What Can Wine Learn From Taylor Swift? | Episode 15

0:03Jonathan Stevenson:Welcome to Uncaught, a cult wines podcast where we take you behind the scenes of the fine wine market. I am Tom Gearing, CEO of Cult Wines and your host. And as always, I'm joined by my co-host, Jonathan Stevenson. How are you doing, Jay? You well? Yeah, very well, thank you. How are we? Yeah, I'm good. I'm not too bad. Good to see you again. Are you excited about today? Very much so, yeah. Looking forward to today. Yeah, this is going to be a very interesting podcast and I'll tell you the reason why. We are joined by Sinead O'Sullivan. And honestly, her CV reads like three people's. I mean, it's quite astonishing, to be honest with you.

0:36Jonathan Stevenson:An aerospace engineer who designed human spaceflight at NASA. A Harvard Business School strategist. And now the author of Good Ideas and Power Moves. The book that treats Taylor Swift not as a pop star, as you know her, but as one of the sharpest CEOs and strategists on the planet. We'd love to hear more about that later. Sinead's argument is that Swift posts higher returns than almost any hedge fund. So Sinead, thank you so much for being here. Welcome. Thank you. I'm really excited to be here, actually. Yeah, I have been a lifelong Swifty, but I have also been a lifelong, I should probably lie about from the age of 18 onwards, wine drinker.

1:17Jonathan Stevenson:Right. Yeah. And of course, that's the aim of the podcast, to talk about wine. Yeah, let's do it. um i mean just just talking about wine how did you get how did you get into wine um yeah it's it's really interesting because i have been involved in well obviously wine drinking for a while um but i kind of got into wine the same way that i've gotten into most things that i've done which is through meeting really cool people that do those things right so like you know people always kind of say that i've done those are very very different things in my career which is kind of true but each of the projects that I've done or each of the kind of you know sub careers that I've that I've been involved with kind of have these interesting problems that I've been really fascinated by but I've found the problems because I found people that are like ridiculously obsessed with that thing and I just love people that are absolutely ridiculously obsessed with things and when I was studying for my I mean during lockdown I mean everyone's wine story kind of either starts or stops at lockdown um but i started my level one wst thought oh no my level two actually and i thought it would be fun thing to do wine drinking on a monday night didn't realize it would involve actual studying um and right before my exam i went to this place called ballymaloo in ireland very very famous kind of cooking school restaurant and I happened to bump into the the kind of head sommelier there and he helped me revise for this exam uh the level two and he was just the most ridiculously cool fun kind interesting wine person I'd ever met and then I was like right I need to be as obsessed with this as he is like he really got me into it interesting I like that idea and I think we've actually had previous guests on this podcast talk about this kind of entry point into wine where we've had some people talk about the family side of things which obviously where where my kind of interest and entrance into wine came but it's the commonality of people that have this kind of like mental this mental moment you might you know just this person that kind of was really influential yeah and brought you into wine or showed you what wine could be was a kind of a gateway it's really interesting to hear that because it is something that's quite common amongst people we've spoken to so like how like how strong was his influence into letting you explore wine and and be interested in it was it Was there a moment where he enabled you to kind of taste the wine you hadn't tasted before?

3:45Jonathan Stevenson:Or is there any way you could describe how that relationship helped you kind of on your path of exploration? I mean, I, so I've always been a wine outsider. I mean, this, this industry is just so typical of inside outside culture. Actually, I've, I've long listened to your podcast because I love that it feels like, and also Colt does the opposite of that, right? but when I met this man, his name is Colin McCann, he immediately kind of made me a wine insider. I mean, there was no kind of pretense and it was kind of the first time that I had felt like I was on the inside of the wine world but that I wasn't judged for being an outsider.

