG WILL WINE KEEP IN AN OPEN BOTTLE ?
WHY DOES WINE COST SO MUCH ?
ARE HEAVILY DISCOUNTED WINES WORTH THE FULL PRICE ?
WHAT IS THE BEST WINE ?
IS IT TRUE THAT ORGANIC WINE DOESN’T GIVE YOU A HEADACHE ?
WHY DOESN’T THE WINE I BROUGHT BACK FROM HOLIDAY TASTE AS GOOD AT HOME ?
DOES IT MATTER WHAT KIND OF GLASS I DRINK WINE OUT OF ?
WHAT IS THE BEST WAY TO CHOOSE WINE IN A RESTAURANT ?

Every chapter gave me something new to think about or a new way to think about something I thought I knew pretty well. Your Wine Questions Answered is a great wine book. But it’s really more than a great wine book because of the ambitious school project in Sierra Leone and progressive values it supports. Available at Amazon US, Amazon UK and Waterstones.

Five Things I Think I Learned at the Napa Valley Wine Writers’ Symposium

March 1, 2016 By Mike Veseth in Economic impact, wine, wine education, wine markets 9 Comments

wine-words1 Sue and I are back from the Professional Wine Writers’ Symposium at the Meadowood Resort in the Napa Valley and it is time to reflect upon the experience. Herewith some notes and a list of five things that I think I learned about the wine writing business.

Anatomy of an Amazing Experience

The wine writers’ symposium has been going on for about a dozen years and it is an amazing experience. The idea is that you bring together a faculty of experience professional wine writers to teach, coach, mentor and help network a group of rising star wine writer participants. (This year’s “student” group was so well qualified that the student and faculty roles sometimes reversed — a good thing.)

The setting is fabulous. Classes and accommodations are at the Meadowood Resort, which is also one of the sponsors along with the Napa Valley Vintners association and the Culinary Institute of America’s Greystone Napa Valley campus. Bill Harlan of Harlan Estate wine fame co-founded Meadowood and actively supports this initiative. The CIA’s sponsorship derives from its wine education program for budding hospitality professionals.

People come to the symposium to learn to be more effective wine writers and especially to find ways to be more successful on the professional side of things — career development and income generation being important factors. Sue (who was a career and writing coach) and I (one of the speakers) came to learn more about how the wine writing business fits into the wine industry generally and of course to meet all the talented participants.

Reflecting upon four days of intense activity at Meadowood, the CIA Greystone and a tasting at the historic Charles Krug winery, I have come up with a list of five lessons we took away from this experience.

Lesson One: An Industry in Transition

The wine writing business (Jamie Goode would correct me here — the wine communicating business) is an industry in transition. Ironically, although wine is more popular and integrated into popular culture than ever, the number of traditional media outlets for wine writing has declined. There are fewer newspaper wine writing jobs, for example, and fewer newspapers, too.

There is more wine content available to consumers than ever before, but much of it is on the web and provided for free by both professional and amateur authors. Some of the amateurs are highly qualified, of course, but their freely provided content makes earning an income in this field more difficult.

The internet and the move to mobile communications are disruptive technologies generally and the wine writing business is no exception. That said, disruption creates both challenges and opportunities and the key lies in choosing a strategic response.

Lesson Two: How Wine Writers Are Like Actors

Wine writers are a little like actors from an economic point of view.The most commonly repeated line among aspiring actors, it is said, is something like “My name is Robert and I will be your waiter tonight.” Day jobs may suck, but having a secure source of income is very useful. Being an actor is hard. Making a living acting is even harder. Ditto wine writing.

A small number of wine writers do very well indeed! They work very hard and earn good incomes, achieve a certain level recognition and even celebrity. Most wine writers, however, work very hard and scramble to scrape together a living with multiple jobs and non-wine writing projects — the economic equivalent of an actor’s waiter gig.

Even the most successful contemporary wine writers pursue multiple disciplines, however, generating content for newspapers, television, the web and organizing sponsored tastings, wine classes, consumer programs and much more. Jancis Robinson used to jokingly refer to her wide-ranging set of activities as “the empire” although an economist would recognize it as a diversified business model built around a core expertise.

Hong Kong-based Jeannie Cho Lee MW’s “empire,” for example, includes books, university teaching, her food and wine website AsianPalate.com, a job advising Singapore Airlines on their wine selections, a television series, magazine articles and much, much more.

