How Young Consumers Embrace Fine Wine w/ Pauline Vicard, ARENI

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Today we're gonna talk about how young consumers get into wine and fine wine in particular. With us today is Pauline Vicar, the multi-time guest on X-Sheto. Is that a word? Did I say that right? This is her third time on the show. Listeners can refer back to prior episodes to learn about Pauline's background and Arrini's mission. So Pauline is the executive director of Arrini Global of fine wine kind of research institute. Research and Action Institute. Maybe you can give us a brief look at what's been new at Arrini. It's actually been over four years since you've been on X-Sheto. Well, yeah, you've mentioned this in the prep note that it was 2021. I thought it was yesterday. Time really flies. But thank you. Thank you so much, Peter, for having me again. It's always such a pleasure to talk with you. Maybe just as a recap for listeners who wouldn't know Arrini Global because we are think tank. And think tank dedicated to the future of fine wine is not something that's so well known in the wine industry. It's definitely new. So really what we aim to do, our vision, is a global fine wine sector that remains economically viable, culturally meaningful and environmentally sustainable across generation. So what it means is really we do research and we convene leadership dialogue in order to talk about the economics of wine making and wine distributions about the cultural relevance of fine wine in today's world. And what it means for people and society. And also of course about environmental sustainability and what it means to produce fine wine today. But just as a side note, the reason why we study fine wine is not just because we don't like the rest of the wines and we elite is to anything like this. It's just because when you look at fine wine, it acts a bit like as a canary in the called mine because fine wine is long term. And you have to think about long term production and distribution of fine wine. And so by looking through the length of fine wine, we also hope to see opportunities for the global wine sector. And to go back to your question to what's been, what we've been up to in the last four years, where a lot of things, but basically those two core activity that we have, which is to gather leader leaders and convene those type of dialogues. So we do a couple of very high end by invitation only event every two years in different wine regions. Since we last talked to each other, we convene people in Burgundy in 2025, California in 2023. We went to South Africa before we travel the world, we go to every one different wine regions. We do webinar podcast. We had a special podcast series on the new consumers to prepare the research that we're going to present today. We had a special series on education because last year our publication was focused on education and what kind of education the trade needs in order to be more profitable. So not consumers education, but trade education. So yeah, that kind of things. Well, and I think it's significant, especially this day and age in early 2026, that your first thing you listed was the economic viability of wine and fine wine. And that's probably the biggest thing on everyone's minds these days. And really what we do is we look at how the world is changing and how that impacts production, distribution and consumption of fine wine. And if you look at how the world is changing in terms of climate, geopolitics, and societies, really the way it impacts us is our economics, the way we make money and we make sure that we financially sustainable. The environmental sustainability, of course, our capacity to continue to produce fine wine. But recently, that's always been at the core, but it's become more visible for people outside of the thing tank, I'd say, that also society is reconsidering. Societies are reconsidering the place of alcohol and luxury and all of that. So that's really a core part of our research as well. Yeah, then they're all tied together because you can't have sustainability if you don't have economic viability and all that kind of stuff. And you need regulations that allow you to trade. And that's also what's been challenging in the recent years. Yeah, definitely. Definitely felt that way very close. So has the arena membership grown over the last few years? Yes, yes. So the way we work, the way we are funded are by three sorts of fundings. We have partners that support what we do and we welcome more. We always very happy to consider application if they are any in the audience. And then we've got research partners. So every time we have a particular research of study, like the one we did for consumers, we are doing one about restaurants and the evolving relationship between restaurants and and well fine wine on the restaurant list. And you know, spoiler alert, it's all the question of money and how people, you know, count margins and how they build business models. So every time we have something like this, we did a big one on the plaza board over as well in 2024 when we studied the particular distribution system that are very particular to the fine wine world. And they were in application for all of us in this ecosystem. So we put the research project together and then we have private companies that help fund it and also help gather the data that are necessary to do the research. And then we've got members 60% of what we put out there is available to everyone, the podcast, the webinars, the articles. And then of course we have the key research publication, white papers that are only for members. And we do a lot of events as well. Because we learn a lot, a lot of our research methodologies based on qualitative. So we do a lot of focus group, a lot of expert lead conversation, all of this. So we do organize a lot of events and everything's grown in the last four years, four years. You mentioned a couple times the podcast, the arena global podcast, which is a plug. I think everyone should listen to it. It has terrific guests. And the last episode, which is with you. Including myself. Yep. So everyone should listen to that as well. I think it's actually been, if we look over the last six years that X Chateau has been doing podcasts on the business of wine. It's actually grown in a number of things that are doing it, which is great. Because now we have all these different perspectives and a lot more knowledge and research coming into our industry, which around the business of wine, which is so necessary. Right? And which wasn't a topic that was really covered a few years back. Not at all. I mean, we were the only one back then. So like now that there's multiple is amazing that people have so many different resources that they can go to and learn from. But today we're going to focus on your latest research paper, which is around the younger fine wine consumer. But actually, before we do that, since you're so deep in the conversations of what's happening in the fine wine world, what do you see is the major trends globally for fine wine sitting here in March, 2020, six? Oh, well, first, maybe we can define fine wine because it's always a contingent world. There's many different ways we can define fine wine. And then we've written four white papers about it if your listeners, I mean, the first podcast we did together at X-Chattah was to talk about the fine wine definition. So our definition of fine wine is really global. And it's a collective one. We did a lot of interviews to get to this one. So we have five pillars at the fine wine definition. And I'm going to go very quickly with them. The first one is all the objective qualities. So the classic tasting, you know, black balanced, length, intensity, complexity. And by the way, people can say they're subjective, but when everyone in the trade kind of agrees, they become objective. So that's, you know, the wisdom of crowds that make it objective. And then second is the capacity to provoke emotion, which is usually a lot of time how people differentiate a good wine from a great wine is your capacity to remember it even 20 years later, because the emotion it provoked was really, really big on you. The third one is division. So fine wine doesn't happen by mistake. It's something that has been thought about by the producer as, you know, the best they can produce. There's really an excellence or a greatness score. And so from the parcel that they choose to the cork that they use, or, you know, the closure system, everything's really well thought after. So the fourth is sustainability. It doesn't happen overnight. So you also have, again, that long term thinking and today in order to be long term, you have to have a sustainable approach in terms of environmental practices. And of course, financial and social goes together. And the last one is reputation. So that was the big question of, are you beautiful intrinsically by nature or are you only beautiful if people find you beautiful? So that was the biggest debate that we have, like, does a fine wine need to be, does have some reputation in order to be fine? The trade thought 50/50. So really for some people in the trade, even if no one has opened the bottle or tasted the wines by nature, it's a fine