4:26And he is just so down to earth and just has this kind of shameless fascination with wine. and I just love my whole career I have done one thing and one thing only which is to surround myself with people that are obsessed yeah obsessed with something and this guy was that and I was like wow he has there is something about wine that has him completely smitten what is that thing and when you're with people that find problems or topics so interesting I mean they become so alluring yeah in themselves and I kind of you know him and his wife kind of their their whole life is around this yeah i was like wow that's super cool yeah and then you know the more i looked at it the more i was like what i mean there are endless endless questions around wine you can never learn like it's you cannot learn wine yeah of course yeah it changes too quickly yeah yeah yeah how does that then sort of transition so that's that's really interesting because i'd say a lot more people would would would reference a kind of eureka moment with a particular glass of wine yeah and so like the drinking of the wine and obviously that that moment of wow that's just a wine I need more of or I need to find more versions of um it sounds as though almost like it was a little bit inverted for you where it was that kind of realization that actually just to be absolutely you know emphasized and immersed by the by the topic yeah came first and then was was there a wine was there a particular wine that stands out that you had either with that that guy or before or after that kind of was like oh wow this is yeah i i've been so lucky i've been so lucky to taste incredibly rare and absolutely amazing wines but i and i i actually wrote about this for for nobel raj the the wine magazine um i only i i remember experiences with people way more so what the wine world did for me because i do a lot of writing um anywhere i go i mean i you know i travel with my day job right so so even for example last year i was in estonia and i was like oh who are the local growers in estonia like what what is happening in the wine world here no one goes to estonia thinking great let's let's let's let's dig up the local the local bottles but the amazing thing about wine is that anywhere in the world you go you can meet these people who are so excited to show you and to explain to you and to let you taste and i mean i just i love for me it's it's like entering into alice in wonderland's kind of you go down the rabbit hole and now there are all of these new people that can't wait to tell you things and to show you things which is the opposite of what i thought the wine world would be it's actually a very open world and people are just really really excited that you're excited about it yeah i agree i mean i i found that as well in particularly well going to the various regions i find it fascinating that even at the very top end apart a side of maybe like petrus in bordeaux um you know it's incredibly welcoming you know even all the way up the scale so if you go past these estates vineyards in any of the regions it's always worth knocking on the door if you're interested because by and large unless they've got a crisis going on with the latest crop it's they're going to let you in they're going to show you something they're going to talk to you about what they do so I do think that's um that goes all the way up the scale but yeah so what so what was uh what were the wines like in Estonia very similar to the wines in Ireland yeah fresh which is not to say anything about Irish or Estonian wines other than that the growers are extremely excited to be growing them which is where it begins so yeah you've got to start somewhere right exactly yeah yeah so where next I mean so you've gone from designing human spaceflight at NASA to Harvard's strategy to writing this book which we'll come on to in more detail on Taylor Swift I mean what is it is that talking from what you've said around wine is that that thread of connection is it just that that hunger and passion that you've encountered in each of those different walks of life yeah with people around you yeah I mean I you know I come from Northern Ireland which is not you know I don't come from a background where we would have uh you know a very working class background so we didn't have you know I didn't have early exposure to fine wine fine restaurants all that kind of stuff um it's not a hyper competitive place by any means and I kind of got early exposure to the space world when I went to this kind of space camp when I was younger.

9:03And that totally opened my eyes to this different world of people and competitiveness and passion. And I thought, okay, I just, I want more of that. And so I ended up going into the space sector and doing all of this kind of human spaceflight design work and absolutely loved it. And I, you know, it's just incredible because the people, again like the problems are really interesting but they're only interesting because the people that are working on them are just endlessly obsessed with solving them and there's a real buzz about that you know it kind of i i think i mentioned in the book even on a friday night people are most normal people are home doing fun stuff and i'm in the lab with my friends and we get a six pack of beer and we're watching each other's simulations run and we're like this is living the dream you know so few people get paid to do it's such it's such uh it's such an amazing thing to be paid to do what you love so my job kind of naturally the but you know the more i moved up in the world of you know designing and engineering the more you get into managing large projects projects with nasa are multiple billions of dollars you know they're very very complex they're very hard they are private sector and public sector you have the government you have loads of different stakeholders.

10:24And so that got me into the world of thinking strategically about how to manage all of these things. And that kind of got me into strategy and geopolitics. And so there was a natural progression from a career perspective. But at every stage of my career, I made a decision to go and move to an institution or a project with a particular person that I, again felt was like endlessly obsessed with solving their problem and and seeing the world in their way and I wanted access to that perspective and yeah I took um I guess where the wine and book writing comes into things I took a sabbatical after I had finished up at Harvard and spent a lot of time in Europe decided to do during COVID my level two and then just kind of went from there was like wow I really really love this I realized my palate was horrendously bad like just ridiculously bad I couldn't cook I actually I set my kitchen on fire trying to put popcorn in the microwave and so I was like right I need to grow up um so I went to culinary school and I was like you know this is great I can learn the whole flavor ingredient thing a little bit better and learn how to cook and I thought I was gonna hate it really really was like you know not looking forward to this this experience and I ended up loving it and so I spent a year working part-time in a two-star in the pastry section while doing a lot of wine writing book writing wine tasting wine learning wine exams on the side yeah um and it was just amazing really really cool very different perspective that's very exact end of the spectrum in terms of cooking as well so that's that that the paste that's the end that i'm no good at i'm more like chuck it all in let's make a pasta dish rather than like you'll be very precise it's not going to be so that kind of that that definitely runs on from your uh your work prior it's a very scientific approach yeah exactly yeah i will say i will 100 a story that demonstrates that amazingly when i first moved to london uh i invited a friend of mine that i kind of met through the wine writing world over for a dinner party.

12:42And, you know, I had just moved into this house. I had a brand new kitchen. I hadn't used any of this stuff before. I just come back from a long trip and I decided, you know, I've worked in a two star restaurant. I can do whatever I want. You know, people are arriving in 45 minutes. Why not make fresh pasta? Why not do all of these things? I'd never done this kitchen before. And these poor people could not eat this food. I mean, it was just it was so bad so then i kind of realized oh wow being in the factory of two star michelin is very different from being able to uh wine and dine people yeah it was a very

13:16Jonathan Stevenson:public fail no interesting if we put a venn diagram together of people in the world that worked at nasa worked at a two-star michelin restaurant listen to taylor swift enough to fall into the top 0.01 % and has taught at Harvard Business School. How many people were in that Venn diagram? Now, if you asked the number of, I mean, if you ask the chef that I used to work for. That's not to cost any aspersions around Swifties, by the way. No, no, no. If you ask the chef I used to work for, how many spacers he's come across, I probably wouldn't be the first. Right, okay. Yeah, I think Taylor Swift, you will find many, many people that, Taylor Swift sits at the intersection of Venn diagram with, but actually not that many men, like a lot of the industries I've come in, come from or worked in.

