A discourse in the communications of wine w/ Karen MacNeil, The Wine Bible & Come Over October

Hey listeners, I want to tell you a little bit about Offset, a proudly independent Commerce platform and brand studio based in Wine Country. I've personally used their e-commerce platform Offset Commerce for over a decade, and I've found it to be one of the most intuitive and functional platforms on the market. Don't just take my word for it, establish luxury brands and leading independent producers and merchants like Brian Estate, Bedrock Wine Company, Arnold Roberts, and Acby Fine wines use Offset Commerce and Love It. Go to OffsetCommerce.com to learn more. That's OFF-SET-Commerce.com to learn more. Welcome to Ex-Shadow. The podcast that navigates the business of Wine with unique perspectives and insights with your host Robert Vernick and Peter Young. Welcome to this episode of Ex-Shadow. Today we're exploring the importance of the media narrative surrounding Wine. With us today is Wine Writer and Wine Celebrity. If you want to call me, so that Karen McNeill. Karen, welcome to the show. Thanks Peter. I'm not sure I like Wine Celebrity Drone. I'm going to have to teach you back on that. Yeah. Well, you have had TV shows in the past and other things. For those of our listeners who aren't as familiar with you, can you give a brief overview of your background? Wow. That's sort of a big open-ended question. I mean, most people know me because I'm the author of the Wine Bible, which is one of the best-selling wine books in English. Well, come to think of it. The French don't write that many wine books and either do the Italians of the Spanish. So we speak English, have an advantage, maybe. But I've had a long career in wine as a writer, as a speaker, as a teacher. And early on in my career, I felt that to be good in any form of communications, you kind of had to do it all a little bit. You know, you needed to do radio and television and advertising and book writing and magazine writing and blog writing. So I've done a little bit of all of those, except I wasn't very good in advertising. So I'll admit that. I do believe that being in a little bit in media myself has really helped me in terms of marketing as well. I'm thinking about marketing and thinking about how to pitch to writers and things like that because I'm on the other end too. But so we're sitting here today in early 2026. My voice sounds terrible because I have a cold. Wine industry is in a bit of a pebble. And the headlines are dominated with titles like The End of Alcohol and another major wine company closes shop and lays off lots of workers and so forth and so on. What's your view of the state of the wine industry at this point in time? I'm worried. I wish I could say, oh, it'll all be fine. People will start drinking again. They just need to hit 45 years old or, but I think some important switch in the culture has been flipped. And I don't think there's any going back. Behaviorally, we are a vastly different country now than we were. Even in 2012, if I was looking up the other day, when did social media in particular, which I know is only one slice of the conversation, but when did that really take hold in America? And the date that is uniformly given the year is 2012. That's when Facebook, for the first time, had 1 billion users a month, active users a month. And it's when, for the first time in the US, more than 50% of the population had a smartphone. So 2012 feels like yesterday, on one hand, on the other hand, think how far we're even we are from 2012. So the whole culture, including the culture of wine, is moving at warp speed in ways that we can't even imagine, I think. So having come out of the, I don't know, the cozy time of the 1970s and 80s, when wine was just purely aspirational, when everyone couldn't wait to try new wines when it was, when there was so much, I don't know, goodness and excitement in the industry. Now I feel a little worried, frankly. I believe Instagram was founded in 2010 or something like that, although I guess Facebook would originally started, I was in college, I think less than just after, so it must have been early 2000s. But I don't think I had the same traction when you're still doing email and everything was on a computer at that time. So it wasn't always on. One of the things about that that I think about Peter is the concept of time, how, on any given day, a business person, yourself, myself, you're sitting in your office, I have a capacity to go through, I don't know, 200 emails really fast, right? Reading every line, but only sometimes reading this, the first line before I'm processing it and moving on to the next. So in a culture that is that fast, that everybody is moving that fast, they're just swiping that fast, they're just thinking that fast, they're just writing that fast, line is a slow medium, it implies slowness. One of the reasons I think white wine is perhaps right now doing better than red wine is that it implies fastness. Red wine, it's like slow and sit around and talk and have this bottle over the course of a hour and finish it with a friend. But white wine is a little bit zippier, both in flavor, but also in time. And time has changed radically in the last decade. So how is that increase or that acceleration of time if you will led to the change in people's behavior and how they how they address and engage with white? Well, I think on the one hand, if you're