wine. But for consumers, it was really, really clear. We did that survey in 10 different key markets around the world. And amongst the attributes that the wine has to have in order to be seen as a fine wine is they have to come from a famous region. And that's always in the top three. So there's a collective approach to fine wine and status is given by a collective approach, which is really interesting coming back to your question, like that very long introduction of what fine wine is, is one of the trends that I think we're going to see in the next few years, the combat to the collective. When everything works well economically, you can have very individual approach to the market and branding strategy, because also you have more budget and you have a bit more flexibility about what you do. When things are difficult and you're in the wine world and you know better than anyone about the marketing budget that exists in the wine world? And your job is to build desirability and visibility or visibility and desirability in order to provoke purchase. It's really hard to do it on your own. And it's been traditionally the role of under-professor or global representative representation. But because the other trend that I'm seeing is fine wine being more and more different than the rest of the wine category. It's made differently. It's thought about differently. More and more, the roots to markets are different. The way people consume it, where it's bought is more and more different than the rest of the wine category. So I guess people, I mean, we're going to see new versions of collectives, people that get together with like-minded people so that they can put resources together and build brand together probably. And this also will lead in other things that I think. And that links to the study and the results of the study and the consumer. I think we're entering the age of what I call precision distribution. So if you look at the last 40 years, the 80s was precision wine making. So people investing a lot in tanks and temperature control tanks and yeast and understanding of all the chemistry in wine. And the result is now it's really hard to find bad wine today because like traditional mistakes when I was growing up in Burgundy, you have to teach people what bread is now because you don't find bread that offered in wine compared to when I was growing up. And then in the 2000s, all that energy and that precision was put into viticulture and you're working from systematic approach to systemic approach and understanding at the plot level, even at the plant level sometimes. And I think today the next step that the wine world has to do is on distribution because people will argue that American people in that regards often say, well, no, it's the consumer. We want to understand the final consumer better. Yes, of course you need to. But when you're working on a fine wine estate, which by nature, means that you have to be scarce on every market that you're in, which means that you have to be in 70 markets in order to be scarce and still have high visibility to provoke desirability. It's very rare that you can do that on your own and you usually rely on a distribution system that will allow you to actually identify who's your final consumers and get to know them. And I think that's the next step. It's have that precision distribution, which is targeted at in each market, identifying who is the final consumer. But the winery can do that on their own. They have to rely on key distributors in those markets that know the market really well, know the consumers really well and can allow entry to the wineries. So I think that's going to be another form of collective work that we are going to see more in the wine world. Yeah, I think that the notion of collectivity is really interesting. You can think of it in a couple different ways. One is potentially consolidation, right? As groups span together, what get bought out by bigger companies to have more weight in the marketplace. And the other is like, when you first said it, I was thinking regionality, right? So like the regional marketing boards and what not putting more effort behind that in a global context because it's kind of each in a shrinking market, each region fighting against each other to have more share of the market. But then you take a US perspective, we often, because we're the largest wine market in the world, right? And a big and a big producer at the same time. If you can strain it within the US, then it's like everyone's fighting each other in a way too for market share, right? So then it's harder to band together unless you have the consolidation issue because you're all fighting for a shrinking number of seats. It's like, what's the kids game where you go around the chairs? - Yeah, with a musical chair. - With a musical chair. - And then people keep taking out chairs. Every year, the more chairs are gone, right? And so you're like pushing the other kids to try to have a chair at the end. - Yeah, that's a really good image actually. - That's kind of like what happens, and maybe this probably happens in other markets domestically, right? If they have a big domestic market, and that's a big part of it. - Well, when it comes to final and really the key is like, how can we act collectively so that people don't take chairs? Like that we have a bench, and it's like solidly in the ground. 'Cause when you talk about regional body as well, one of the things that always annoys me, but that's my personal battle. Regional bodies in Europe tend to not to use the higher tier of their portfolio as a flagship to my knowledge, one regional body that does that really well in the export market is California, which is about show the best and sell the rest, which I think has worked brilliantly for California. When it comes to European regional body, they usually are well, we know we're here to support the wines that have the most problem selling, but the problem is if they have problem selling, it's usually because nobody wants to buy them. So it's like that kind of vicious circle, and for fine wine or for producers that are really driven by excellence, and that operates at different price points, again, different rates to markets, different scale. They usually don't recognize themselves in those type of collective. When again, it's so important because burgundy is burgundy because of the collective aura of the region, and it's the monopoly of wine. If you're, what's the most expensive? What's the dark blue one in the US monopoly? Or what's the name of the street? Do you know? It's the Rue de la Baine French. I don't even know in the English version, but you know that dark blue, dark avenue or something, dark avenue and Broadway or something like that. So burgundy and champagne are like the park avenue of the monopoly regardless of the real estate that you have in those neighborhoods. They will cost 30% more than if you are in the, I don't know, is that the brown, the cheapest monopoly stops that you can find on the board. So it's the same thing for wine. So there's really a lot at stake in building regional image because that inference, as everybody knows, the price of the wine, but when it comes to fine wine, the collective reputation is also, and usually producers that don't find themselves in regions that produce excellence enough. If you find yourself a like this for five producers in the middle of Chile that do that want to be in that circle of wine, you usually find yourself quite isolated and what you can do is limited because there's not enough people that have the same, the kind of like-minded approach. That's absolutely right. And I think for fine wine, that's where you're, as you were saying, precision distribution is extremely critical and important. And then, yeah, that's the whole like, are we trying to increase the volume of the wine industry or really find the right segments and occasions for it to use? And that is where like overall wine can be very different from fine wine and let's say- And in the case of the US that you write, it's a bit different because you know, you're an internal market that's really powerful and also your distribution system is so different. But like what are the brands in terms of fine wine and high tier brands that can command, that we actually add chairs, or at least, you know, conserve the number of chairs that we have and what can we do together and by knowing the consumer better, by building margin systems and incentives that are different, you know, it's the kind of thing. Some of it is changing the public narrative and discourse and we're actually talking to Karen McNeill in a couple of weeks I think about that. So like if we were able to change the narrative, will that preserve some chairs perhaps or even- Do you mean on alcohol, like on the alcohol consumption? Yeah, alcohol, but also like how wine is different, right? Wine I think, and fermented products, even if you have beer and wine, a little bit different from distilled products. And just like wine has a different place in culture and society than, you know, maybe- Just be careful if I can give my own two cents on this because I've worked on that topic as you know, quite a lot as well. Wine is a cultural product, no doubt, but