Support yourself with a single type of work (magazine editor? wine book author?)? Yes, it is done — Eric Asimov, the chief wine critic of the New York Times is an example — but that’s the exception not the rule. Need to create that diversified empire. And then hope for some luck, too.

Lesson Three: No Single Path

There is no single sure path to success in wine writing. Some of the top people in the field are Masters of Wine or Master Sommeliers, for example, but others like Asimov are self-taught. That said, I noticed that a great many of the talented “students” were seeking WSET credentials. The detailed wine knowledge is important, of course, but this is also a way to signal potential clients of serious commitment, which is useful in a crowded and competitive marketplace.

It seems to me that many of the successful writers leveraged specific assets effectively. Jamie Goode was a successful science editor, for example, and the scientific foundation of his writing clearly differentiates his product. Decanter contributor Jane Anson’s deep knowledge of Bordeaux gives her a comparative advantage.

The day of the generalist (I am thinking of our fantastic keynote speaker Hugh Johnson, who seems to know everything about wine) seems to be passing or perhaps has passed as a business model.

Specialization is important, whether by market segment, winemaking region, or wine issue area. But, as noted above, the ability to make connections and to communicate across several platforms is also critical to success.

Lesson Four: Passion is Not Enough

The writers we met who seem to have the greatest success share drive and passion, but they are also strategic in the way that they invest their time and other resources, entrepreneurial in seeking out and making their own opportunities, and multidisciplinary. They leverage their core comparative advantage effectively to make themselves valuable to clients and readers, not simply to be more visible to the public.

Let me repeat part of that. They think about their clients and audiences and what they can do to create value for them. Then, of course, they have to persuade their clients of the return on investment and convince them to share some of those returns with them.

More work is needed to measure the value created by high quality wine communications and to distinguish it from freely available web content, for example. The statistics we heard about low and stagnant “dollars per word” freelance writing rates suggest that professional wine writing has low value, that its value is not widely appreciated, or perhaps that professional writers are in a weak negotiating position when it comes to writing fees. (Alder Yarrow argued that this is due to an over-supply of wine writers.)

Lesson Five: The Value is There

Ironically, even as the average return to professional wine writing has declined, its importance to the industry has actually increased as the wine industry becomes more competitive with other sectors that compete for sales and attention.

Wine writers tell wine’s story and story-telling is a valuable skill. Consumers do not just sniff with their noses and slurp over their tongues. Lots of things smell good or taste good. The key, it seems to me, is to engage the imagination and take wine enthusiasts on a journey and the people we met at Meadowood and others like them are skilled and valuable guides.

Or at least that’s the lesson I take form the substantial investment made by the symposium sponsors. Napa Valley Vintners, Meadowood and the CIA will get some direct publicity from the symposium itself (this column, for example) but the real payoff comes down the road as all the participants become more effective in their work and better able to tell the Napa Valley story and the story of wine more generally.

The sponsors actually kicked up the investment a notch this year. In the past most “students” paid symposium expenses while a small number received fellowships to offset cost. This year a new “all fellowship” model was rolled out, with fewer “students,” high admission standards, and full-tuition fellowships. Plans are coming together to build an endowment to sustain the full fellowship model into the future. I like the forward thinking behind this.

There was a lot to absorb at this conference and I am only scratching the surface here, but these are some of the things I think I learned at Meadowood.

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Thanks the symposium’s organizers for inviting us to take part and to the sponsors for their generous support of the program. Thanks, as well, to all the Napa Valley wineries who donated the wines we used in classes and the meals and receptions. Shout-outs to so many including especially Jim Gordon, Julia Allenby, and Antonia Allegra.

Sue and I also want to thank Cain Winery for inviting us to an intimate dinner they hosted at Terra Restaurant in St Helena where we had a glorious meal and tasted Cain Five wines from 1986, 87, 97, 98, 2006, 07, 10, 11 and 2012. It was an awesome experience. Thank you!

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Say, when is someone going to write a song about wine writing? Try substituting “wine communicator” into the song at the appropriate place and see if it works. Cheers.

How to Make a Small Fortune in Wine … Story-Telling Time in Napa Valley

February 16, 2016 By Mike Veseth in wine, wine critics, wine education 3 Comments

Sue and I are in Napa Valley, California this week to participate in the 2016 Professional Wine Writers Symposium at Meadowood Resort. The symposium is a project of Meadowood Napa Valley, the Napa Valley Vintners Association and the Culinary Institute of America. The theme this year is “Taste Locally, Publish Globally.” You can read the program here.