looking at it positively, you could say, well, great, the fact that wine takes time means that maybe it will be this analog reprieve in a fast digital world. And you know that I started the come over October campaign, almost predicated upon that idea that the world is now too much with us, too fast. We actually, it feels good to slow down, have a glass of wine with a friend or a family member or colleague or even just by yourself. I don't know if wine doesn't take the position that it helps in a fast world. I don't know what other recourse there is because wine in and of itself is not particularly fast unless maybe the whole wine world went to single serving containers. And then you know, it's like down that there are plenty of fine wines that that already are in single serving containers and that can be down the hatch. But I'm presuming here that we're talking about kind of fine wine, wine that is bottled, wine that costs a couple of dollars, a glass at least. Wine in general, particularly fine wine, is physically I think slower to consume because of the high acid, the high tanins for red wine and other things that don't really allow it to be consumed quickly like a shot of spirits or a beer. So I do think that is important. Yeah, even think about one of the sorry tin trip, but your comment just sparked a thought for me, which was even think about one of the characteristics that is a hallmark of greatness that has always been a hallmark of greatness is length, is finish and you're right. There's no other beverage. You don't say man this orange juice has. You know, time is a really important factor here and how we think about it. Do you think there are other factors outside of the time element that are driving the decline and wine consumption both in the US and abroad? I think there are, it's a matrix of complicated factors. Of course, there isn't a single one. But one of the factors that is a very simple one is just choice. If you talk to any baby boomer, baby boomers remember when there was ABC, NBC and CBS and that was it and everybody got their news from one of those sources and that's what you watched for both news and entertainment. And today, of course, we know that people have literally hundreds, if not thousands, of media choices. And they also have hundreds, if not thousands, of beverage choices with new ones coming online all the time. So just the pie itself of everybody has to drink something, if only water, but the number of options within the pie is so big that it's inevitable. I mean, have the wine industry thought about it 20 years ago, they would have realized, oh, as all kinds of things also got better, right, as water got better. As you went from kind of bad 39 cent coffee in the Greek deli to eight dollar lattes and multiple variations of those in Starbucks. As the whole world of beverages got bigger, sometimes better, more interesting. more diverse, it was inevitable that wine share would go down. But I think wine, so one is sheer number of choices. Two is, we live in one of the most bold societies, American society, in on the globe. And Americans like big things, loud music, big cars, I always think about rap music and hip-hop. And we've got subtle forms of sound. And in a culture that increasingly likes experience and drama and being galvanized by things, you can see how cocktails would be so appealing, right? Somebody shaking, stirring their sound, there's color. You might not be able to do it yourself, it's fascinating to watch. And wine sits there, classively, on the shelf. No change in color, no change in sound until you've locked open the quirk and no movement. So the whole culture is moving in one direction and wine can't move that way, it doesn't move that way. So yeah, these are things I, more than the average barrel, lay awake at night worrying about. I mean, I wouldn't call it fine wine necessarily, but the wine industry more broadly has made some adjustments like that. If you think about even a few years ago, the popularity of 19 crimes and with Snoop, right, talk about rap, breaking open to new things today, the XXL, right, talk about big things, big bold and sweet. And high alcohol wines have done quite well within that FAD, I guess, CPG, fashion time period. And then I mean, when I grew up, it was like, Zima, Z equivalent, I think sort of things. So I think wine has done some changes. I think it's harder for wine because it's a bit more expensive to make than like, you know, high noon, which is owned by wine company, Gallow, right, and they're able to pump out millions of cans quite easily and more inexpensively than if it were based online. Yeah, if you're right, of course, there have been things like 19 crimes and XXL and those are probably pretty good. I don't know that they taste really fabulous, but they, I'm not a good judge of that, but they certainly are hitting contemporary culture from a different angle, which to me is great. Like, let's everybody get in the pool. I believe that everything should, that every attempt to bring wine into contemporary culture is pretty much categorically good. The other thing though that I worry, I suppose I worry about as someone who is a writer and makes my living from communications is the co-opting of certain ideas by other beverages. And I'm speaking here primarily about the concept of being mindful. When you see functional beverages and beverages with THC and CBD compounds that are in cannabis, when