As last year, the Estoril Congress Center was the venue for the 3-day conference held on June 20-22. 385 persons had registered compared to around 310 last year. There were 6 Speakers a day discussing back-to-back, various topics of interest, always followed by a QA session. There was an open discussion on each day with a mediator. First day had the usual seaside presentation of Portuguese wines at the Fort in Estoril where around 25 producers presented over 150 wines in the beautiful surrounds of the Fort on the beach offering a surrealistic tasting opportunity to the tasters.
After the customer speeches and welcome by Paulo Salvador and Rui Falcao, the two organisers of the conference and a few local politicians, the stage was ready for the Speakers- with all proceedings in English.
Robert Joseph was first off the block. He is writing a book on the Future of Wine, that was the basis of his talk. He stressed on the emotional aspect of advertising. He said that 38% of people did not even read the labels. The critics did not influence the drinking habits of wine drinkers. He rued that wine writers were invited for the jaunts and if they wrote against the hosts, they were black-listed.
Michel Bettane, on the other hand was wary about the emotional aspect. He felt this could be often manipulated and thus unfair on the consumer. People in Champagne have spent centuries on creating the value. He felt complexity in wine is more important. It appeared that Robert was focussing more on the 90% of the market while Michel had the higher 10% in mind.
Laura Catena is an MD from Boston, who used to feel that wine his father produced was dangerous as it had alcohol. But the Argentine helped her change her mind. She is now hooked to high altitude, cool climate farming and talked of the benefits, especially with global warming but said understanding vineyards was very important. As a Founder of Catena Institute of Wine, her contribution to several aspects of wine production, especially climate change and cool climate grape growing is exemplary.
Jaume Gramona has the experience of 27 years teaching at as a university professor and also looking after the family winery business, which is organic as well as biodynamic. He stressed that sustainability was very important and the soil could be made alive through bio-dynamic farming.
Dirk Niepoort talked of the old, rich traditions in winemaking and the 385 grape varieties available in Portugal, more than in Italy but rued the dictatorship in the previous century that had made them all ‘stupid’ and had been damaging. He emphasised the use of traditional lagars even today and talked about the use of amphoras and also making unique wines like Port and Madeira for centuries. He said Portugal made wines that might not be likeable initially but could be made popular; they had character.
Debra Meiburg MW specialises in Chinese market but talked about wines in Asia in general. Koreans are big drinkers but trendsetters but Japan was a sophisticated market with maximum Sommeliers to boot. Macau was an irregular, gambler-driven market while Hong Kong with zero tax and no regulations was highly fragmented, unregulated market with 350 importers for 8 million people. Only 20 dominate the market while 80 are solid players. Auction mania has slowed down since China clamped down on wine gifting. She talked about China in detail, more particularly about e Commerce that has had an explosive growth. (details in a future edition)
Maureen Downey was a big shocker. Counterfeiting was as early as winemaking in Egypt but people do not take fake wines seriously until there are deaths. She gave examples of recent frauds and conceded that the real culprits were still outside the jail. The penalty for being caught was too little- maximum of 2 years after which the criminals get back to the same work. One has to take a dim view of collectible wines. She gives out a lot of information through winefraud.com and offers services for identifying fraudulent wines and acts as a mentor to train people. She left us with the scary thought that there was East European mafia behind counterfeiting and that all the confiscated wines are returned to the owner after trial and are back in circulation and that today people were more concerned with price than provenance.
Rui Falcao talked about old Portuguese traditions and the use of amphoras, mostly in Alentejo, which have been used for over 2000 years to make Talha wines. They are lower alcohol wines with better temperature control during fermentation. He explained the process of making amphoras which are always above ground unlike in Georgia and said no two pots are alike, with different villages having different recipes, stressing that Portugal still made wines in a traditional way.
Prof. Charles Spence The colourful psychology professor from Oxford has conducted several experiments with wine related activities. An exponent of experiential marketing, he worked with wine flavours not as an expert but was just drawn into wine. He talked about Provencal Rose Paradox where people had great time tasting at the venue but when brought the same wines home, they did not impress. He talked about experimentation with improving seafood eating experience by using sounds of sea-food. Blue is instagrammable and hence is popular now (perhaps a reason for the sporadic popularity of blue wine!) It was shocking for most to learn that the pleasure of glass resides mainly in the mind and NOT mouth. Music affects wine and the mood.
Willie Klinger is the Managing Director of Austrian Wine Board (AWMB) and had just finished with the biennial Show VieVinum. He is always ready with growth statistics and champions the cause of Austrian wines which have been on a roll since the Board was formed after the infamous debacle of 1980’s. He was proud to share that the bulk wine sales had come down and bottled sales were up with the average price of a bottle reaching around €3.70 a liter compared to under €1 a few years earlier.