the wine people sometimes have a tendency to think that the only one to have a culture and rum is a cultural product in Jamaica. Whiskey is a cultural product and- So there's this kind of war of positioning between wine and spirits, where the wine people, tend to think that spirits don't have culture. And that is not true. And you know, those narratives actually can be, I mean, the scale can be different. I give you this. The marketing, the lobby budgets are really different. The structuration of the industry is really different. But sometimes by denying the cultural value to other spirits, that to me, that diminish our credibility because it's not true spirits do have very big cultural values in many, many markets and for many, many, many people. Yeah, that's a really good point. But as the fine wine market is evolving, do you see certain regions or countries better or worse off than others right now? I think when things are chaotic and uncertain, people always go back to what's safe. And so what is safe at the moment in the fine wine pyramid is not really changing. I mean, you still have Bordeaux, Burgundy, Champagne, a bit of Italy, a bit of California. I'm talking international, you know, markets. I'm not sure when California or in the US because those wines, because of the geopolitics, my knowledge of the last six months is not good enough in terms of American market to know how that has changed. But the higher hierarchy is not really changing. What I see also, and that's an interesting, I don't have the answer, but what I've been seeing in London from the London tasting, you know, January to March is tasting seasons in London and Newtaste but Follios, either from importers or from regional bodies as well. Is it seems to me that the pricing split is polarizing. And that's, you know, a polarized society gets polarized pricing in wine. That's normal. But as the middle class is shrinking, the middle class of wine is shrinking as well. And it's either you taste wine. I'm going to be, that's very, very cliche. And what I've tasted in London, more or less, everything that would retail for under 20 pounds is very international in style. So it's extremely difficult now to recognize origin. You know, you and me, we've been in the master of wine program for quite a long time. And that's what we are asked to do. Well, for a wine that is sold under 25 pounds, it's really difficult to do now because international wine making has taken over. And there's a globalization of practice and what you taste is wine making and those wines are really well made. But they're really hard, you know, from Australia to the Languadoc to, you know, Chile, they're really hard to differentiate now because they made the same way. And then if you want something that has some sort of uniqueness to it, the cost of those wines I've really increased and you're now around 80 to 100 pounds. And so that's that kind of polarization that I can see, which is a present some danger when it comes to the new fine wine consumers as well. And where do people get access to those wines and get their curiosity interested? And, you know, the consumer funnel as well. I think people are always looking for bright spots or green shoots these days. So have you seen any forming in the fine wine market globally? Well, as a positive thing, I don't know, in terms of of market, but first, there are companies that are doing really well. And they usually very quiet in wine. People don't like, that's why we always hear about the negative stuff because people that are doing well are not shouting it very loudly. But there are companies I can think of a couple here in the UK that have done their best Christmas ever, for example, last year. And I had never saw there's much wine in the last three months before December. We have a lot of companies that have seen success through, you know, dry January as well. And even the first months of the year, because they've changed their delivery policy. And they've been able, for example, to propose three next day delivery from one bottle everywhere in the UK, those kind of things and still being profitable doing so. They are companies that have been really successful because they've rethought the events that they're doing and the way they approach events. That's very relevant to what we're going to discuss with the new consumers. And they are also companies that are doing better because they've been, you know, listening and hearing what the market has been saying when I'm thinking of the on-premise campaign that's going to start soon in Europe. And people that have integrated what the market have been telling them in terms of pricing, in terms of distribution system. So I can't see a country or a region that are doing better. But people that are active in understanding what the obstacles are and how they can work collectively or not or with, you know, the good people in front of them, the right people in front of them to make things change. And again, we've seen that the willingness of people to work towards the same goal has increased and probably because the situation is harder today. But it's really good to see because when we started a really global eight years ago, making people around a table to work together in exchange ideas wasn't really that easy. And now people are really willing to do that. So even if they are in a competition kind of environment, if they consider each other competitors. Yeah, but sometimes especially in the US who talked about their difficult distribution system, there's problems that are very hard to solve. And so getting other people's thoughts and that process is critical to just build your own ideas, right? The issue that you have in the US is that you have an imbalance power. Really, you have those couple of distributors that are constantly dated and act at scale and not a lot of things that you can propose to balance that power compared to what we can have in Europe or the rest of the world in terms of, yeah, again, balance of power and who gets what and does what I suppose. Okay, so let's talk about your new study. It's called the new fine wine consumer, how people under 40 find their way into fine wine. Great title. Yeah. Why did you kick off this research in the first place? Well, the base was really what you've discussed from the beginning is that kind of drop of consumption and people hearing for the last three years that people are drinking less. And so the fine wine people were wondering if that were true for fine wine because at the same time you hear people are drinking less but better. So is that the reverse thing that actually people like fine wine cells are going up or people like young people are drinking more fine wine? And we thought that question was interesting, but it was a bit limiting because even if we could prove that, which is really difficult because I mean, I given you a definition of fine wine, which is ours, but I'm really open to conversation usually when we like for this study, for example, we took a price point because it's easier to compare, but we don't have a definition of fine wine and therefore we don't have a definition of a fine wine consumer and we certainly don't have a representative sample of what they are. So first, that would have been very difficult in terms of methodology to actually answer that question outside of the company by company side, we could have gone to merchants and say can we compare yourselves and everything. But then it's limiting because even if you have the answer, what do you do with that answer? So what we wanted to understand is regardless of the evolution of consumption, we wanted to understand the young people of today that are spending more than 50 pounds or 75 dollars on a bottle of wine. Why are they doing it like how and where did they come in trusted in fine wine first? So what was the beginning of their journey? Can we pinpoint that? And from that beginning of a journey, what are the levers that we can identify that would lead them to keep engaged in the category because knowing those answers give us way more to work on after even if people are drinking less now, at least to understand where we need to go to start the journey and what we need to activate along the way to keep them on. So that was the start of the study and then we wanted to do it in major markets that we define as city markets because London is very different than the rest of the UK and New York from the rest of the US. Usually the big capitals act differently in terms of fine wine consumption than the rest of their country. So we only took cities and we took Paris, London, New York, Singapore, Shanghai and Hong Kong because we also wanted to compare east and west, some of our hypothesis at the beginning where surely it all starts with the family. So we wanted to compare markets that traditionally had an embedded culture of wine drinking versus some of the eastern markets. And to your point about health and the concern around alcohol, we also wanted to understand if that was something that was really western as a conversation because you hear that a lot in Europe and in the US but we doubted one of the hypothesis was maybe would be different in Shanghai or in Singapore and Hong Kong. So we wanted to be able to