For this 29th episode of the Wine Makers Show, the Wine Makers Show goes to meet Laurent David. To describe Laurent, we could mention his three main commitments: Château Edmus, Wine Angels and the Wine Tech. If we wanted to go further, it would take us a long time. So I’ll let you do it yourself by discovering this great interview with Laurent. I had a wonderful time during the recording and I hope you’ll enjoy this wine podcast just as much. Happy listening.
You must have just finished the harvest right now?
It’s only just wrapped up. After a complicated year, I think we’ll all remember 2020, for several reasons. In any case, when it comes to wine, in Saint-Émilion we had it all: frost, hail, mildew, drought. And we’re coming out of it with very, very, very beautiful grapes. Not necessarily big volumes, but really top-quality. Now we’re waiting on the work in the cellar, to see what it gives in the end, but we can breathe!
Laurent, we’re going to talk about quite a few things. What I really like is that you have a slightly atypical profile compared to the wine world in general. Can you start by introducing yourself?
I can indeed. With pleasure. Laurent David. First name, Laurent; surname, David. I’m originally from Bergerac, in the Dordogne. A charming little town of 25,000 people. That’s where I fell into wine. My earliest memories are a few drops of Monbazillac, I’d dipped my finger into a glass at a family party; it’s an initiation with my father; it’s the Sunday meals at my uncle’s; and my grandfather who had a few rows of vines. Every year we’d have fun doing the harvest. I did the harvest until I was 18. It really was magical to cut those grapes, put them in a vat and then, there it was, afterwards there was wine. Wine really is an extraordinary product, I think we’ll come back to that. I find it an absolutely fascinating product, and right away I was drawn to that magic, to that absolutely exceptional product. I think that’s when I immediately wanted, at some point, to invest in wine. After that, I went off the rails: I left for tech. I worked abroad, in Germany, Spain, Britain, for big tech multinationals. It was very rewarding, those were completely different years. But I always carried that memory in me, something that nagged at me. I’d come back to Bergerac of course for every family party. All my friends were winemakers, and that was perhaps no coincidence. I told myself that one day or another, something was going to happen.
At that point, when you started working, straight away abroad, very quickly in big groups or multinationals, was that right after your studies?
That’s right. I finished my studies with the fabulous Erasmus programme, in Madrid. I lived the “Spanish Apartment” experience. It was a discovery of Spain, of that culture. Spain is the country closest to my heart. When I see the Spanish football team play, except against France, I’m always a supporter of the Spanish team. Spanish wine is fabulous. Their culture is actually quite different from ours, but quite close. They like raw products, natural products, they have very high standards in cooking, in how things are cooked, they’re very strong on that front. I loved my three years spent there. After my year of study, I did a cooperation placement at the French embassy in Madrid, at the economic expansion post, that existed back then. And there too, I enter semi-professional life, where I do research, I help French companies set up, find outlets on the Spanish market. It was the great smart-card boom at the time. The French were very far ahead. So I helped several companies find markets, partners, distributors, integrators, on the Spanish market. And then all that comes to an end. What do I do? Do I stay in Spain, do I go back to France? My future wife had gone back, so that was a very good reason to go back with her. There I am in Paris, and one of those companies I’d worked for offers me a brief to prospect the Spanish market of course, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa. As a first job, I found it fantastic to travel the world with my briefcase, to go and prospect this French technology. Off I go to Buenos Aires, Chile, Santiago, Mexico City, Lebanon, Cape Town, Morocco, to sell this technology. I loved it, but I also became disillusioned fairly quickly. For me, the myth of travel and of the travelling salesman, in the end it was a lot of meeting rooms, jet lag, Caesar salads and sandwiches while watching, not BFM TV, we didn’t have it back then, but it was TV5 Monde. In the end we didn’t enjoy it that much. And along comes an opportunity like that, one of my clients who was creating a startup. It was just before the 2008 bubble. He tells me “listen, I’ve got this great product, it works for mobile phone operators.” He was of Lebanese origin, who had migrated to the United States, to Silicon Valley. He tells me “do you want to help me work on this?” Without a second thought, off we go, we found this first startup. We find a first client in Ireland. Then the bubble arrives, poof, it bursts, we didn’t have time to raise funds. Me, I reach an age where you tell yourself “well, maybe I’ll get married.” And in the end it was a good idea. By luck, a headhunter calls me for a company called Nokia, which at that point was in incredible growth, which was going to become the leading European company. They were looking for people with a business development profile, people who from an idea would build an ecosystem of partners to showcase products that weren’t voice and SMS products. Back then, we’ve rather forgotten this today with our smartphones, but phones were mainly used to call and send texts. There, they had new product ranges coming, that were going to connect to the internet, play music, take photos. We had to be able to explain all that, find applications. So off I go to Nokia. Again, it was ten absolutely fabulous years, of growth, of acceleration in this company that went very, very fast. I discovered Finnish culture. Quite a bit of travel in Europe, since in the end, by the close I was handling the Benelux and France.