they co-op that idea of these are mindful beverages, I think, what? Mine is the most mindful beverage ever. It is that contemplative beverage. But so I think the industry has been floundering around not telling its own best story sometimes. And letting other beverages take positions that, in a sense, wine owns and has always owned for hundreds, thousands of years. It's a little sad. I mean, the idea of being present, being mindful, you listen to these terms being applied to other beverages. And I think, wow, why miss the boat on that? Yeah, I see that for beverages like better mushroom based or tea related beverages and all sort of things, the story of it. They're trying to take the same benefits if you want to call it. That extend a wine and alcohol and in some parts of alcohol in general, and then extend it to other things to directly go after the wine, the alcohol and the street's market. Well, the good news about that is that A. Words are free, are more or less free. And with adjustments in how you talk about your product, you can recover some of that positioning. But it's not instantaneous. As you said earlier, part of the problem for wine is that not only is it a slow beverage for consumers, it's a slow industry. It has to be a slow industry. It's agriculture, it's nature. Every decision is kind of a four year decision and that's fast. So many decisions have to be 15, 20, 35 year decisions. So wine has never been able to chase trends and it shouldn't. It's too hard to do. But it means that people in the wine industry, I think, are cautious. They're naturally cautious people because they can't chase trends and because Mother Nature always bats last. So it teaches you, it teaches a whole industry to move, tread slowly and carefully and that has left us behind a little bit. Absolutely. One of the major themes over the last few years that has potentially large impact on both the wine world and alcohol in general is the health impacts and the narrative around health and alcohol more generally paired with the large health trends that are going through social media and media in general, people wanting to be more healthy and trying to biohack themselves to live till 100 or whatnot. How important do you think those media narrative around health and alcohol has impacted the wine consumption, which then has obviously impacted the industry? No, this is a very sophisticated question and issue because on the one hand, you think to yourself, okay, there are truly anti-alcohol, neo-prohibitionist forces in the country. I've researched this a lot, I have no doubt that they are there and operating very strongly right now. So the question is, should wine align itself with beer and spirits and should we say, hey, wait a minute, you shouldn't conflate alcohol use with abuse. We can kind of agree on that on the one hand. On the other hand though, is wine categorically different than spirits and beer? I mean, I wrote a piece of, a few months ago called, is wine really in the alcohol business? Because I think if you're a wine drinker, you're not primarily going after alcohol. If you were primarily going after alcohol, they're cheaper and faster ways than to buy a $30 peanut or something. And to me, wine is more than alcohol. It's, you know, it's threaded into this rich, compelling culture of food and history and religion and art and all of those things. Even when you're just sharing a glass of Sauvignon Blanc with a friend and so you're not absolutely conscious of thinking about the history of Sauvignon Blanc in Europe, nonetheless, the aura of wine in as part of a larger culture is always operating. So does that mean then that wine should take a very different approach to all these anti-alcohol forces? To me, I think it should. I think wine can take a stand on the issue of well-being, which is an easier word to be accepted by everyone than health because health is already so loaded, so it's so triggering that word. And it's so fraught with absolute black and white binary reactions. And it's also a word that is right now, you know, brings up images of a country where 40% of the people are obese, GLP1 drugs, or so. Before you jump into that deep end, which is very swampy, I stay over on the shallow end a little bit and talk about well-being because I think in that arena, wine can very legitimately say that moderate use, we're not talking about alcohol abuse, but moderate use, has a real role in well-being. And I think that's been documented for hundreds and hundreds of years. Yeah, generally well-being in terms of better relationships with other people, which is correlated with lower stress and less inflammation and maybe even directly and not abuse, but moderate use, lower stress, alcohol in general can help reduce stress a little bit, which is somewhat counteracted by some level of inflammation and causes. But I think there is a long study in history of better relationships with other people leading to longer life and better outcomes and everything like that that wine has traditionally been a part of. - Not yet. - Over thousands of years. - Totally. And when you, you know, was Lydia Bastionic, the great cookbook author who I was talking to her a few months ago and she said, you know, Lydia has owned many top restaurants and for many years in New York and actually all over the country. And she said, for my whole career as a restaurant owner, she said, I've watched thousands of business