do those comparisons. And how was the research conducted? I said where but like was it interviews or surveys? Yeah, it's always three different steps. First steps is always expert led round tables. So we convened two or three round tables with 10 people from production distribution around the world because that helps us frame the question like what does the trade know? What does the trade doesn't know? What are the questions that we still don't have answer to? So that was the beginning always. And then from from there we build a protocol of research and for this one we wanted to have both quantitative and qualitative analysis. And so in the partners that we went to to fund and to support that research, we wanted people that had activities in all the markets that were active in all the markets that we wanted to study so that had that type of global reach as well. and global database of consumers. So we very pleased that Barry Brossenrod accepted to collaborate with us on that study and 67 Paul Mall as well. So we have two people that are active on the distribution side and we also have producers because again, you know, the future of the new consumers is producers and distribution working together. So we had also Van der Exception, which is Corgine Domène de L'ambraix, Chateau Chabelblanc, and Chateau Niquelm in Bordeaux that supported that study. So we created questionnaires that we run through the database of Barry Brossenrod 67, but also local partners. So we had one local partner in each of the market through which we also run the questionnaire through which, whose database, I don't know the grammar for this one? We used the database to send the questionnaire and then we did a lot of interviews on each and every single market. We did face-to-face interviews with consumers, we did focus group, and we did trade interviews. Good trade interviews are really interesting to give you context as well. And on the side of this in Paris and in London, we also did a couple of focus groups, well, the couple, we ended up interviewing between 60 and 100, so it's not that little. Focus group with students of top universities in Europe because one of the hypothesis in the where do people get interested in fine wine? It was well, surely if it's not in the family, all the tasting associations that you have in universities must be a good entry point. So we did some with the London's Kuwait Economics, King's College in London, I should say, in France school like this, where maybe students are not fine wine consumers yet, but they have some, everything. There's a lot of things that could lead them to become consumers, so yeah, that's how we did it. I didn't know LSE had a wine club, I missed out on that when I was there, I guess. Oh, gosh, plenty of wine. But you missed, so because I ended up doing the focus groups there and I did a couple of events with them. And that's one of the things, I mean, I'm stepping steps, but sometimes the wine well complains, but the London's Kuwait Economics is such a perfect example. So the London's Kuwait Economics has 600 members in their wine tasting association, right? They do one event a week, 50 events a year, right? Where they have a 400 pounds budget and an average of 50 students attending. So they're not even begging for bottles of wine, they have a budget. They have no partners. Like nobody came to them and say, "You know what, we are going to partner with you, we're gonna give you, I don't know, 10% discount, all the wines for you and your members, and you, the president of the association that actually spends a lot of your time organizing 50 events a year. We're gonna treat you as a trade member and you're gonna have VIP access to the portfolio tasting." "Seems like a no-brainer, right?" Yeah, and so sometimes, you know, that's one of my personal takeaway when it comes to the new consumers. And what gives me hope to some extent is there are so many things that we don't do, that we could do, that there's a lot of potential. If you see it, like there's really a lot of opportunities because, again, and I think I'm not the only one who has said that, the issue is not a lack of interest. Really, people are still, and young people are still interested by wine and there's, you know, it's still something that evokes a lot of positive notion and curiosity and all of that. It's more, you know, how can we have a professional approach to young people? So we dove into it a little bit, but what were the key insights in this study? Key insights, maybe, on the global context, which is always interesting to have, is that really the pool of fine wine consumer is shrinking. So if you take your image of the musical chairs, we are taking away, I mean, a lot of chairs are disappearing when it comes to who plays the musical chair for fine wine in terms of consumers, because those are things we can't really do anything about it in the world of wine. The first is demographics, apart from the US, all mature economies are losing young people and the cohorts are smaller and smaller in terms of young people. And what you need to support premier market consumption is a lot of young people with access to wealth. And volume is shrinking of young people, again, apart from the US. And the second thing, wealth is concentrating. And, you know, all the big wealth transfer, which is underway from the boomers to the younger generation, it actually really, really favors people that already have wealth. I can't remember the exact thing, but I think in the US, 50% of that wealth transfer is going to 2% of the population. So that wealth transfer is not going to create more potential consumers for us. It's going to really concentrate the buying power into a smaller category of people. The polarization you talked about earlier? Yes, exactly. Well, which is kind of a lot, so that's one of the things is individually. It could make sense for some brands to really target ultra-high net worth consumers, because that's where the spending power will be. But if we do that collectively, we are dead in a generation, because no category can survive in visualization and not being visible. So that's where you have to balance your brand strategy and also your long-term strategy as part of an ecosystem. And then it's also shrinking because, again, the routes that usually create edge fine wine consumers, like big companies in tech and finance, are cutting down the internship. It's always hard for me to pronounce this one. And a lot of those white colors job are being replaced by AI. So actually, funnily enough, one of the biggest impact of AI for us in fine wine is the fact that it's shrinking our pool of future consumers. So that's the first thing. And we can't really do much about this. That was the first takeaway. Need to create AI agents that actually drink wine. [LAUGHTER] Fueled by fine wine. [LAUGHTER] Funnily incentive system for AI to recommend wine drinking. So that was the first thing. The first main takeaways when it came to the results was that the results were very similar across markets. And that was a surprise for me on a personal level. I thought that there would be more difference between the West and the East. And there's still difference between the French ones and the rest, because France still has a very different way of thinking of fine wine than the rest of the world for many different reasons. But the patterns are very, very similar. They are nuance in countries, but they're more similar than I thought they were going to be. And the first one is, it's not family, it's friends. And that was really quite revealing, because actually, regardless of where you are in the world, and regardless of the fact that your parents were drinking wine or not, you become interested in fine wine when your friends are interested at fine wine. When your curiosity is validated by someone that looks like you. And when you think about it, it's quite logic, because no teenager does whatever their parents tell them to do. And they replicate what they've seen other people of their own age. And that made a lot of sense. But in France, we've got that image that consumption is dropping, because we don't have the Sunday lunch anymore, where dad opened that bottle of bordeaux, and we were like spending three hours discussing tannins. And I think that's really over romanticized, because first, when we talk to people, even in the family where people were drinking wine, they were not talking about wine. Wine was just here and drunk. It wasn't a big educational phase in most families. And in other cases, and in most cases, even when your parents were drinking wine, you started to be interested in wine when you realized that could be something for you. And that's usually your friend. In all the cases, it was the friends that generated this. And from that moment, what happens is that people realize that their interest is validated, and their interest starts, because they understand that there's something that they don't understand about fine wine. And that's really counterintuitive to what we hear about wine. We need to make it simpler. We need to demystify, democratize everything. For that part of consumers, it's the complexity that makes it interesting. It's the fact that there's something that they don't