14:04Jonathan Stevenson:What's the biggest outlier of the four? For Taylor Swift. Or for the Venn diagram. What's going to get the most people out of the population? Would it be NASA, I suppose? NASA, yeah. Yeah, NASA's going to be. See, in my world, it would be the opposite. It would be either the wine or the cooking. Right, because everyone you know loves Taylor Swift and wants a NASA. Or putting Pop-Pol in a microwave, maybe.

14:23Jonathan Stevenson:I mean, look, let's be honest. it's like your CV is the type of CV you read and you do question what you've been doing with your life. When you look at what you've managed to squeeze in, you just go, I haven't achieved anything, have I? That is absolutely pathetic. Yeah, it's remarkable, really. And you then decide to write a book about Taylor Swift, which is, you know, having had the opportunity to look through some of the conclusions is really amazing. like the parallels drawn from obviously her success to the business world and the way you comply and the modern themes around business and strategy and there's some stuff in there that i think's just absolutely bang on um where how did you get to that point what was the motivation to get you from what you just said in terms of the the nasa experience then working in a restaurant but suddenly to have this understanding and focus around such a massive popular culture figure like Taylor Swift, but actually the substance of the book, not that I think people would look at, oh, a Taylor Swift book and think of it in any particular way, but actually the substance of the conclusions are really fantastic, grounded, modern day business strategy and understanding.

15:34Jonathan Stevenson:How did you get to that point? It's funny because the book had actually started as a more serious book about investing in hedge funds. And I had included a chapter on Taylor Swift to try to explain strategy. You see, what was really annoying is at the time I was writing in, well, I was kind of existing in two different worlds. I was writing a lot for places like Financial Times, but then I was fully two feet into, well, more than two feet into, whole body immersion into the world of Taylor Swift. I don't know, since I was like, as long as I can remember I can't remember pre-Taylor Swift in my life because you know my memory doesn't go far that or back that far um and it annoyed me in one even country Taylor Swift oh yeah okay fine you're yeah you're there from day one I was a day oneer yeah oh gee and so it annoyed me that there were two clear people that I was writing to or in the world of at the same time one was the business and finance people and I would try to explain to them you know this whole Taylor Swift thing it's like a big deal and they were like sure i roll you know the next beatles blah blah blah right and then there were the swifties and i was like you know what she's doing is like way more impressive than you realize and because they weren't in the world of investing or or strategy or business i was like ah it's annoying there are so there are two few people that i can talk to about how she is excelling in the business world but then also just being this amazing singer songwriter and I remember so many times trying to write about this and editors were like you're really trying to like pull something out of nothing here she's selling a lot of albums but I was like it's not just that she's yes she's selling albums but this is a case of the tail wagging the dog one person has changed a multi multi-billion dollar industry from the inside out and it wasn't until the Ares tour that Bloomberg the FT all these other places started to take her as an industry seriously and she is an industry she is the music industry yeah so that that made me want to write a book about it and and my editor had read the hedge fund chapter on taylor swift and we were like let's just just let's just do that like let's just do taylor if you look at like the music industry specifically i mean clearly over the last 20 years has been such seismic change because of streaming and obviously how we consume and engage with music to a certain extent it's kind of forced the biggest pop stars biggest musicians on the planet to rethink how they monetize not to take anything away from taylor swift clearly she you would look at it and say well maybe she's the person who's grasped that opportunity the most or has understood the problem she had to solve for the most in terms of re-looking at it from a slightly different direction that ownership of her but not to take anything away from do you think that that was in a sense there was an inevitability that someone would move in this direction because from an economic standpoint musicians couldn't just sell records that people go to a shop and buy and that would be 80 percent of their source of revenue right it had to be kind of rethought in a way that enabled you to create an industry or an economy around you that actually enabled this revenue string to come from more than just the music and maybe to a certain extent is the music now not the least important point from a pure revenue perspective but it's kind of like the bit that kind of draws all the other revenue streams in so i suppose the question i have is do you think taylor swift is as unique as you think she is or was it inevitable that someone would have emerged from this changing music scene to establish this way of working in this business that's yeah that's a really interesting question um i do think that she was as unique as i think she is for the following reason i agree with you that there was change happening i mean we can we can certainly discuss the equivalent in wine i mean you know this is literally kind of what's happening in the wine industry at the minute right change was happening and at the time around streaming and digitization and social internet i mean this is kind of the internet stopped being this one-way information and started being a social a two-way interaction that was new right um there were many stakeholders deep pocketed very powerful stakeholders that were battling out who was gonna get to win in this new dynamic And where I think it's interesting is that not for one second were any of the advantages in a single.

19:56I mean, singer songwriters were the least powerful of any of those stakeholders. It was a complete shock when it turned out that the least powerful person in the room became the most important dynamic in an industry, which had multiple deep pocketed, very powerful stakeholders battling to be the winner. And none of them were the winner. It was someone from outside of the set, like wasn't even in the building. So I think it's like, did that happen accidentally? Did it kind of fall that she got lucky? I don't think so. In the book, I discuss the certain ways in that she very strategically lined herself up to be the winner in a market that didn't quite know where it was going.