deals being done in my restaurants. And she said, why do you think business deals, marriages, any kind of socially binding agreement is done in the presence of food and wine? It's because food and wine have this special ability to make us want to be together, to agree with each other, to come to some harmonious place between us. And she said, you know, nobody goes out on a ski slope and does business deals. They go to a restaurant for a very good reason. And I thought that was such a simple but brilliant observation. - Or a golf course in some cases, I guess. - Not what I thought was out a whole lot of us, but we'll let that go for now. - Yeah. Which kind of plays into the, what you mentioned earlier, this organization come over October, which you founded with Gina Collangella and Kimberly Charles, trade non-profit focused on creating tools to enable line companies to engage in some of these positive aspects and well-being of line culture. How is that going? - Yeah, well, it's not primarily for the trade. Come over October is now, and it's sister campaign, Sharon Pearce-Sundays, is the largest grassroots consumer campaign ever launched in the wine industry. Last year we reached 2.9 billion media impressions. 1400 retail stores across America did come over October promotions last year. And it was an idea I had in February of 2024. And it started out, I was walking my dog, it was a simple idea of, wouldn't it be great if everybody who ever drank wine for a whole month just did something very simple, a simple behavior that has been repeated for thousands of years, which is just invite a friend, a colleague, a neighbor, a family member to come over and share some wine. What if everybody did that? I said to myself that morning. And then because I'm a writer, I liked the rhyme of come over October. And later that day, I called both Gino and Kimberly who I've known for years and said, so I've just had this idea, and you two are good communications people. This is a crazy dumb idea, or what do you think? 'Cause I knew that they would say to me, take an aspirin and go back to bed. (laughing) But they both said, oh, this could maybe be a very good idea. So the three of us joined forces. I'm not in public relations, they both are, but they're both, but we all are the three of us in some form of communications. And between the three of us, we probably know, can pick up the phone and talk to anybody in communications in the country. And so we formed a little business. The three of us donate our time to it. It's not a money making venture for us. But we did last year raise a quarter of a million dollars from wineries, from importers, from distributors, to launch these come over October and Sharon Parasundee's promotions all over the country. So it's been hugely successful, much more than any of the three of us could have imagined. It's been very gratifying. It's really worked. People get it, you know, it's really simple. Come over October, buy some wine, and come open it up and come on over. - So you mentioned Sharon Parasundee's, how is the organization and what it's doing come over October changed over time? - We started with come over October. Our little company is called Come Together, a community for wine. And it launches the come over October campaign. And after the first year, I realized, as did Kimberly and Chino too, that we needed something that went beyond October. Even though lots of people were making come over October, it was just a phrase, the whole fall was come over October, which is great for wine. But we needed something in the spring. And we also wanted something that the first year, the part of the business that we didn't reach as strongly as we hoped to, were restaurants. Wineries did all kinds of things in their tasting rooms, trade associations did stuff, Yelp did stuff, lift the car company did stuff. But funnily enough restaurants were, I don't know, we just didn't reach them as much as we wanted to. So I felt that we needed a food component for a springtime campaign and came up with the idea of share and pair Sundays. Because like come over October, all of our campaigns have to have a time, a reason and a behavior. So people understood come over October consumers, you didn't, it wasn't oblique, you didn't have to explain it to them, it was really easy to understand. And so is share and pair Sundays. So now we've gotten more restaurants involved, they're like, yeah, Sunday, you know, come on over and have some bites at the communal table and bottle of wine, it's share and pair Sundays. And of course, by share and pair Sundays, we mean it could be any Sunday, any time. And it's not specifically food and wine pairing. It's not, you know, okay, you have to have this Santa Lucia Highlands Sera with crispy duck or something. It could be Pinocrygio and potato chips. It's just the idea of having a little bit of something to eat and something to drink with someone else. And so that was targeted primarily for restaurants or it was just, you know, two retail stores all over the country are doing share and pair Sundays promotions. So are wineries. So are trails like, oh, the one that quickly comes to mind is Seneca Lake in New York has a wine trail and the finger lakes. And so they do share and pair Sundays with a, you know, a group of wineries that you can go to one after the other. Texas, the whole country really has been phenomenal in how they promote these two ideas. The