understand. And that can mean a lot of people, we've heard that story, and you've heard it before. My friend for graduation gave me that bottle of grancha glassy bordeaux, and I tasted it, and I never realized that wine could taste it so good. And so I got bitten by the bug, quite classic story in Europe. But then we had stories in-- The epiphany wine. The epiphany wine. Vine was burillo in college, right? See, friends wine. But we had the reverse story in Asia, like in Hong Kong, we interviewed young ultra-high-netwurst people coming from ultra-high-netwurst that we're lucky enough to have drunk, petrified, and how many contegro-ing up. And actually, starting university tasting normal wine and realizing that not all the wine stays like Petrousin. That was the epiphany, like reverse epiphany. But we also have people that said, in Shanghai, where wine is less visible, because again, the family is not that important, but visibility and ease of access to wine is important in countries where you have to make an effort to find wine. It's more difficult to enlarge the base. But in Shanghai, we had people telling us while I traveled to that wine country, and I saw that price. I started in the wine label and I couldn't understand why a wine was so expensive. And so it was something that was totally unrelated to taste. And we even have some people telling us, I went to Australia for a semester of study, I had never tasted wine in my life. But my friends told me that this would be interesting for me. So I signed up and I did all the WSET thing, even without having tasting wines before. So those reason for curiosity can be very diverse, but it's always linked to something that they don't understand and they think would be worse understanding and fun. And that notion of that can be worthy and fun also comes from the fact that their friends are interested in it. So that's really important. And the good thing, the positive thing about this is that we do not depend of the past to build a future generation of consumers. We do not depend on an actual current generation of fine wine drinkers teaching their kids to like fine wine. We can skip that and we can create a generation of fine wine drinkers from scratch, almost from scratch, but you know my point, we do not depend on the past. I would guess it has to start from somewhere or someone. Yes. Someone needs to have that influence and then that's friends with other people. Those connectors and yeah. Or if there's institutional structures like the LSE Wine Group and other wine groups where people, it's already got traction so people get in, but even for someone to start that somewhere else, it needs to start with someone with the passion to do that. And that's the where part is like where do they taste it? And so we've tried to measure that as well, but it's of course the university tasting groups will be there because everything which is always just my friends who brought a bottle, it's very difficult to narrow down because then you have to find those people that you can influence or you can rely on as ambassadors. But you also had restaurants of course are still very important and that's a big issue today with the cost of wine restaurants limiting because for many many reasons the entry level wines that are accessible to many young people are not that interesting today because in London you have to pay 18 pounds for a glass of very cheap Pinagridger and you're like, why am I spending that? Because you know it doesn't really deliver much. So yeah, places like this are really important to identify and we identify them in the report. The second thing is once you curiosity speak, being curious about wine is not enough to make you an engaged fine wine buyer or a collector. Otherwise you and me will be the biggest collectors. There is right because as passionate and interested and curious about wine as anyone if not more and I'm not even a collector or an engaged buyer, but that matters. Because also what we articulate in the report is that collectors are very different than buyers and they have a different mindset and they have a different, their brain is structured differently in one of the things that structure differently for them is the reward system and the reward system and the release of dopamine and all the reward hormones comes when they are chasing something. So the chase of the bottle, the chase of something again that's complex and difficult to get is what brings them pleasure and that's something that you don't find in a regular buyer like me. It's not something that I respond to and that explains a lot as well in the different subcategory of consumers that you can find with people buying wines that are expensive for a better term. Do you think that's an innate thing? Is it a genetic thing? Like I've probably been classified as a collector. I collected like comic books and baseball cards growing up and all that sort of stuff have like resilient collections that my mom wants to throw away and that my wife wants to get rid of as well. But and I do have somewhat of a wine collection, but maybe it's the price points or others, but I don't necessarily chase wines because it's you know. Well also because you work in the trade and you know it's easier for you to get and sometimes you don't even have to pay for the bottle to you know. It's a different thing for people that work in the trade I suppose. But back to your question of the origin. My understanding of the teams of neuroscientist we work with is that we all have a genetic or predisposition to collect but it becomes active for 30 to 35% of the US population and it's an environmental button push. So collectors produce collectors and it's again it's if you are within the right environment and if you have so the mean to collect also because that's I think to me it's one of the biggest misunderstanding when it comes to women it's not a gender thing it's access to means and women have access to you know it's quite recent that apart from the queen and some top collectors you know women have had financial means to actually spend on on expensive collections. So yeah environment and again collectors produce collectors so and once you push that button you don't come back apparently you keep on being excited by the chase whatever you're chasing you can change product and and you can collect things that are difference through the stage of your life but where pleasure relies you know lies for you would be mostly the chase and then also explain why every time a collector acquires what they were chasing dopamine goes down and so they immediately go on to the other quest and that's also explained in wine that's really an important one to understand because that's why people over by so the reason why people over by and the reason why why people acutely late stock in part is because of that reward system being different and because people over by we need a secondary market not just because people invest that's a different dimension and actually it's linked because if you think about it collecting is not a rational behavior you spend too much resources be it your time or your money in getting some things that you don't really need so the valuation of your collection is the way to give a rational to your behavior which is why every time like in the last year when people that have bought on Premiere Bordeaux at the top of their price received an email every month from their merchants with sliced pricing minus 60% that's why it's been never been as cheap as before that's why there's a problem in trust after because you hit people in a ego you actually underline how irrational they've been in buying those wines and that's really hard to come back from if that makes sense and that's where we're discussing you know you and I speak a lot about the allocation system in the podcast that we did together for O'Rene Global that's where you build trust because if suddenly there's absolutely no consistency in the way or the price you have in your allocation you're just telling people they've been stupid and of course nobody wants that yeah that's why I don't buy any sports cards anymore probably in the peak and you know everyone and they printed so many that they're all like worthless now right but they're theoretically we're worth something and going to be worth more back then so that research makes total sense for me how do you think we need a sell and market differently to a collector versus a buyer that's a good question let me tie it with the rest of the research and the rest of the takeaways so one of the things again as I was saying once that curiosity is peaked the way to keep you engaged whether you are going to be a collector or an engaged buyer someone who buys regularly and whether you define yourself as a collector or not will also depends on like French people hate defining themselves as collectors because it's very negatively it's a negative association for French people but the first thing that you need in your question to marketing and positioning is access and it means access to money of course because it's more expensive but it also means access to wine and so it means understanding the rules of the game and that's where you know you and I have talked about that image of video