20:43Jonathan Stevenson:Yeah. is it certain that she would always have one no but i think she had but was like you know the scooter brawn incident something that kind of forced her into a different way of thinking that maybe other artists didn't have that experience so she you know she was forced to find a solution to that and obviously what she came out of in terms of re-recording her albums and having taylor's version and all this type of stuff and then you said building the community and having this you know suddenly everyone suddenly shifts towards and listening to the re-records rather than the originals yeah it just feels like i mean that's just probably a really good example of kind of someone that has failed in some incidences learned from that and rebuilt and kind of come back and sort of have these downfalls and then battle back to kind of get herself back on top which i think is actually really impressive as well do you see that as kind of being part of her dna in terms of how she's got to where she got to in this kind of business acumen that she's developed for sure she's someone who does not shy away from a problem yeah she runs out of full force falls flat in her face and then it's like right let's go again yeah but i think what's interesting about what you just said i mean this is going to be endlessly confusing for someone who doesn't know taylor's fifth but with her re-records this status should we just explain that quickly for somebody who doesn't know it right i mean you know typical in the in the music industry you know you have the the record label that owns they invest and use a singer songwriter or band And they, I mean, it's kind of like a venture capital investment.

22:09They own your records and you get a percentage of the royalties from that. That has kind of always been the case in the music industry. Those albums of hers were being sold as many, many of them are today. Again, the same in the wine industry. Private equity is slicing and dicing different portfolios. They want to take out, they want to strip the assets of a music recording or music agency, and they want the Taylor Swift part. And then they'll sell off the rest of it to someone else. So this was kind of happening to everyone, and not just to Taylor Swift. And the status quo was that it just happens.

22:50So it wasn't that she was forced into this position where she had to make a choice. In fact, no one else was even thinking that they would do anything but that. And she was like, actually, hang on a second. F this. I want to own those. And she figured out a way how to not own what she had already done, but create new music that made these old recordings of hers completely worthless. And that had just never been done before. And absolutely everyone thought that it was going to fail. And I mean, you know, Rolling Stone, for example, wrote about it. like it's a nice idea never gonna work yeah of course yeah and yeah but then they're probably you know in in the pocket of those same people in that pre previous you know structure right so i think i think i think the issue here is is not that people were predisposed to wanting you know the big guys to win i think the issue really was that they it made no sense for her to do it right so like the ultimate issue with taylor swift is in the world of business and finance nobody has understand what has understood what the actual asset that she was sitting on was and for many many years all of the private equity analysts all the hedge funds all the music industry executives the fat cats with the cigars you know they thought it was her catalog they thought that was the valuable part of taylor swift and it wasn't it was her fan base and that was portable she could bring them anywhere yeah and so they're spending also even like grow that by harnessing this kind of i feel like if you look at the same issues lying in not just i think wine is actually quite far behind all of this but like if you look into like politics for instance you know the kind of how difficult the media now find it to control narrative in in the uk for instance where clearly with the rise of social media yeah that kind of realization and kind of almost like oh shit moment of like we can't we can no longer control things like the royal family all of these type of things I think almost as much as that, she had this like perfect storm of like people wanting to go.

25:01Actually, the man shouldn't win or if I call it the man, you know, the system shouldn't win. And she was a massive vigilante for that movement, you know.

25:09Jonathan Stevenson:And I think the other thing to your point around that is, and I think when I was looking at your book, like I think there could almost be an extra tagline onto the title, which is, you know, good ideas and power and lessons from Taylor Swift in the modern world. and when I say in the modern world because so much of it to Jonathan's point is around the changes we've had in society over the last 10 years and technology and social media and what that's enabled provided people it's kind of it just feels so grounded in today into what's happening today what is what are the tools at your disposal that you can use to your advantage I think that's what to your point Jonathan around sort of like monetizing that community but if you go back 10-15 years a bit like you're saying with the old artists that were the most powerful influential that had the record labels behind them they probably were a little bit not one hand tied behind your back but you didn't have those levers to your disposal right you didn't have that real way to communicate and create this connection with your fan base or that community and i think that's a really strong point in your book around that building worlds and building community and i think that is that is in a way probably the one almost one of the maybe the most strongest points that she has really taken advantage of.

26:19Yeah, totally. And it's so relevant to the wine world. But like, as you say, any world, I mean, it kind of surprised me that Harvard Business School, for example, the entire institution is set up to teach frameworks that helped political, governmental, private sector investment leaders understand and grow in a specific environment, but that environment arguably has changed. And Taylor Swift is, I mean, I'm giving a lecture at a university about this soon. Taylor Swift is the leading CEO of the future in that she is both a product and the CEO of that product. And there is never an example of better product management than from Taylor Swift and branding and community and supply chain and distribution and this is the world that and as you say rightfully in politics in in how governments are trying to figure out how to function in large corporations this is how this is how they they work now yeah and people are scrambling to figure it out yeah it's interesting you say that um well

27:29Jonathan Stevenson:going off too much of a tangent but i read a book recently i think it's it's called hooks i can't remember who by the author but do you know hooks that it's a it's like a business book but it talks around sort of like in the modern era kind of how um like technology companies especially like facebook and other examples have used kind of psychological um processes to get people kind of addicted like why do you go back to instagram every day and the kind of like how you kind of subconsciously prompt people and build these habit forming um you know inducements within someone's kind of uh engagement with a with a product the reason i mentioned that is i read it and it and it's obviously been written like five six years ago based upon the last 10 years but it felt so dated like even reading that book that's about kind of like facebook and instagram and like twitter and how it got built and i was reading it today and it already feels outdated yeah and i think that's really interesting we say about kind of harvest business school and these frameworks and of course some things stay true forever but from your experience at harvard business school from your experience from writing from a business perspective do you think we're in an era now where things are changing so quickly and so fast that some of these case studies and some of these frameworks are outdated and maybe aren't as relevant as they were five years ago has ever been a moment in time where business frameworks or business kind of you know ideologies or how you how you approach business in a certain way have changed as much in such a short short space of time oh it's such an interesting question so I would say people are gonna get angry at this or think that I'm wrong, whatever.