whole Texas Department of Agriculture has been great. In fact, they asked us if they could modify come over October a little bit. And in Texas, the logo is come over October, y'all. (laughing) Which we loved, of course. So both campaigns are meant for anyone to take them and run with them. Do whatever you would like. Right now we're talking to the Paso Robles cab collective about share and pair Sundays promotions. They might do with Paso Robles Cabernet. So everybody does something a little bit different, but all around that central theme of either coming over or sharing and pairing. - It's what have been some of the most, and maybe even the least impactful things that come together organization has done. - One of the most impactful, I think, for us was, I did an interview with Pink, the rock star, the singer songwriter, and she was incredible. And after that, we also did several interviews with sports figures. We realized that wine not only connects wine people, but it connects people across industries. And the more that we can do that, the more we can have discussions with musicians, sports people, doctors, lawyers, anyone outside of the wine business. The better it is, the more excitement is generated. - Pink is also in the wine industry, right? Doesn't she have a winery instead of Barbara? - Well, two balls, wines are delicious. Yes, so she was very willing to do this. The other thing we realized, though, Peter, is passion, anyone's passion is addictive. And that wine moves in this individual way, from person to person. You know, I often say it's like that scene from when Harry met Sally and Sally's like, "Who?" and the guy in the side says, "I'll have what she's having." When you watch someone else really enjoying something, when they are obviously excited about something, it's a huge turn on. You want to be in on it. Like what? We want to have some of that. And so every individual has this power to in their own simple way, turn one other person, 10 other people on to why because of their own passion. They don't even have to do anything except demonstrate their own love of wine. And I think we harnessed that with Sharon Pearce Sundays and come over October. And that was very powerful. That's how we got to 2.9 billion media impressions. Well, I think the wine community is one of the most, I don't know, generous as the right word, but most sort of welcoming and sharing communities, right? Wine collectors and other people constantly want to share airlines with other people and not not even always in like a show off mode, but just in a sharing this great experience, kind of thing with others who might appreciate it. You know, I started out in food writing in New York years ago. And I remember thinking to myself as I tried to, it was hard to move into wine writing, but remember thinking, you know, you can't knock on the door of hotels then the great restaurant in New York and say, hi, you don't know me, but could I just taste your food? In food. But actually, you can't knock on the door of a winery in Sonoma, Long Island, Texas, Missouri, Italy, San Sear, wherever you are and say, you know, I'm interested in wine. Can I come in and taste your wine? Jances are, you can. Yeah. So you mentioned the great success that come together has had 2.9 billion impressions. How do you think it's changed the public discourse and narrative around wine in the media? Well, it's only the beginning and we have a long way to go, yeah, we're not done yet. We're just, you know, we're in Cherim Pair Sunday's 2026 right now and building toward, come over October 2026. But I think it has shown two things. One is that any kind of good message that the wine industry could come up with should be simple and actionable. And second, that a generic campaign on behalf of wine is critically important. You know, when the industry was at its sort of height, let's say in the late 90s, it was still in its booming phase, wineries could afford to just focus on brand. They were all about their own brands, distinctiveness, how their brand was different than someone else's brand. Today, wine desperately needs us to promote category wine. And there's a lot of, as you know, I mean, there's a lot of discussion about this in the halls of wineries. I don't think we're there yet, but I myself am determined to try and make that happen because until we promote wine generically, we will remain culturally irrelevant. Do you think that's harder to do in shrinking industry environment? Because today, the industry is shrinking. And so all the brands are basically competing for market share. I made an analogy on another episode where it's kind of like playing the kids game musical chairs. Everyone's running around trying to have one of the chairs that is still there. And so it's a little bit more potentially less collaborative than it may have been in the past because of that. You're right, but it's also very short-sighted. What are we all going to do? Just wait till there's not a chair left. Is that what anyone is suggesting? Because that's what's happening. The answer is to put more chairs in the room. It's not to keep going down the drain. It does make me a little frustrated with wineries because one of the things we'll hear is, well, we don't have any money, times are tough, I get it. All the more reason why you need to spend some money right now stopping the massive drain out of sales. Because, you know, a good example of