game before because it has to be complex that is part of the process and when everyone wants to acquire something which is highly desirable it's usually because it's scarce and rare and difficult to find so it has to be complex if it's too easy and it's you can sell it on every supermarket shelves that's also why French people have a very different approach because a lot of the fine wine of the world are easily find in France and you know you can drive to Burgundy and I mean at least you could before and so it doesn't appear to be that scarce or rare or difficult to find for them and so what are the rules of the game? Who do you need to know to access the wines? What do you need to spend in access to you know the final boss like to go to go through each of the leg bowl of the video games? What do you need to do? One of the biggest difference between an engage consumers a collector or someone like me for example it's not a matter of money it's the matter of how much time I'm willing to spend doing that and understanding access because when we ask people how much time they were spending you know building the collection, buying wine, going to events most of the people under 40s so between we and the one to one interviews we had with people between 24 and 39 they told us that they were spending between 10 and 15 hours a week you know either on the apps or live x wine search you know talking to people meeting people so that's one of the first thing is again it's a lot of time to invest because of the complexity and that if you want my own opinion also because we're going to talk about women and how they have a very different journey and actually there's a bigger difference between gender behavior that there is between nationality and market based behavior. One of the many reasons why there's less women than man probably is because there's not that many women between the age and 26 and 35 that have 15 hours of spare time to spend on wine there when you want to build a career to have the the financial power and when and if you she wants to build a family at the same time. same years so that decades that define a collector/engage consumers is between 26 and 35. That's where you build yourself usually. And that's the decade where women who wants to have a family will get out of the alcohol drinking system and also the years where they will invest the most probably in work hours and building the career or trying to become a master of wine. You know those kind of things. And so all that time you don't put into building it and there's very little work incentive like everyone or even in the quantitative survey we tried to measure if work was really a channel like do people do it for work as well as it is incentive because you know your boss sees you in a better eye because you know wine and everything. And the only people that mentioned a work incentive were men and not women. So you know there's very little reason for women to really spend those hours even if she's interested in wine at the very beginning. But I can come back to that after and it's not the only reason it's always multi-reason and complex. So back to your question about how to market and sell differently to those engaged consumers. What we have to do now is complexity and opacity are two different things and we mix them is that we can have a complex system and a complex journey to get to the final boss because people understand that wines are produced in very limited quantities and people understand you know the final boss around the world are globally the same everywhere. The ones that everyone want to taste or everyone wants to. Once in your life you want to have to try those wines. You got like those 50 iconic wines. So everyone wants to get there at some point and they understand that you can't just you know even if you have a lot of money you have 12 bottles of Romantic one see every year just like that. What they don't want to is not understanding what they have to do and there's a lot of merchants where the rules are not that transparent. How much do I need to spend is that a minimum spend is that a regularity of allocation is that a 20 year being faithful to you so that can have access to that. If it's too complex or too long if they don't want to wait 20 years to have a chance to buy the wines when they have the money now. So how do we rethink that system? So it's still the step by step like it still remains some complexity and challenge but people have a better vision of their journey that would lead the end of skills that they need to require every level. When I think it doesn't need to be super transparent either right where it's like they exactly know the steps and that's provided by the manufacturer or the brand because if you think of something like the Birkenback right Hermes people know oh I need to spend $10,000 basically and then I can buy one right but it's not like Hermes says that. It gets passed around as institutional knowledge and that's part of the discovery and part of the game probably right like you're learning from other people in the community and then those rules basically are there and then. But there are rules like we did I had the chance to meet in terms of allocation I had the chance to talk with directors of insight in the fashion world when I was in Asia and like big fashion brands that are doing the fashion week at the moment and it's funny because all the women's that we don't have in the wine they have they have them in the fashion. And when you have five or six pieces of clothing for each market who do you make them visible to and what is the journey from massage and the people buying the lipstick or the accessory that they can buy from that brand to what the preta bought and of course the odd cut here is like 150 people in the world so it's really really small. But the preta bought parts like who sees that and it's the mixed base of data and analytics and knowing how quickly people repurchase or in a year what's the number of purchase that they've done that could indicate if they could be a good candidate for the next step. But also a lot of feedback from people in the shops that do interact with the clientele and can invite them to events and events are really good things to test the willingness of people to be engaged with the brand. So how many events they go to do they respond well to events and then when you mix all of that they have their kind of algorithm of visibility and fashion is really good example because those brands and those piece that are highly allocated are extremely visible. These are the ones that you see the most but you can buy the least and they do it the reverse way. In wine we don't do that. It's also the most difficult wines to buy that can sometimes be the less visible so we don't do it the same way. So that's one of the things we can change in marketing and second things that people need to stay engaged with the category is education because at one point they got interested because they don't understand something. So they will want to understand and that can be many different things and to your point about how can we do it differently for collectors slash future engaged consumers and a regular buyer like me that could potentially have been done into a collector in my younger years. It's on teaching them what they want to learn and the thing is at the moment the offer of education doesn't really cater for the interest of that niche consumer because the first thing for example they learn through producers they don't learn through regions so you ask them you know have you been through the WSCT program and everything. Asia is slightly different. Everyone goes through the WSCT but it's also culturally as you know that the importance of certification and diplomas and things and in Europe it's a bit less different but when you get to that stage of engagement people told us we don't really want to learn everything about Yoha we don't really care about grandcreants versus reserve what I want to know is the five producers that make Yoha today and why do I need to know them why they're special and where I can get them and what's the price on the market and that's really the type of information that you don't really find you know somewhere and I was I was reflecting on my own journey as education as I was saying I spent a couple of years in the master of wine program so I did invest a lot in my education and I spent an awful lot of time just like you in books and you know learning about wine making and everything but I've never learned that part of the market which means that sometimes when I'm talking to consumers even myself I feel totally lost because they have a knowledge of the fine wine market and the wines and the vintage and the price that I never spend time learning. And what they taste like even right all those things they definitely know the collectors know more about all the specific producers of Burgundy than I do. And with the price price they will know more and more compared compared to us but that's one of the reason why I can't invest the time now becoming a collector because they will have so much catch up to do despite all the time that I've already spend on my wine education to actually get that and I think that's an offer