If one of the most oft-repeated words at the 2016 Wine Vision conference was ‘innovation’, it was appropriate that the final session of the event was entitled ‘Trailblazers’ and devoted to spotlighting people who are trying, in very different ways, to introduce change to the industry. Loosely modelled on the television programmes Dragons’ Den and Shark Tank, the format involved participants pitching their ideas to a team of experts. Unlike their TV counterparts, however, the Wine Vision judges were not potential investors, but they had a lot of advice to offer, and in one case, the provision of some otherwise costly professional services. My role, on behalf of Meininger’s Wine Business International, which sponsored the session, was to assemble the panel and moderate the session.
I was delighted to have three highly qualified people on stage – Jaime Araujo, whose wide experience includes working with her parents’ ultra-premium Napa estate, at LVMH in Paris, and running her own bi-national consultancy in France and Hong Kong; British-born and now Sonoma-based Kevin Shaw, who happily admits to being the most expensive drinks packaging designer in the world (and whose studio regularly wins an embarrassingly large number of awards); and finally, there was Dr Damien Wilson, an Australian academic who is the inaugural Hamel Family Chair of Wine Business Education with Sonoma State University’s Wine Business Institute.
Unfortunately, one of the three finalists selected from a large number of would-be Trailblazers was unable to make the trip to the US. However, the two remaining contenders offered a pair of projects that impressed the judges and the audience, who also had the chance to question them.
The skinny on innovation
As a former BBC reporter, Amanda Thomson was clearly experienced with a microphone. Disarmingly, she freely admitted that her company Thomson & Scott’s new brand, Skinny, was not technically innovative in offering Prosecco and Champagne with less sugar – and thus fewer calories. Zero dosage Champagne has been available for decades, but as Thompson said, apart from wine enthusiasts, few consumers know about it. Despite the growing array of zero- and low-sugar foods and drinks on the market, she believed she had found “a gap in the wine market”. Without any help from vinous opinion formers, but with some clever marketing, her brand had become the bestselling wine on the website of the high-profile London store Selfridges.
The panel were very impressed by the concept, and by Thomson’s explanation that she was targeting a set of well-heeled, mainly female consumers who care about their health and figure. Responding to a question from Araujo about how she could handle competition from other low-sugar wines, she replied that the strength of her brand lay in its name. The word ‘skinny’, she said, was part of the general vocabulary, thanks in part to its association with skinny latte coffee.
New packaging
Next up was James de Roany, another LVMH alumni who has been a wine consultant since 2009. His project was undeniably groundbreaking, taking the form of a light, biodegradable bottle. PET bottles, he explained, have failed to win over the wine industry, despite their much lower weight. On the one hand, they are associated with cheap wine; on the other there is an environmental issue, because if they are not recycled, they join the mass of plastic debris floating in the ocean. De Roany is not unique in looking for a biodegradable solution – new product development teams at Heineken and Coca Cola are as well – but he’s the first to be doing so for wine, using material woven from flax fibre, which he said was five times finer than human hair, immensely strong, and grown without irrigation or chemicals.
To address the ‘cheap’ image associated with PET, de Roany had decided to launch his product with a Champagne. However, given the production rules for that category, this meant that the wines would have to be produced in glass bottles that are covered with the flax rather than purely out of the fibre itself, which, as Damien Wilson pointed out, rather reduced the point of the exercise. Araujo was interested to learn that the biodegrading process required the breakage of a bottle that de Roany had said was strong enough to withstand dropping from a window several floors up. Kevin Shaw also noted that the opaque nature of the flax bottle might be an issue for many wine producers – and consumers. Despite these issues, Shaw was sufficiently impressed by both this concept and Skinny to offer their creators free consultancy.
