Uncorking wine knowledge in Sanya

I suspect that this young crowd – in fact, they are very young – have probably never attended a real wine presentation. Wine is very complicated. It takes ages to learn and build up decent knowledge about the subject

You never really stop learning about wine. I have met many top wine experts – wine critics and wine journalists – and the common factor is that they are very humble because they know that they don’t know enough. You can always learn something new because it is such a diverse and complicated field.

When I do a training session like this, I try to keep it as simple as possible and stay focused on a few key messages. And so when they pick up a bottle on the shelf, and they have to talk to someone about this bottle, they have those three or four concepts in their mind to translate to the consumer.

So it is about adding some value to that bottle. For most consumers the bottles on the shelf don’t mean anything. But if you can inform the consumer through a few words and explain that it comes from the Venetian area, it is crafted with this technique, from these local grapes, and there is a family behind the story – that adds value to the bottle on the shelf.

You train someone who will train someone else, and that trainee will train the next person. Because if this consumer learns something from the store staff, they will go home with a bottle and be proud of it.

They can then tell a bit of the story to their friends and family. And then maybe their friends and family can share that story with others. So it forms a chain of communication. That’s why it’s very important to do this kind of training with the staff; it is a starting point for me, and for the winery, to reach the final consumer.

On this occasion, we are not training wine experts. When talking to a wine journalist or sommelier it would be a different story. Most people working in the wine industry are knowledgeable about wine – you need to be – because it’s so complex and so technical.

But most of the consumers are not. I would even say that 90% of wine drinkers are not experts. So we need to find a way to communicate wine in a sensible way, in a way that is simple so the concepts can be understood. For this kind of communication, it is not necessary to go into every single technical aspect.

You need to communicate at the audience level and adapt the message to them. Find content that can be informative but not too difficult. In this case, the store staff are young, inexperienced in the subject of wines, and they change and rotate roles frequently.

For this type of audience, you need to keep the message as simple as possible. Focus on some key messages which can even be repeated a few times and will hopefully then be easy to transfer to the final consumers.

During your first training session this morning you told the story of the Boscaini family who own Masaia. Can you walk us through the significance of telling that story to staff?

The story of the family is very important in any such business, but even more so with wine because it is a long-term business. You need to wait for results – in terms of both quality and finance.

If you invest in a vineyard, it takes 10 to 15 to 20 years to get that investment back. If you plant a vineyard, it takes four or five years before you get good grapes. And when you make the wine, the same recipe is repeated over a year, ten years, 20 years and 100 years.

Having a family behind the brand that knows this – where the primary goal is not just short-term financial revenue but rather a long-term project – is very important to the family that has been living with this concept for a very long time.

And we observe tension when wineries are managed by funders or investors who are in a hurry and seek immediate results. They do not accept that you can have a really good year and the following year may not be as good due to a challenging harvest or a market that went down for some reason. In wine, you need to accept that and see things from a long-term perspective.

Families like the Boscaini family really understand that. They look ahead and try to not only anticipate trends but also formulate them.

Has your career taken a similar journey to the winery’s story? Were there certain areas or chapters that required patience to see results?

Yes, absolutely. I entered the wine business 15 years ago, having come from a different industry. My goal was to enter the wine business because I like wine as a product and I thought I could do well and have a nice job with a product that I liked. In fact, I ended up liking it very much. I was lucky enough to have entered Masi 15 years ago and I’m still there.