29:01Business frameworks that we teach today are remnants of a largely kind of post-1980s neoliberalization of the economy, right? Things are changing really quickly because where the power exists in society and through these kind of multinationals and technology and where power lives and the levers that you can pull in power has moved significantly. And so a lot of those frameworks are redundant, I would say. But like, look at what will always stay the same. Humans.

29:39Jonathan Stevenson:Yeah. We all have the same. I mean, this is like, go back to Neolithic era, right? Like we all want the same kind of emotional, psychological things. We are all attracted in similar ways to certain outcomes. And think about the industries that really, really resonate with humans at an emotional level. Art, music, wine. I mean, culture. And so some things change. The frameworks that you use to teach business and investing change. But human needs largely stay the same. So, you know, I think what we can see from Taylor Swift, again, going back to wine, that disruption is happening to wine. And you can look at that landscape and kind of you can tell who's doing well and who might exist in 10 years time and who might not.

30:31Jonathan Stevenson:Yeah. But I mean, I think that's a good segue into wine. So if we kind of take your learnings and the stuff you've summarized from your book and obviously your experiences and then your knowledge of the wine industry. I mean, how would you surmise where you think the wine market or initiatives going over the next few years? obviously we do this podcast we talk quite often around it's a lot of negative media attention on wine and you know the new generation aren't drinking as much and healthy habits all this type of stuff like where do you see the kind of uh evolution of the industry over over the coming years in this in this context and where do you think the opportunities are for businesses maybe to take advantage yeah of this change and this evolution i mean it's interesting i have my own personal ideas about what I find exciting and what I think is boring.

31:20And I am not a typical person in terms of cultural reference. So I could not possibly say what I think the industry is going to do or where it's going to go. But I do think there are dynamics that will show clear winners and losers. Like for example, and, you know, maybe this is, oh, thank you, little top up. Well, look at, you know, French wine. I'm sorry, but in the book, I outline a chapter about being anti-fragile. This is a term that's quite frequently used in hedge funds, right? It's this idea that, you know, kind of the everyday person will have this understanding of someone who's resilient.

32:00And that kind of means that, you know, like I said, you get knocked over and you get back up again. That's being resilient. Being anti-fragile is a completely different characteristic entirely. It's that someone punches you in the gut and it makes you immediately stronger. So you use, you predict that there's going to be chaos, whether it's in the markets or it's in your industry or it's in the customer base or it's in distribution. And you use that chaos to outcompete everyone. And there are very specific ways that you can do that. I kind of talk about Taylor Swift. You know, she uses anti-fragility in so many different ways.

32:39When someone starts, you know, kind of picking a fight with her, she gets stronger. Even when that person is much, much bigger, much more powerful than her, Kanye West or Scooter Braun. COVID is a really good example of this. Because she owned her entire distribution. So she had a recording studio in her house. She could text any artist in the world to collaborate with. She owns her distribution. So if she wants to put something into the public domain, she can drop it. Like she doesn't need music industry sign-offs because she is her recording and her label. So when every other artist during COVID, their tours got wiped out.

33:21They couldn't finish their albums. They couldn't release music. Industry executives didn't know what to do. They had no marketing. They had no distribution. Taylor Swift, 10X in popularity. because she put out I don't know how many albums in like the shortest amount of time ever. She flooded the market. She's totally anti-fragile. Okay. So that is the example.

33:41Jonathan Stevenson:And a lot more people had a lot more listening time as well. Yeah. So captive audience. Yeah. No, she found, like she owned that. So let's look at the example of something that's like the opposite of anti-fragile. And I would say France right now. They are. France as a country? kind of with their aocs and their their okay like their their unwillingness to move but do you not think some of the um i think the aoc thing's a bit of a difficult thing because there's a more of a qualitative aspect to it yeah do you not agree in terms of holding people to a certain standard of quality to at least but then isn't that isn't that because i was just thinking there because i being flexible around that is more maybe the grape varietals i still feel like in the wine world that we are still almost and i think it's kind of where you're leaning is there's just so much of this antiquated you know almost now prehistoric ways of of the market working that just have to be completely broken out of and you know in the way you describe taylor swift it almost should be like there's no real wine like there's winemakers trying to make a bit more of a name like that.

34:53I'd reference maybe like Dujac is maybe one where they're trying to get more close to the action, close to the...