this is the railroads. But when American railroads were at their peak in the early 1900s, they had tons of money. They had tons of money. They were the leading transportation. And they believed, of course, that people would always just ride on railroads. Railroads would be always major transportation, even as different forms of transportation occurred. Railroads refused to change and refused to band together. And railroads are today. They essentially all went bankrupt with the exception, maybe of a few that remain government subsidized today. So a lot of industries will go down with the ship. And that's what I think the wine industry is facing. Until you stop thinking about a collective campaign as an expense, it's not an expense. It's a, it needs to be a protection of your entire industry to keep propelling it forward. Otherwise, you will go down with the ship. The railroads, for example, should have owned the airlines. They should have seen, oh, people are changing, but we, we're going to move forward with people. We're going to get into this business too, this new form. But there was not a single railroad person that ever invested in an airline. They went down with the ship. So maybe in the immediate sense, yes, Winery's can say, oh, I'm sorry, we don't have any money to do this. But to me, man, it's very short-sighted. I mean, it begs the question of how big should the wine industry be? And was it too large before as we were, you know, even from a planting perspective, we were going into more maybe what you might call marginal areas, right? Like Kern County and other places where it could very easily grow other crops outside of wine. Why may or may not have been the best usage of that land. Sometimes I compare it a little bit to like the Sherry market, right? Which boomed and became huge and then got out of favor and shrank dramatically. And now it's sort of rising again, but in a, you know, niche kind of way. Well, remember, Sherry came back because of huge expenditures. They put tons of money into the rep promotion of Sherry and it worked. People often compare wine situation to the God Milk campaign. The God Milk campaign in its first year spent $23 million on that campaign. That was more than the entire value of the dairy industry in California. But they realized, we have to do something radical here. So there are two issues here. One is, are there too many vineyards? Yes, probably. Probably. Well, undoubtedly there are. Vineyards don't need to be everywhere and can't be everywhere and produce great wine. On the other hand, there has to be places that aren't the great quote unquote terwars where you can produce every day wine, every good, every night wine that you could sell for $10 a bottle. So probably there are more vineyards than there needs to be. But reducing that production will not in and of itself solve the problem. You create more demand, not you personally, but one, we, the industry, must bring online many, many more people who fall in love with wine in the way that we are. And how do you think sort of the public discourse or media narrative around wine will play into building that demand again, especially in the world of fast digital, which also means very ubiquitous and short lived? Yeah, you know, that's a communications plan. And I have a number of ideas about that. I'm watching the culture really carefully as the kind of word architect of our own little campaigns. I will only say right now that I think I have some good ideas about how wine can communicate itself in the future, but they're not fully formed yet. So I don't want to give a half of the answer. Do you think there's some, you know, that we need a reverse some of the health messaging things. We've got the, you know, studies that are coming out these days that are proving to J curve or other things like that. Or is it more people related stories like the song movie, which really got off and created a whole generation of sommeliers for, you know, a decade or so, talking to Jason Wise about a similar topic tomorrow. But yeah, what would can create enough momentum to start to get the demand for wine movie? Well, certainly if you took, you know, if you created maybe 10 categories under the big umbrella, one is entertainment. You know, there are, wine has to be more often in the entertaining world, including on television. Right now, there are 30 cooking shows on PBS. There's not a single wine show and most of those cooking shows don't even show wine. So there's the whole entertainment, Hollywood world. There's the world of restaurants and salms. They play a critically important part because as we were saying earlier, their passion for wine becomes contagious. People are like, "Whoo, okay, I'd bring me a bottle of that. I'd like to try it." So restaurants, and wine buyers play a critically important part. There's the whole world of health, sports, well-being, mindfulness. That's a big category that needs its own independent communications plan. There's the category of wineries themselves. I read the other day that Howell Mountain is having their annual taste of Howell Mountain come around. The tables are set up. A standard kind of thing, but with bites, $275 a ticket, I thought, "Whew, wine industry, wine industry, constantly creating barriers that keep people away." I get that it costs a lot to put something like that on, but I think somehow the wine industry needs to lower its expectations of how