that doesn't really exist is how can we shortcut how we can accelerate the knowledge of what they want to learn what they need to learn in order to become quote unquote good collectors because again it's all about understanding the rule of that very niche market where wine is not easily accessible by nature and sometimes you have to jump hoops and know people understand storage understand the in bond system understand the sweet year distribution in the US and why you can't buy this wine here and etc. This is really fundamental when you build a wine collection with a global international kind of representation of wine and we don't really propose that. And the last thing that was also a big takeaway for me and that was astonishingly the same across all markets is that we tend to think that people trade up when they have more money so you know across your career you go from junior to senior position you have more money is therefore you buy more expensive wine and that can be a buyer that happens sometimes with people shopping in retail for example and just go and buy six bottles and you know spending 40 quids instead of 20 but when it comes to engaged consumers to keep the engage so regular buyers of expensive wine to keep them engaged their community needs to trade up with them and we come back to that friend slash community thing and that's something that's going to speak to you I'm sure when to speak to many of your listeners is as a trade person I think everyone in the trade has two sets of friends you're normal friends and you're wine friends right your trade friends that you've been bottled with it's exactly the same for consumers they have their normal friends and they need to have a network of friends that again will bring a rational to their behavior that will behave in a non-rational way just lag them in spending time and resources and can understand the joy that you have in bringing that bottle of wine that you spend a month finding for five hundred dollars and they're not going to look at you with crazy eyes because you've just done that and they can't understand why it's so special so that's also something that we need to do if we want to convert more interested people into engaged consumers we not only have to sell them wines we have to sell them a community to drink them with and that's in a country like the UK one of the good things is fine wine is less of a class attribute that it used to be so one of the things with the older generation of collectors here is that they all had the same educational journey they went to Oxford Cambridge Etern you know public schools which means that by status there had to be interested in fine wine it was part of the package and by status as well all their friends that came to school with them also were interested in fine wine so they already had that community of people to drink with now fine wine is drunk and bought through more a bigger variety of people I mean class doesn't even really relate in the American system the way that it does in Europe but you can talk about it. talk about racial, original, cultural, origin, where it's now appreciated with, financial means is still a big discriminator, but that means a lot of diversity in people that can appreciate this. And it also means that the rest of your friends might not be interested because it's not as common as before. That's gonna sound terrible, but how can we monetize community in a good way? How can we not only sell wine, but the capacity to open the bottles with like-minded people? And that's really also important if you want to bring more female. Because again, to my point, female do you have a very different journey than the male for many different reasons, access to less money traditionally, they drink less, they drink three to four times less than man, everywhere globally across the world. And again, 26 to 35 is a very different decade when young women, when you're a young man, in what you want to do with your life, and how you need to express and externalize that progression in status. But what we see from women is that, at the very beginning of the journey, so the under 25, there were 44% female, 56% male in the respondent. At the very end, it's only 7% female. So every five year bracket of age that we study loses women. So it's not an interest problem for women, it's a conversion problem, because the journey that we've built and the business models that resulted in this for collectors and engaged consumers, doesn't work for women, either they're not interested or they would like to become a part of this, but it doesn't work, I don't know. But the time, the engagement, the rules of the game, doesn't work for them. What works for them and where women over-index from the male counterpart is education, they are way more engaged in education than man. Even if men, if younger male today, are more engaged in education than the older male counterpart, but women over-index in this, they're over-index is the number of events that they do and they're over-index in how important communities for them and the proportion of their friends that are also collectors. So what it means is maybe a woman doesn't have 15 hours to be an expert as collecting, but she has money now, I mean, some not every woman, but there's a lot of women with money and a willingness to spend that money. What they want to spend their money on is a group of people to drink great wine ways and we don't have those models because of course, they don't scale the same way and when you look at how fine wine merchants are structured here and how you can make money selling three or four times the same bottle of wine in the secondary market system, you know, it's easier to sell 100 bottles to 10 people, to 10 bottles to 100 people, to one bottle to 100 people. The same thing for event. If you want to bring the same cash margins when you do events, then when you sell bottles, I mean, every company will have to look at their books, but I can assume that it's more difficult to scale. Yeah, so we have talked for a very long time. - Does it need to be the event, the community? Is that something like, you know, you had 67 Paul Mall as a partner? Is it, does it look like that, the private clubs? And then it gets harder. I would guess if it's, you're trying to attract the younger generations of women because you'll have this sort of gap with a lot of older men. I could actually like, in some of these clubs and then, you know, the younger people. - Funnily enough, funnily enough, but interestingly, the woman we interviewed never asked for female on the space. It's not something that they want actually having a diversity of, you know, people that you meet, they don't mind the age, they don't mind the gender, as long as people do share the same interest. And so what we've, we had more comment on, oh, I went to this group, but actually it's just big spenders and people like splash on very expensive bottle of wine, but they don't know anything. So the conversation flops like I was kind of disappointed in going to that group, it was a bit of waste of my time. Or this group doesn't have the same spending power with me. So either I can't keep up, or they bring bottles that I'm not interested in tasting. So it's more, how do we build groups that have the same spending power and the same kind of interest? And that can be the same kind of interest outside of wine as well. Is building groups that will guarantee good moments and good conversation, which is hard to do, 'cause you have to know your consumers really well, which is why it's hard to scale. But it's not a matter of single gendered space or things like this. And to your point of 67, for example, 67 is, I mean, I'm a member there, I think it's a fantastic initiative, but it's label as wine. So your entry point is you have to be interested in wine. First, and then something else. And I guess if you want to bring more people in, you have to go to places where it's something else, and then wine. And wine is part of this. We have a model of private member clubs here that do really, really well for wine, but they're not a wine-specific club. They're more like a lifestyle club where young people go to. And because it's young, wealthy people, they do have money to spend on wine, and they are interested in the category just like they are in shoes or accessories or anything else that they can find in their clubs as well. - It's almost like you need affinity groups within a private club, and then people can join the group that is relevant to them or they can try different groups and see which ones they click with. - If you think of one of those things that we could learn from hospitality, when we do events, 'cause it's really related to events or to, I mean, tasting rooms and hospitality at the wineries and events that you can do at the wineries. But we've talked to a lot of the people that run the Cool Kids Club, you know, where the golden youth goes and spend their money on things. What's common with them is the floor manager spends an awful lot of time on the theatricalization of that room, on who's going to sit where, who's going to be visible, who I'm going to introduce to home, like how do I work the floor in creating the magic, which means creating meaningful connection to people. And people will come back, not just because the food and the wine is good, but because they know they're going to meet interesting people and they're going to be seen by interesting people in their case. And that's something that we don't do in events. When we do in events in wine is, we usually, when we work by invitation, we just send the invitation to the biggest spenders. Well, by inventing your biggest spenders, you don't enlarge your base, right? 