A symposium on the future of wine has pointed in a direction we all saw coming.
By W. Blake Gray | Posted Monday, 01-Mar-2021
In-person wine tastings with producers are going away, the wine auction business is moving online, and storytelling is now as important as wine quality.
These were a few of the observations from a symposium at WineFuture 2021 last week on how the luxury wine business is adapting to the pandemic – and how many of those adaptations may be permanent.
If you are a wine lover, you have likely attended a dinner where a visiting winemaker flew across the country or around the world to spend a few jet-lagged hours not eating her food. Wine dinners are not going away, but in the near future the winemaker might "show up" on an iPad from her home.
"In the end of March, when we realize that travel is blocked, we invented a menu of Krug Connect – connecting with clients, connecting with the press," said Margareth Henriquez, president and CEO of the House of Krug. "There I was [virtually] recently in Argentina, a small market for us. I was connected with 150 sommeliers. This was never possible for Krug before. When we traveled we always did small events. Today we have a studio with the right cameras and the right lighting."
Viña Errazuriz president Eduardo Chadwick said that, in the past, "people were not used to hosting you on a videoconference. They expected you to travel for any event. Now we are getting in touch with more people in an easier way. Now we can be in many countries on the same day. I'm not saying personal contact will cease to exist. But it's going to be used more strategically."
Adam Bilbey, senior director of Sotheby's Wine Asia and Europe, said his company was initially worried that it might not have as many buyers online as it did for its in-person auctions.
"What we realized was that with the capability of online, we were actually engaging with a much broader audience," Bilbey said. "In 2019, 25 percent of our buyers were new. In 2020 (with auctions online), 37 percent of our buyers were new."
Younger buyers
Bilbey also said that the online auction audience skews younger than the in-person audience, with nearly 50 percent more buyers under the age of 40 than before.
"What we learned is that when we have live sales now, we're really saving them for special occasions," Bilbey said. "We're planning 50 sales this year; 33 are going to be online versus 17 physical sales. This was always going to come. There are less physical catalogs, which is better for the environment. The curation that you can offer online is so much better. The physical contact is going to be there. But there's going to be less of it and it's going to be far more meaningful and impactful."
Bilbey didn't talk about whether online auctions are drawing higher bids, but it sounds possible.
"People are at home. They're far more comfortable sitting down with a glass of wine in their hand," Bilbey said. "The curation and the telling of the story is very key. You can really reach into people's hearts if you make sure that the curation is earnest, eloquent and humble."
Chadwick echoed that, saying, "In the past, presenting a new wine was done in a very technical way. We have invested more effort into making that a better experience, a more personal experience."
Of course, now the challenge is to get samples out to people when they can't gather together. Sacrifices have to be made from the winery's cellar.
"For five years we never had one extra bottle," Krug's Henriquez said. "This year we had to have bottles to animate other markets."
The longterm impact of the pandemic on travel purchases of wine is hard to predict but, in a different session, Fraser Wotzke, manager of merchandise and planning of spirits, wine and tobacco for the DFS Group, said that people who are traveling now are buying more duty-free bottles per journey and paying more per bottle for them, and this might be the case in the future as well as companies cut back on business travel in favor of Zoom meetings.
"They want to make those journeys count," Wotzke said.
March 01, 2021 at 05:11AM
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