much people will pay for the experience of their wine. Because to go full circle here, one of the problems with charging a lot for a tasting is that people then spend a long time with you because they want to get their $125 worth of their $125. That means that whole regions, like Napa Valley, when instead of people coming in and going to maybe four wineries, they go to one winery and spend two and a half hours, or maybe two wineries, but they don't go to four wineries anymore because the cost is so high and because the cost is high, they're going to spend a lot more time there. The wine industry itself has to take a hard look at itself about how it does its business relative to its consumers because it's not just selling wine, it's getting people to drink wine that matters. At some point, sellers are full, not only apartments are full, not just peoples, but the more the industry doesn't do this, the more wine backs up in the wineries seller, and you're a pro in the business, you know how devastating that can be for a winery, to be gray behind in sales, to be holding on to ventures that should have been drunk already. So you had all those categories, what I didn't hear, it would be curious to get your perspective on is what role does social media play, and all that. Yeah, social media is great. Social media can be, you know, I think we've gone past now the age where all you had to do is put on a red negligee and hold up a bottle and be paid $1500 as an influencer. But we know that social media can be incredibly creative and fascinating, and we have at come over October and Sharon Pearce on days, we have a person who does nothing but social media, that person is paid even though, you know, we aren't, but because it's a very important prong here, and it requires talent and creativity. So I've seen some great things on social media, and wine absolutely belongs there. So yeah, it's no, it's definitely one of the categories in the Big umbrella that needs to be attacked. So you mentioned the need for, you know, wineries and retailers and restaurants to kind of promote this general message around it. How much do you think individual wineries or retailers should try and change the narrative themselves? I do. I mean, I think you can't, if you're a winery, you can't wait for someone else to do something. You just can't, you must be creative for your own survival. And besides, when you're a winery, you're so proud of your product, you genuinely want people to enjoy it. You know that your product inspires excitement and love and good feelings and generosity. So wineries have every vested interest to pick up the ball and run with it because it feels good when you're quite apart from the economic reality. The reason you make wine as opposed to sunglasses or some whelces is because you believe that it gives people joy. And it's a hard business. So why would you put yourself through that business if, through that difficulty? If it were not to have the payoff of giving people joy. So wineries must take the lead and they can. So what do you think will be the key narratives in media and in the public around wine in 2026? I think that I hope that the key narratives are well-being, sharing, excitement, experience, and connection. So we like to wrap up each episode on a bit of a personal note. You've probably visited many, many wineries more than most. What has been your most memorable winery visit and why? My most memorable winery visit was last year a winery in Chile called Vick, the I.K.A. that makes a so-called stone wine. It's made in a natural clearing in a forest, 3,000 feet up in the mountains where the whamaker has buried Amphra made from clay and another part of the mountain. And in this Amphra, in this deserted forest in Chile, which looks like natural stone hinge, the trees have formed the oak trees, formed themselves in this incredible circle. And when you are up there and you taste the wine from this piece of ground, I mean it was extraordinary to me. It's a form of wine making. They call circular wine making, where everything is made on the property, every container, even the yeast that they use is collected from wild flowers on the property. I mean it's astounding. And you know if place talks as we sometimes like to say in the wine industry, I've never experienced place talking as much as I did standing in that living stone hinge of Amphra. I'm hopefully sharing that experience with the winery owners and whatnot and over that glass of wine creating memories I think is huge for wine and hopefully we can promote that message more and more to everyone else. Thank you Peter. Thanks so much for taking the time today. My pleasure. It's been great to speak with you. I know you you're so knowledgeable about the industry itself. Thank you for letting me throw in a few more mu-points. I appreciate that. Hey listeners, if you love the show, support it by buying a show notes book. They not only compile two years of episodes but also organizes them into themes for better learning. They can be an inspiration to listen to or relist into an episode or provide a quick reference of the key learnings from a show. Go to xchatto.com and click on the store page for easy links to buy. Thanks for listening. Thanks for joining us. If you loved this episode of xchatto, we'd love for you to subscribe, rate, and give a review on iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. Until next time, cheers.