34:59Jonathan Stevenson:Well, no, a really good example of like Pierre-Vincent Girardin who obviously is what, late 20s. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, when I went to see him in May, he was like, he just planted Savonin, right? Savonin wouldn't classify. If he bottled that wine, what he plans to do, it'll be bottled as Van de Tableau or Van de France. You can't bottle it as a Bourgogne or anything like that because it's not Chardonnay. It's a white grape varietal. But his viewpoint was he's making wines in azura he's making wines obviously in burgundy he there are patches of land or areas of uh vines uh in burgundy that he thinks have a similar biosphere yeah to azura in terms of a little bit more forest um in terms of the way that like the air circulated and you know in terms of the kind of plants and vegetation that you find he thinks they're plots of lands in burgundy they're actually a much more accustomed to that type of biosphere and his concept is that he thinks savernine will be a better vine a better grape variety for those areas there's no point planting chardonnay which is what you have to do so that's quite a good example i think of someone who's kind of breaking out a bit but the only thing about pvg which is kind of maybe a little bit aligned with the taylor swift thing is he's a young new winemaker yes obviously had a little bit step up from his father but if you look at his brand the way that he's tried to establish himself it has been a little bit outside of the norms in terms of like he's building a cult following he's quite a well-known personality he's doing things his own way he's got his own laboratory at his vineyard where they plant 10 different vine selections and different types of grapes all this type of stuff so he's doing a lot of experimentation but I think it gets to the point where people buy the brand rather than I'm buying burgundy so if he creates a saverine and bottles it at Vandes France and it's his brand people will buy it yeah not because it's to your point oh it's an AIC classification premier cruise I think that's maybe a good example of where you can see some people are trying to maybe askew in that way but in my what the only thing i would say in in slight contrast to that is that i think there are still so many wineries that are doing lots of those different things it's just people aren't seeing them because they're so far behind the door of the whole you know sort of behemoth of of the bordeaux market and on premier and the layers of distribution and yeah you know get it like the winemaker in almost every winery that you go to even in Estonia, as you mentioned earlier, like they're all completely wine passionate.

37:14They're probably all trying different things, you know? So I think, yes, you're right in what he's doing. I think it's definitely more akin to that. But I do think there's still so much of that going on that is just...

37:24Jonathan Stevenson:But also I think with France as well, you kind of maybe have to split up into the different regions as well. Because like, you know, champagne and Bordeaux, it's so rigid. You can't really break out from that. I know you've got Gros Champagne movement, but in Burgundy, it's a bit more of a patchwork quilt. It's a bit more dynamic. there's a bit more flexibility and you have got people coming in and you know buying grates buying barrels and going to a cooperative winery and basically you know making wines the way they want to make it so i think there's pockets of france that you've got the right regions where you have the right type of culture i think maybe moving in more in that direction yeah i think like you know my again i i don't know what the future of the wine industry is going to be because i you know there are obvious narratives that are like there's no point in me repeating them here you i'm sure every episode i mean it's the only thing that's being discussed in the wine industry at the minute yeah people aren't drinking and young people don't like wine and but what i think is really interesting what i personally am interested in are the rebel wine so like if you think about this kind of again going back to what what killed every artist during covid was the centralization of everything going through the same producers, the same music festivals, the same distribution channels, centralization of quality, right?

38:39You mentioned quality just now. Centralization of quality labeling in France is a system that we know is dying because it cannot keep up with climate. It cannot keep up with the external factors. Well, let's look at what decentralized quality indicators there are. And there are new up and coming producers that are building names, that are building lifestyles. People are curious about more than just the bottle. Where did it come from? Who is this wunderkind of the Alsace region or the Dura? You know, and I actually want to live their lifestyle. I'm inquisitive. I'm looking at the food that they're eating.

39:17It's not just a bottle of wine. It's moving beyond the product of wine into the ideology of actually the world is changing and I'm not waiting for it to catch up. And that's massively the thing I think is the huge gap. Yeah, the huge gap is that the story and the genuine fascination in what that person is doing. Going back to what you said about surrounding yourself with people that are so passionate, I think it's the distance from someone going into a wine shop or even a supermarket and looking at a wine bottle with a label and just going, oh, I'm going to maybe buy or not buy that wine and just trying to drag that consumer all the way to the very door of the estate and meeting the wine.

39:57And it's not like you have to know and like every single winemaker, but you will find your favorites and enabling people to find their favorites and the story and everything that goes around the wine, not just what's in the bottle, I think is kind of what you're leaning to. Yeah, and I think like, you know, maybe something that feels underappreciated at the minute, right? So going back to, I was going to say not to bring everything back to Taylor Swift, but that's kind of what we're talking about. The music industry used to make, generate profit from selling music right so you sold physical copies of things now in order to market and distribute that you used to go on tour you made no money from touring you went on tour as a marketing tool yeah yeah yeah the product then was was your revenue driver and it's completely the opposite yeah you you give away your product for free in the hope that people will come to these ridiculously i mean we were kind of talking before about who's been to an aristotle i think like hundreds of millions from his latest residency didn't it yeah yeah so you're you're really monetizing experience and like i said wine culture music these are experiential goods i wonder is the wine industry really doing or keeping up with that trend so like for example neighbor of mine went to um is it domus dom no domus in where which region uh napa dominus dominus it's either domus or dominus okay this is a producer right they could be domus could be a producer yeah anyway i had not i had not heard i had not heard of this uh of this producer before he came back with the bottle and we had dinner and we drank this bottle of wine and we talked about the art they have what i did not realize before one of the most prolific sculpture and art collections that i have i do a lot in the art world that i have ever no no no it's not it's not

42:00Jonathan Stevenson:because they've got the francis bacon triptych and stuff they do and and the reason i know that is because my favorite artist right now that I've been obsessed with for a while is a South African absurdist multimedia artist called William Kentridge. Right. William designed a label for that family for their 30th vintage. Oh, nice. Okay. But his sculpture, I was very surprised to find in, I think it's Domus. Yeah. Love it. In this other winery that my friend had bought the bottle of wine. And so this bottle of wine turned into a conversation about artists and, you know, lifestyle. And then a week later, I'd actually seen a piece of William Kentridge's book somewhere else.

