Building the Next Napa Valley, In the HIMALAYAS with Michael Juergens: An EOFire Classic from 2021

0:01Light that spark fire nation JLD here and welcome to entrepreneurs on fire brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like the Ops Authority. Today, we're pulling a classic episode from the archives, and we'll be breaking down how to build the next Napa Valley in the Himalayas. To drop these valley bombs, I brought to Michael Juergens into EO Fire Studios. Michael is a wine expert, author, professor, drummer, international business consultant, and founder of Bhutan Wine Company. And today, Fire Nation, we'll be talking about some awesome things.

0:33Only do epic stuff, or you won't be able to maximize the ROI of the time you have spent on this planet. We'll also talk about how you can't let the risk get in the way of moving forward. What you have to do is monitor the risk and try different ways and oh so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Michael and our sponsors. DTC Pod hosted by Ramon Berrios and Blaine Bolas is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. DTC Pod is a podcast about all things direct to consumer. Ramon and Blaine cover everything from starting, growing, and optimizing e-commerce stores and DTC brands.

1:08If you're interested in the stories behind your favorite consumer brands, this podcast is for you. One recent episode on how the best brands are built is a must listen. Listen to DTC Pod wherever you get your podcasts. Michael, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with? What's up, Fire Nation? And I guess one thing I believe about being successful is you have to cultivate really a mindset of apathy. And what I mean by that is you cannot become too outcome dependent because what ends up happening is as you go along and you're pursuing whatever the vision is, it's never going to work out exactly the way you want it to.

2:00And so if you're 100 % focused on the outcome, you never actually see the opportunities. And a good example of that is Slack, right? You know, those guys didn't set out to make Slack. They were doing something else and they created Slack to help them pursue their other vision. And then they looked at it and were like, oh, this is pretty cool. We should market this thing. So yeah, this idea of not being outcome dependent, I think is critical to success, not just in business, but in life too, I think. What is important though is being action dependent, Fire Nation, because you never know what you're going to stumble upon.

2:32You never know what's going to lead to the next thing. But guess what? Sitting on your butt and just wondering and trying to wait till you're perfect is going to result in absolutely nothing. So as I mentioned during the intro, we're talking today about building the next Napa Valley in the Himalayas. What an audacious goal. But hey, if we're not having a big, hairy, audacious goal in our life, what are we really doing on this earth? And Michael, I don't think you know this about me, but I actually trekked the Himalayas. I did a 12-day Annapurna circuit trek, and it was an absolutely amazing experience.

3:10And therefore, I do know firsthand that it's a gorgeous place, but I also know that it's quite remote. So break it down for us. Why did you choose the Himalayas for the next Napa Valley? There's a piece of it that said if I wanted to start a vineyard, I could just go down the street to Paso Robles or Temecula and start a vineyard and be like everybody else. And that's not interesting to me. But I think really the draw to the Himalayas, it wasn't like I set out to go there to explore where we could start a wine industry. I happened to be in Bhutan, and I noticed how just magnificently beautiful the place was and how amazing the crops were there.

3:49And so I actually thought they already grew grapes there. So I went around asking everybody, where are the vineyards? I want to go see the vineyards while I'm here. And everyone was like, we don't have any. And so I was like, well, you guys should. You need to get on this right away. And I coached the country around how I thought that they should do it. And I gave them a lot of information. I wrote up the business plan for them and I just wanted them to do it. I thought it would be bitching if they did it. And they came to me and said, we really, really want to do this as a country, but we really want to partner with you to do it.

4:23And I was like, that sounds like the coolest adventure pretty much anyone could have in the wine world. So I'm in. Let's talk about the specifics because a lot of people have dreams. Like I have dreams. Kate has dreams. People listening to this podcast, they have dreams. But there's a difference between having dreams and actually feet on the ground accomplishing dreams. So let's get specific. Let's really talk this through because I think Fire Nation can maybe learn from the action that you're going to be taking about great ways they can go forward accomplishing their dreams. So how are you accomplishing your dream of building the next Napa Valley in the Himalayas?

5:02Recognizing once again that it didn't start off as my dream to be involved. I just thought it would be super cool if they did it. But then once I became involved and realized I could be a piece of this, and actually, I think that Bhutan is probably the last country in the world that has the organic potential to grow amazing wine grapes that doesn't already do it. Most places that can do it have been doing it for thousands of years. And it was just, to your point earlier, it's remote. And so Marco Polo and the Roman army never got there with their handfuls of grapes. And so they never planted anything there.

5:37But what I'm doing is we've taken a very collaborative approach with the Bhutanese country. You know, there's – I don't know if you're familiar with Bhutan. You spent some time in obviously the Himalayas. But they have a concept called gross domestic happiness instead of gross domestic product, which is an amazing way to live. But they believe that what's more important is the happiness of their citizens rather than any arbitrary economic success. And so they have different pillars that guide the gross domestic happiness. For us, what we did is we didn't approach the wine industry as like, hey, here's a way to make a few bucks.