No Joke: Writing About Wine Business

Sue is a career and writing coach and I am going try to convince the participants to think seriously about writing about the wine business as well as more conventional topics such as wine-makers, wine regions and wine tasting. My talk is called “How to Make a Small Fortune Writing about the Wine Business.” The title, as you have already guessed, it a variation of the world’s oldest wine joke, which begins “How do you make a small fortune in the wine business?”

(In case you haven’t heard the joke (which seems unlikely) I will provide the answer at the end of this column.)

The symposium takes place in rather regal settings. The Meadowood Resort looks like a fantastic place (I’ve not visited before) and we have classes at Meadowood, the CIA Greystone facility (the historic Christian Brothers winery) and local wineries.

I have taught in many types of classrooms around the world (ask me about the Communist-era blackboards in an old university classroom building in Prague), but nothing as elegant as this!

Wine and the Dismal Science

And we are in rather illustrious company, too. Hugh Johnson and Jay McInerney are the headliners, but really all of the speakers and coaches are headliners in my book. You can see names, faces and read bios here. My talk is sandwiched between McInerney and the New York Times’s Eric Asimov. No pressure!

I am a little bit of a fish out of water here. I am not really a wine writer (I can see some of you nodding in agreement!). I’m an economist who studies and writes about the global wine industry and most of my talks are aimed at the industry audience. Wine and the dismal science — an unexpected pairing but a very interesting one.

No Complaints!

Don’t get me wrong — I have no complaints about being included in this wine writer group. The perks of writing about the wine business are pretty appealing, including the chance to rub elbows with these wine celebrities and to learn from them and from everyone here like the student I hope ever to be.

I think everyone will have fun at the symposium but, returning to the theme of my talk, this is real business not a holiday junket. It is business to the participants, who make their living writing about wine. And it is all business for the organizers, too, who have a strong interest in nurturing wine communication.

Wine is all about telling stories, so how smart is it for the Napa Valley industry to invest in the story-tellers? Very smart and very forward-looking.

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OK, here is the promised punchline. How do you make a small fortune in the wine business? You know the answer. Start with a big one!

Wine Economist Year in Review & Looking Ahead to 2016

December 29, 2015 By Mike Veseth in Shameless Self-Promotion, wine, wine education 2 Comments

Past and Future - Two-Way Street Sign 2015 was a busy year here at The Wine Economist and 2016 is shaping up to be pretty interesting, too.

Looking Back at 2015

In January I spoke in the “State of the Industry” session at the Unified Wine & Grape Symposium in Sacramento. Then we left for New York City where I spoke at “Vino 2015,” a conference and trade show organized by the Italian Trade Commission.

North to Alaska: I traveled to Juneau and Anchorage to give talks and do a fund-raising wine dinner for the World Affairs Council chapters in those cities. Then it was east to Boise, Idaho to speak at the Idaho Wine Commission annual meeting. Both Anchorage and Boise were surprisingly warm, but …

It was really really cold in Ontario when I visited in March to speak to the Winery & Grower Alliance of Ontario meetings, but the people were warm and it was a great experience. Then a quick trip to Walla Walla to talk about wine industry at a regional business summit.

South to California in May, to speak at the Ramona Valley AVA symposium, then a fund-raiser for the Admiral Theatre Foundation in Bremerton along with my friends from Hedges Family Wines. Sue and I were delighted to be invited to the 50-year retrospective tasting of Oregon’s Eyrie Vineyards in Portland, too.

Italy and a Few Surprises

June’s highlight was lecturing at the Conegliano Wine School in Italy and visiting with winemakers in the Veneto and Friuli.While we were in Cormons I got word that around the globe in Yantai, China the Wine Economist had received the Gourmand International prize for the “Best in the World” wine blog. Incredible.

Back home it was north again in July, to speak at the British Columbia Wine Institute annual meetings, then south to Napa Valley to talk at the California Association of Winegrape Growers summer conference.

Two books came out in the fall, my newest volume Money, Taste, and Wine: It’s Complicated and the paperback edition of Extreme Wine.