42:44And so anyway, we went back in the conversation. We talked about the wine again. And it connects beyond a product into an experience. And in that way, visiting a winery is like visiting. This one? Yeah, Domus. Yeah, yeah. The bottle of wine in this instance was the merch. he went to this place there were amazing stories it turned into a two-week conversation and the bottle of wine was the merch and it was the setting for us to have this dinner and whatever we did not buy the wine or you know he did not buy the wine because it was a good burgundy with a good classification yeah or a good a good um a good bordeaux with a good classification yeah interesting yeah i mean i i mean having just recently been to the bordeaux for the on premar one thing I would say is that like there's been a huge advancement in how the look and feel and experience of going to the wineries is it's like it's night and day from when I was I was there a long time ago sort of decade ago now but so many of them have pumped loads of money into that of course but like done in such a way where like the experience of just walking around there is almost like just going to an amazing gallery or it really is leaning onto that but I do wonder whether to your point because it's all still stuck behind so much of this on premier is not yeah not delivering

43:58Jonathan Stevenson:to a certain extent you know wine can't be consumed digitally right i mean there's ways you can engage with wine digitally you can't consume the actual product digitally and i think that whilst i completely agree with the the kind of evolution of wine music industry last few years there's also a counter story to that which is obviously the rise in sale of vinyls and physical recordings which is that as we've seen you know the rise of consumption of music being basically you know eucatious you know there's there's nothing really preventing anyone consuming any any musical artist independent or or not where people are now finding their passion is owning these limited edition vinyls or collecting vinyls or having some sort of i've got a record player at home i have loads of friends my age i've got record players at home you know it's just something to kind of bring back that analog feeling around music so i think that there's always kind of like a counter story to the the main story and i think that is around the digital consumption of of music but i think in the wine industry i think the way that we look at it is you kind of want you don't want to lose the romanticism of that special bottle in your cellar the you know not it's all about showing off to people but like there is that magical feeling of having a certain label of a certain bottle of a certain age and you know we've all been there into restaurants or into a cellar somewhere and someone goes oh look at this this is a 1982 and everyone goes oh wow I can't believe that's 50 year old wine or someone pulls out something from the 1900s and it you know at that point it becomes a bit more like a piece of art kind of a physical physical piece of art that you're appreciating obviously then you get the moment to to drink the wine you have that experience so I think wine has some really interesting unique dynamics around it which I've always said the thing about wine that I find uncomparable to any other products in the world is that it's the only product that i know that's manufactured and at the point of manufacture it's not at its peak you know you think about you buy a car you drive off the forecourt it's never going to be as good as that moment when you drive it off the forecourt you know you buy a watch that watch will never be as good as it the moment you unbox it it's only ever going to deteriorate over time wine is the only product that's manufactured and the point you receive that wine assuming that you receive at the point that it's made and bottled it's only obviously up to a limited point but for the next 10 15 20 years it's only going to get better yeah only going to improve and that's a very unique thing around wine which i think creates this kind of mystique around sort of the ageability you know that time this whole time essence this whole time factor around wine which i think is something that you know makes the wine industry you know very differentiated to other industries but then it's kind of but you can also that we are living in this digital world and it's kind of like how do you how do you mesh the two together how do you of enable digital to make it more accessible but still not lose this physical element of wine that analog element of wine yeah exactly i think you can do both i think that's that's kind of where we're landing with it is you can main because of the vintage wine world exists and because there are every estate has a back catalog of you know hundreds of vintages you can also you can protect the analog of of your product because you have it there by and large going back centuries um um but almost like that new introduction is kind of what we're talking about with the you know the constant rhetoric around gen z's not drinking etc etc so i think it's almost like almost like reshaping that first introduction making that experience exciting enough to then gather your followers and your you know your swifties so to speak in order for them to go back through the annals and into the analog of what you already created and produced you know that's kind of because then you're going back to that whole notion you know comparing it to music again which is kind of like you know the first album's the best which is often said right so it's like you just you need to harness this new wave of change and evolution of how people are viewing experiences over maybe the product in in new vintage but then actually capture them for for going back through to the great stuff yeah yeah exactly i'm not sure the distinction here is between digital and analog um i mean i think you're right that music can be experienced digitally and then you can buy the the vinyls or whatever um i think it's about whether wine is being sold as a product or an experience that's i think the difference because taylor swift is a lifestyle you've got swifties in your world yeah they're freaks they're they're undeniable freaks we're weird right like it's a lifestyle when you meet another swifty yeah you see the french bracelet it you're like yeah we're freaks you know you instantly recognize it in each other um now to a certain degree that's what the watch world is too right yeah a visible indicator that you subscribe to a certain freakishness and how do you do that with wine sure part of it is going to a restaurant and looking at the list and hemming and hemming it does exist in wine of course it does but the question is you have to go on instagram and show them all off that's the question is are they moving fast enough to capture