6:17It was here's a way that we think that this meshes extremely well with what you're trying to do with gross national happiness. and then we went around and we got buy-in from all of the various ministries of the government that would have a say in this, the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Economic Affairs, and so on and so forth. So we started with that. Then obviously, there's an enormous amount of logistics to try to get grapes up to the Himalayas and vineyards planted, but we've planted eight vineyards so far. We're up to about, we've got a hundred acres or so in total vineyard land, but only about 50 acres are planted.

7:01We're still trying to experiment and see what's going to work there because no one knows. It's never been done before. And so, you know, back to your tactical, what do you do? Well, you do as much research as you can, but eventually you just got to grip it and rip it. And so we're doing that, but we're doing it in a very mindful, fail forward kind of way. So what's been one of your most frustrating experiences thus far? And what's been one of your favorite experiences thus far? Well, one of my most frustrating was, I have about six weeks ago, we'd spent months prepping these two new vineyards for planting, and we removed 400 truckloads of rocks out of one of them.

7:43And I have 35 ,000 grapevines in the Loire Valley in France that I'm trying to ship to Bhutan and, uh, and a ship got stuck in the Suez Canal. Oh, I heard about the Suez. Completely monkeyed up everything. And I was, you know, you only have a small window of time to plant, to plant grapes and then the growing season's over. So I'm sitting there thinking, man, this is, this is going to throw a huge monkey wrench into things. And we, we ended up scrambling. I ended up flying the grapes to Kolkata, India, and then trucking them up into, into the Himalayas. And India was under, you know, complete lockdown because of COVID.

8:22And so was Bhutan. And so we had to navigate around that. And it was like every day, high stress. My vines are going to die. My vineyards are going to, you know, not get planted. That was most frustrating. And I would say back to that point, you know, what's been the most triumphant? I'll say there was probably two. One was when Bhutan, you know, the country granted us the very first and only license to make wine in the country. That was pretty awesome. But the one I've been riding pretty high on the last couple of weeks is that we finally got those vineyards planted at the last minute, scrambling through COVID.

9:01We navigated all that. And the gods were watching, man. They were looking out for us. Sometimes it kind of feels that way when you're following your dreams, Fire Nation, when you're doing the right things. the gods, they seem to be watching. And we're going to be talking about some key challenges. We're going to be talking about a phrase, drinking and knowing things, and so much more when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Marketers have never been spread so thin. Trust me, I feel it too. Between creating content, launching campaigns, generating leads, nurturing your prospects, and more, you barely have a second to breathe, let alone do your best marketing.

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10:17Stop spreading yourself thin and start making major moves with HubSpot. Visit hubspot.com slash marketers to learn more. So Michael, we're back and you did tell us a challenge you had in the Suez Canal. Of course, that was a very frustrating experience. And we've also talked about some other things that's gone along with this project, But let's really dive deep into just the overall key challenges of putting something together like this. Because what I want our listeners to be able to pull from this is, what can they expect when they go after their big, hairy, audacious goals? Like, what are the challenges that were presented to you?

10:54If you were going to start a vineyard, you'd start with, let's go get all of the weather data for the last 20 years and evaluate exactly what the weather data looked like. Number two is, you'd go get soil analysis done and you'd evaluate the composition of the soil and the pH and everything else. Then you would analyze that information, that data, and figure out exactly what is the best grape. You know, is it Merlot? Is it Cabernet? Is it Chardonnay? What's the best rootstock? What's the best vine spacing? What's the best trusset? And you would have all this data. We didn't have any of that. I mean, there's not that many weather stages in Bhutan.

11:28The soil is radically diverse. And no one knows, there's no history of what's work there. So I think for us, we could have gotten into analysis paralysis pretty easily. But at the end of the day, you've just got to take some action. And that's what we did. With that, we're finding all kinds of new things. Like, for example, we just planted a vineyard. I was just talking about this. And about two weeks in, I start getting photos from the guys working in the vineyards of this weird looking caterpillar that they'd never seen before that was munching on our grapevines. And I sent it to our technical team.

12:06And they're like, we don't know what that is. And we asked the boutonniers, like, do you know what this is? And they're like, we don't know what that is either. We know it likes grapevines. So this doing stuff in a new environment with no data poses risk. And you can't let the risk get in the way of moving forward. What you have to do is monitor the risk. And then we're trying different ways of getting rid of the Caterpillar now. It's a Buddhist country, so you can't kill anything. You got to sort of figure out ways of getting interested in something other than your grapevines. So that's the stuff I do on a daily basis.