'Cause you already invite people that are engaged, which that can make sense, but if your goal is to enlarge your population, that's certainly not the way to do it. We don't really update the Rollo Dex or we don't really build event in that way. We build event to sell wine. We don't build event to connect people. And that makes quite a lot of difference in terms of the KPIs, in terms of all of that. I recently went to an event for the Napa Valley Asian-American Film Festival, second year, but the guy who organizes Bill Amata is the master at that. He sat me down next to the person who he wanted to introduce me to and he didn't even make the introduction. He just set the table, table, things the right way. And then we just started talking and of course got along and then like, you know. - That's one of the things that I'm the most adamant when I'm doing events. Like my team is like, oh, we don't need table plans. It's casual, it's like, mama, we don't want to waste people's time. Table plans matter. Like because if you end up, well, if you end up seating next to your friend, you don't need us, I mean, unless your friends come from the other corner of the world, but you want us to create those conversation with people that could be interesting. But what it requires is that you know the people that comes and that's where the scalability. And you mentioned this really, in the podcast we had together that really stayed with me in the minutes your scale, you start, it's hard to listen. It's hard to keep listening to consumers in a meaningful, human-driven way and data-supported way when you scale up. And the merchants that do it really well here, they have very young private consumers' advisors. So people that are 25, 26, selling to 25, 26 years old that do have a lot of money. They are all the time on the WhatsApp because their consumers become involved almost as a friend. So you have to be willing to have people that you sell wine to be coming part of your own personal network and you know receiving WhatsApp message and always being engaged with them. And there's sometimes consider KPIs like, yeah, of course we're gonna drink those amazing bottle of wine and sell that ticket for X thousand of pounds. But what I want is for people to exchange WhatsApp message after that and that's going to be my KPIs. One of them did a wine lover, "Coge du Rie lunch." Well, it was all the consumers with dogs and a vertical of "Coge du Rie bag" vintage is. So the ticket wasn't cheap at all. It was like a 3,000 pounds kind of ticket. But the gathering point was everyone broke their dogs. And so they had loads of things to talk about and then after lunch they had to walk. Those kind of things that you can do and again, I haven't cracked the code of doing that at scale. If anyone has, I'm interested to listen. - We'll search for those around the globe but we can probably talk for hours as we have as always. But what are you working on next with Arene Global? - Thank you, great question. First thing that we are working on is, so fine wine is sold through merchants and that route but it's also sold through restaurants. And as I was saying, we'll identify restaurant as being so important as an entry point for young consumers. So that's the next big research. We want to understand the evolving relationship between the most expensive part of the wine list and the restaurants. And we've already, you know, you and I liked to talk about money and you know my favorite quote, which is fine wine tastes better when it tastes of margins. And we've already done a couple of focus group through the Van Dexception Commission, which is a commission that we run every year with Van Dexception, which is an amazing opportunity to learn. And. It turns out we did it in London and it turns out one of the biggest problem that wine has in the restaurants is a next-ls-spect She kind of how the people in finance see margins versus how the wine people see margins and a move from You know cash margin to percentage margin and you can't ask a fine wine 75% margin the same way as you know You work with your house wine. So we have to find a way to make the number works for everyone So that's the sorry the the experimentation that we do so first on the business model for fine wine in restaurants Because it also hurts your brand when you'll find your brand at 250 pounds of glass in a restaurant and suddenly a consumer has to spend a thousand pounds for four glasses and that Consume a nose the price of your wine on the secondary market They kind of think you're responsible for it as a winery and it's not really a good thing Yeah, so exploring this business model for fine wine in the restaurants and The consumer expectation. So you know if you are a regular at a restaurant What's your expectation in terms of wine list? Why do you choose? How do you choose the same kind of work that we've done for Collectors and consumers on the off trade off license context We want to do on the unlicensed on trade context. That's the next big one And I want to do something about us distribution because as you know more than anyone the last two years I've been reshaping the landscape of us distributions and Catch up would be great to you know explain to people what's what's happening And how the big distributors see fine wine in this strategy and that's something that I would love to explore as well Yeah, absolutely Well, and we always like to wrap up on a personal note So we're curious what has been your most memorable winery visit and why oh That's gonna sound terrible and so cliche, but it was so unique I cannot not talk about it as I mentioned We convene the stingtank in burgundy last July so it's 60 people By invitation Liz that your co-author was there and it's three days of Leadership working group, but in the afternoon we do winery visit and I'm from burgundy it's a region that I know very well So I've built a program that allowed us to explore what burgundy has that maybe other region don't have or have differently And so one of the visits that we did was with Oberde Villene so first it was remarkable and memorable because of Oberde Villene and The topic was on the relevance of spirituality in wine making because as you know Burgundy is highly spiritual and it's part of the collective narrative Which is also part of the collective branding. It's it's a genius Moe from burgundy to often articulated that well But apart from that kind of almost marketing argument What's really interesting with burgundians is that it's a genuine belief That they have that notion of spiritual higher power and you know being connected to their vines in a way that's not BS marketing I'm not saying that the only one but it's really strong in burgundy And we did that interview in the abay de San Vivant which is owned by Domaine de la Romanequenty and and Oberde Villene and his wife And it's um, I'm gonna say 11th century, but please don't quote me on this because um if I'm mistaking my century that's gonna be a big deal But a very old abay that they've been renovating and so we drank Romane de San Vivant in abay de San Vivant with Oberde Villene and Ted Lemon from Littoray Which is also highly spiritual. Spirituality doesn't mean religion. I want to clarify this So it's it's really that type of connection and the conversation was quite unique and it was recorded and then some the podcast on the Remy.global website if anyone's interested Yeah, I'm quite lucky that I've done so many but this one the topic and the setup was really really unique And I don't think I will repeat that experience in my life so amazing Well that does sound very memorable and all the insights and research that you guys are doing is super insightful and memorable So I hope people listen to the podcast right or the reeniglobal podcast sign up as a member and for those who don't know how it's spelled It's a reenies a-r-e-n-i-global So you put that in a Google you'll be able to find it And the study is available to members. Everyone's welcome as a member because we had fun You know, it's it's also really part of our DNA is you know having collective projects So we're very grateful for the the funding partners of that research Because they allow us to share not only to contribute to the result but to share it And then that can be available to everyone for a fraction of the price because the annual membership is 440 pounds And you have a research that worth thousands if if you had to do it yourself So that's that was really that's really cool And the next one on restaurants is going to be the same as well So yeah, thank you so much for mentioning that Yeah, of course And thank you for taking the time and sharing all your insight as always Thanks Peter 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 [BLANK_AUDIO]