the excitement and the attention of younger people that are looking for frankly more meaning and and don't want a product again like the younger winemakers that i think are doing exciting experimenting and are potentially more interesting than the established old houses that are preserving what they've done for 200 years yeah i think that's the question like like what kind of community are you going to create and how are you going to do it also what you said earlier about the kind of wine being kind of this inside outside culture i think maybe there isn't any current product or service offering that enables that connection between the outside to the inside or facilitates the outside to inside in a because from an outside sense you look at the insiders and go oh god that looks cool i'd love to be a part of it i don't know how i don't the right people i don't know who i would talk i don't have the right connections i'm not on the right whatsapp groups yeah i don't know what i'm doing so that kind of facilitation from outside to inside doesn't really exist maybe in wine yeah maybe of all the products it's probably the widest maybe because if you want to go like i want to be a swifty right the facilitation of being from the outside to inside is you know you listen to her music and you know you start maybe getting involved in online communities and yeah going to the shows and meeting people and talking to people and suddenly you're going to be a swifty right yeah in a way there's there's not much barrier to entry there well look at the other big distinction too right like taylor swift has the ability to scale to hundreds of millions of people without degrading the value of her product or or or the value of her brand wine has the opposite problem yeah it cannot scale to hundreds of thousands of people without devaluing itself watches the same so like there are obvious differences there and they're they're interesting questions how do you solve for them yeah like isn't the value of any collectible asset that there are insiders and outsiders but you want to bring some people in but not all of them because okay so a really good example of this actually is um jay-z and ace of spades yeah crystal yeah i'm sorry but like taylor swift mention Sancer yeah doesn't even sorry doesn't mention it there's literally there is literally a bottle there it's blurry for like half a second again the freaks the Swifties figure out I believe we're called the Swift first I just want to clarify we're not we're not freaks but we are I am self labelling us to the outside world this is a freakish thing to do to pause a video and to figure out what blurry label this is and then just to buy it instantly right that is a weird thing to do so let's look at what happened in what i want to know 20 years earlier was it 2006 2008 with jay-z yeah and the christy yeah the ceo said he didn't want people with hip-hop videos they could have had the same thing like this music was you know jay-z is mentioning them and saying you know they could have had that fan moment and they're like nope not these people so like you there there is i'm sorry but there there's the world of wine has issues yeah yeah swifty's fine jay-z of jay-z fans not so much yeah and look at what industry change came from that you know that's another example of someone that was like you know i'm just gonna do it my own way lvmh a really good example of a brand not a brand but a company that understands branding and lifestyle they will invest in a wine label that they may never outwardly market but that they know will go really well with the hermese scarf it's a lifestyle so yeah i mean these are interesting questions but the inside outside one is another good um sorry just to interrupt another good case study i just thought of is is treasury wine estates who own penfolds and how um how quickly they went from obviously grange and and how that was um being taken up in asia then they had the changes to the trade agreements there and then all of a sudden fast forward to now and i think i'm pretty sure in saying that their biggest selling label by volume is the snoop dog 19 crimes right yeah um which is just a really interesting dynamic shift and i think it basically almost an extension of what you just said around the jay-z stuff where it's like that in a nutshell i mean we talked about it quite on one of the earlier pods i believe where it was like i think that connection between music and wine is something that really is the it's an emotional thing that people can try and lean on and going also lifestyle and not a lifestyle that would be native to wine right 19 crimes well ex snoop dog felon like this This is a real example.

53:46I mean, and look at what they were able to do with that label that Cristal had poo-pooed Jay-Z for. So, like, this is what I mean. Are the French moving faster?

53:56Jonathan Stevenson:But then to your point around, like, kind of, like, the scarcity and the volume of the product, like, Cristal didn't really have a volume issue, right? Not to say that's the reason why they should have taken that position or stance, but at your point, it's kind of like, well, they make it every kind of four or five years. They're not making that many bottles. yeah i just think that if people want your product let them want your product let the community in yeah well it's a very dangerous game to play around with like when people want more of your product in a way that kind of does that reflect kind of a bit like we're saying almost that kind of bygone era because that was kind of like in the 2000s right i think obviously as a good example you know jay-z going out doing arm and the brignette ace of spades and obviously some other celebrities now especially on like the more spirit side of things have really proven how successful a model that's been yeah it kind of again was reflective of this changing of the guard right in the early 2000s a ceo cristal sees it as an image problem oh that's going to put off our you know legacy buyers of the product whereas actually the modern era says you can build a community around this individual who has huge amounts of influence now and can direct people a bit like you described earlier and maybe that's the new era of kind of how maybe industry ceos river is kind of which is the generation that everyone's now trying to They've then jumped on to say, okay, if we want to shift product, let's create a whole brand and a whole experience and a whole kind of mythology around this particular bottle and the 19 crimes you'd have to commit to get sent to Australia and have the augmented reality label, right, and kind of bring it to life, which I think in a way kind of leads into what you're saying, kind of like world building, having this mythology, then having obviously the celebrity connection in terms of that notoriety and kind of distribution.