12:42Putting out fires, Fire Nation, putting out fires, not lighting fires, putting them out. That's what happens when you go after these big, hairy, audacious goals. And you have a phrase, Michael, drinking and knowing things. What the heck does that mean? Well, so I'm working on becoming the 46th American to qualify as a master of wine. And so I'm pretty knowledgeable about wine. And my friends had been after me for years to give them wine recommendations. And so during the pandemic, I started just sending out an email to my friends saying, here's a wine that I think is cool and you should go try it.

13:20And they would forward those emails and more and more people would email me and say, hey, can you send them to me? And finally, this thing ended up being thousands of people around the world wanting to hear which wines I thought were dope. And so I actually packaged up the first 52 of them into a book. And this is for the average Joe who's curious about wine but doesn't necessarily want to spend any time learning about it. They could take this and go through and do five minutes every week and drink a glass of wine. And at the end of the year, they'd be as knowledgeable about wine as most sommeliers.

13:57And so that book actually is, it hit number one on Amazon. I think it was number two or three this morning. I checked right before I came on here just because I figured you might ask me about it. Right. But yeah, it's been a cool ride. And the idea of, you know, we kind of screwed up wine in this country. We made it this big, snobby, unapproachable thing. And I think that's really intimidating for people who are curious about it, but they're afraid of looking stupid. or they're afraid of being judged. And so it keeps them out of something that is truly a really joyful, enjoyable thing that brings people together, which is why you've been doing it for 10 ,000 years.

14:32That wine's been part of the global culture almost more than anything else. This is a fantastic concept, Fire Nation, of actually taking something that people do and probably feel pretty ignorant about and pretty naive about and say, hey, let's make it fun. Let's make it really easy to do. Let's make it kind of like this ritual where you grab a glass of wine, and you sit down, you read one thing, and boom, before you know it, you're going to have some real knowledge. You're going to be able to impress your friends. You're going to be able to hold your own conversations. So with all this being said, Michael, you've shared a lot about a lot here.

15:02I mean, building the next Napa Valley in the Himalayas, the struggles, the challenges, the frustrations, the excitement, the successes you've had, everything in between, drinking and knowing things, that idea that you had, and now it's, you know, a bestseller in Amazon and doing all these cool things, take the microphone, take us home. Like what is the one thing that you really want to make sure Fire Nation gets from everything that we talked about here today? Then share the best way that we can connect with you in everything you have going on. And then we'll say goodbye. One of the things that I did earlier in my career is I chased, I chased stuff.

15:39And when you're chasing things, especially if you're chasing them for the wrong reasons, you never really achieve, in my opinion, happiness and success. And so I adopted a mentality of, I don't know, about eight or 10 years ago, which is only do epic stuff with cool people. And you can apply that to business. You can apply that to your social life. You can apply it to pretty much any aspect of your life. But if the things that you're doing are not epic, And if the people that you are doing them with are not cool, then you are not maximizing the ROI on your time on this planet. We only get limited time.

16:20So spend it in the things that are going to bring you the most happiness and the most success. And you'll get there through doing epic stuff with cool people. I think that could be a tattoo that I get across my arm. I mean, I've never gotten a tattoo in my life. I've kind of waited for the right moment. but do epic stuff with awesome people. I mean, to me, what better way to live life than doing epic stuff with awesome people? Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with MJ and JLD today. And Michael, where can Fire Nation connect with you?

16:57How can we learn more about what you have going on? Any call to action for us, let us know. If people wanna jump on the drinking and knowing things bandwagon and start getting those recommendations, they can just go to drinkingandknowingthings.com and sign up. Just put your email in and you'll start getting the emails too. If you're interested in the book, you can find it on Amazon. If you're interested in following me on Instagram, that's at drinkingandknowing. From a Bhutan perspective, bhutanwine.com or at Bhutanwine is a good way to watch our progress. There's some amazing pictures of the vineyards We're not as great at updating the website as we probably should be, but Instagram usually has some pretty current pictures of what's going on in the vineyards.

17:44And certainly people are welcome to connect with me on LinkedIn at Michael Juergens, for sure. Fire Nation, I want you to head over to eofire.com, type Michael in the search bar, and the show notes page will pop up with links to everything that Michael talks about, links to everything that he just shared, best show notes in the biz. and Michael, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thanks, John. Hey, Fire Nation. Today's value bomb content was brought to you by Michael. And Fire Nation, if you've ever thought about creating a podcast of your own, then the podcast journal is for you.

18:21It is gorgeous. It is faux leather and it will guide you step-by-step in both the creation and the launch of your podcast in 50 days. Visit thepodcastjournal.com, thepodcastjournal.com. and I'll catch you there or I'll catch you on the flip side. DTC Pod hosted by Ramon Berrios and Blaine Bolas is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. DTC Pod is a podcast about all things direct to consumer. Ramon and Blaine cover everything from starting, growing and optimizing e-commerce stores and DTC brands. If you're interested in the stories behind your favorite consumer brands, this podcast is for you.

19:00One recent episode on how the best brands are built is a must listen. Listen to DTC Pod wherever you get your podcasts.