Gerard Basset MW MS talked about various options available for university education, WSET and MW and MS etc. Apart from missing out on the important university- Adelaide, he talked about various structured programmes available. It turned out that he is not a proponent of university education and propagates study of courses like WSET and CMS.
Heine Zachariassen founder of Vivino.com had a very interesting chat about Vivino even if it is based on ratings by private tasters- but over 100,000 tasters rate these wine daily, it has an extensive reach undoubtedly. This app means giving the power of selecting wines to the hand of the tasters. The firm has collected enormous data on thousands of wines and just the click of a smart phone gets him the information about wine. They have instituted 149 wine styles for Awards and choose the ten best in each category.
Alberto Antonini is a passionate winemaker of Chianti wines near Montespertoli. The ex Antinori chief winemaker believes that less is more and too ripe grapes are not what fine wines ought to be made of. Over-maturation, over extraction, over oaking are what the viticulturist and the winemaker decide. He talked about Invasive oak vs respectful oak- it was adding flavours and aromatic .We do not need too much oak which can be a can be a friend or enemy-
Mariette du Toit –Helmbold was the wine tourism specialist who believed that wine must be good to attract the wine tourism first. Luxury is not about eating at the best restaurants drinking the best wines- but having a unique experience with local people and live the moment. Glorious food is also a part of the experience. Cape Town has 6 out of the 10 great restaurants of Africa.
Martin Brown- Founder of Wine-Searcher.com has been in business of not only giving information about average prices of a wine but a lot of other interesting statistics also. The business model counts on retailer listings, which pay for the listing. He went through the various graphs and charts available to the subscribers using the app.
Felicity Carter Lots of Stories are built around wine, which are important and credible. Story tellers make good money. Story does not have to have good language but it must be engaging. She also said audios are more than written; in fact they grew by 21.5% in 2017 over 2016. Spoken word is different than the written word or film and that Memories is build by association and repetition.
Ronald Austin The senior partner from Clifford and Chance’s Paris office specialises in Mediation in the wine world rather the going for litigation. He suggested that this could be a solution during conflicts between the two parties and could be used as a too to solve the problems between the two parties. He talked about an embarrassing moment with Freixenet vs. CIVC when the bottle started exploding.
Workshops and debates
Everyday, the last session of the day was a moderated debate. The first day saw 5 people discussed various wine faults. This could have been better moderated as it lacked punch and substance was not satisfying to the soul. Next day was about the importance of the traditional wine press. Last day was an interesting debate between the two IT icons of the conference- Martin Brown and Heine Zachariassen- first time ever that the two IT icons of the industry came face to face.
There was wine served during the various breaks-in the innovatively constructed Living Room. The quality and variety of the food was even better than last year. A special Tasting of 11 Portuguese wines was a unique event as the wines were unique and not easily available. Also noteworthy was the Forte de Cruz on the sea-side where around 25 producers were stationed at interesting points and offered their products to the delegates. The amount of time available was not enough to taste all the wines but nevertheless showcased the wines from various regions of Portugal very nicely.
Still imperfections
There were no obvious shortcomings during the 3-day conference and it looked near perfect. There did not appear to be the energy that 385 people registered could have created. Compared to last year, the number might have been respectably larger but it did not translate into much bigger numbers present.
In fact, I checked up with two people who had been to the recently concluded Conference organised by the Institute of Masters of Wine in Rioja. Both agreed on condition of anonymity that they felt the Speakers were better in Cascais, though energy level was much higher at the other. Naturally, with 100 MWs being in the same hall, the energy would be hard to beat but hopefully, the reputation of the current Conference would travel wider and the conference would hit the optimal number of 500 registrants next year.
Madeira et al
Visit to Madeira organised for 22 journalists through TAP airline (there are 24 seats in Business Class) was a big bonus for those who could be accommodated. But the organisers need to step up their efforts to arrange trips to the producers to a couple of regions, like Porto/Douro, Vinho Verde, Alentejo, Dão Lisbon, Setubal or Bairrada etc by rotation every year, after the conference. This will give more insight into the various regions and exposure to wines. Obviously, these would be optional with prices subsidized by the producers who are interested in their wines being talked about.
Showcasing by foreign companies
There is a scope for attracting foreign wines to be showcased here; this would also funds to the organisers for allowing the stands and the producers/consortium would get opportunity to do some business right away or in future. This would also result in higher registration numbers in the long run.
Undoubtedly, the organizers have come a long way in just 2 years and the diligence and efforts in this direction would make it a truly premier international wine conference in the years to come.
The 3rd Edition of Must Fermenting Ideas wil take place again in Cascais on 26-28 June, 2019.
For earlier Articles on the Conference, please visit the following Articles:
MUST Fermenting Ideas: Must-Attend Conference near Lisbon in June
MUST Wine Summit 2017: Madeira-Most Misunderstood Wine (Madira)
Advisory for MUST - Fermenting Ideas Conference in Portugal
Fermenting Conference in Portugal a MUST Attend in June
Subhash Arora