We visited Barboursville Vineyards while in Virginia to meet with Luca Paschina and we were lucky to able to meet up with Marc Hochar in Richmond and taste some older vintages of Lebanon’s Chateau Musar on the same trip.

I spoke at the Seattle meetings of the Academy of International Business and then flew to Milan to participate in a discussion on sustainability organized in conjunction with the big SIMEI trade show there.

The year ended on a high note when we learned that Money, Taste, and Wine will receive the Gourmand International award for the year’s best wine writing in a U.S. book. As the U.S. winner it is a finalist for the “Best in the World” award to be revealed in Yantai, China in May 2016.

What’s Ahead for 2016?

The travel schedule is coming together for 2016. I am looking forward to going back to Sacramento at the end of January for my fifth year moderating the “State of the Industry” program at the Unified Wine & Grape Symposium.

A few weeks later we will head to Napa where Sue and I are on the faculty for the Professional Wine Writers Symposium.

Then it is north to Anchorage for another World Affairs Council fund raising program before returning to Walla Walla for the big Reveal Walla Walla trade auction.

It looks like we will be going to Portugal in May to speak at a conference organized by Wines of Alentejo and later to Seattle for Riesling Rendezvous, an international conference sponsored by Chateau Ste Michelle and Dr Loosen.

That’s what’s on tap for 2016 so far, but the year is still young. No wait — it actually hasn’t even started yet. Who knows where the wine rivers and roads will take us.

That’s the look back and ahead. Hope to see you somewhere on our travels in 2016. In the meantime, cheers to all! And have a great New Year.

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Sometimes I feel like I have been everywhere in the wine world to speak to wine industry groups, but the truth is … I’m not even close!

Wine Economist Joins 2016 Professional Wine Writers Symposium Faculty

September 22, 2015 By Mike Veseth in Shameless Self-Promotion, wine, wine critics, wine education 1 Comment

I’m pleased to report that Sue and I will be joining the faculty of the 2016 Professional Wine Writers Symposium, which will take place February 16-19, 2016 at the Meadowood Napa Valley resort. I will be speaking about the challenges and opportunities of writing about the wine business and Sue will serve as a writing and career coach, drawing upon her years of corporate communications experience and work as contributing editor of the Wine Economist.

We are honored to join this year’s distinguished faculty, which includes Hugh Johnson, Eric Asimov, Jeannie Cho Lee, Jamie Goode and … well the list goes on and on. Here’s how a press release describes the faculty.

Renowned British author and expert on wine, Hugh Johnson OBE, will deliver the industry keynote address at the 2016 Symposium for Professional Wine Writers at Meadowood Napa Valley to be held February 16-19. The Symposium is open to qualified wine, wine-food and wine-travel writers.

Other faculty members featured at the 12^th annual gathering include Eric Asimov, chief wine critic for the New York Times; Jay McInerney, author and wine columnist for Town & Country; Jeannie Cho Lee MW, founder of AsianPalate.com; Ray Isle, executive wine editor, Food & Wine; Doug Frost, wine author, educator and one of only four people in the world to hold both the Master of Wine and Master Sommelier credentials; Jamie Goode, author, writer and founder of wineanorak.com; Virginie Boone, contributing editor for Wine Enthusiast; Mike Veseth, publisher of the Wine Economist; satirist Ron Washam, the HoseMaster of Wine; Esther Mobley, wine, beer and spirits writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, and Tilar Mazzeo, author of The Widow Clicquot and associate professor at Colby College.

The full program for the 2016 symposium has not yet been announced, but participants can expect an intense set of lectures, meetings, discussions, writing exercises, and one-on-one coaching sessions — plus the opportunity to taste great food and wine and get to know some luminaries of the wine world. The program emphasizes three subjects: the craft of writing, career advancement and wine knowledge.

This year’s symposium marks a transition toward a fully funded fellowship model (in place of the tuition charge of previous years) thanks to the generosity of Meadowood and the Napa Valley Vintners Association. Applications for the 30 fellowships are now being accepted with a November 1, 2015 deadline. Learn more at WineWritersSymposium.org.

Founded by Meadowood Napa Valley and the Napa Valley Vintners Association and supported by The Culinary Institute of America, the symposium brings together wine book authors and editors, wine magazine writers and critics, newspaper wine columnists, bloggers and other editorial wine content creators. Special thanks to Jim Gordon for inviting us to join the faculty for 2016.