Before you carry on reading, you can join The Club and learn about wine simply and for free. The Club is wine courses and incredible value. You’ll never have a doubt again when choosing a bottle of wine.
Join The Club
There too, I learn a lot about high standards, about how to present, to analyse, to look at business plans in detail, to put things together, to convince, to know how to navigate big organisations to present your ideas, to move them forward. It goes pretty well. And then one day, one day in 2007, I’ll remember it I think all my life because it changed my life, I was with most of my clients, so Belgians, Dutch, French, Luxembourgers, we were at CES in Las Vegas, a huge consumer electronics show, in January 2007. I was on stage, presenting my product roadmap, my strategy, in front of this little gathering of clients, but no one was listening to me. No one was listening to me, everyone was on their phone, looking at the news that had just broken, the texts, and at that very moment there was a gentleman called Steve Jobs, who was on stage, a few hundred kilometres away, and who had just announced the iPhone. A thunderbolt in the telecom industry. Nokia was briefed, we knew something was coming. Me, personally, I knew Apple products, I had a Mac at home, I had an iPod, I knew the attention to detail, the integration, the pleasure of using them. When I see this, I tell myself “they’ve understood everything.” I look, I go back to my room, I switch on CNN, I see the product which is magnificent. I don’t sleep all night. The next morning I tell myself “I have to work in this, I have to go with them, I have to go and help them.” They didn’t need me, of course. “I want to be part of this adventure!” It took me six months to find the right person, to go through about twenty interviews. That’s how it is at Apple. And then visionary managers, lots of French people at Apple, who trusted me. I think I was the first person hired in Europe, on the iPhone, for the launch that took place at the end of 2007. And there, it’s an incredible moment. It was late November 2007. On the Champs-Élysées, Orange opens a store specially dedicated to this launch. There was a giant countdown displayed on the façade, an incredible thing. In November, in Paris, the weather isn’t great. It was 11:50 p.m. when I arrive, the launch was at midnight. There was a queue that went almost all the way around the Arc de Triomphe. There I told myself “wow!” You see that for concerts, for football matches, for sport, but for a phone… There you could feel something was happening. So there you go, after that it was eleven fabulous years, of staggering acceleration, of growth at Apple, a company that fascinates me and pleases me as much as ever. I have the latest iPhone, I’m waiting for the next one and I remain devoted to what this company does for its demand for detail, for perfection. It’s a school like no other, on high standards, on attention to detail. They’re great obsessives, some would say great maniacs. But you can’t imagine how enormous the work behind it is. It was a joy to work with teams of a stellar level. My managers, whether the American teams or the French teams, and I’ll always thank them, people who gave me my chance and let me grow, who taught me to be better, who pushed me. It allowed me to move forward, to learn a huge amount of things that still serve me today, like that obsession with detail, that perpetual analysis of what’s happening, the documented, data-backed recording of every step, the understanding of what a brand is, of how important it is to embody it with the right values, authenticity. I could list them all, Apple’s values. The will to simplify, to use technology to make an experience human and interesting. Technology for technology’s sake is pointless, if somewhere there isn’t a pleasure in using it, if it doesn’t render you a real service. Apple is a company that has understood all that, that has remarkably managed to chain it together, from production to commercialisation. It’s the only company in the world that goes from microprocessor to software, to hardware, to service and to distribution with its stores, it’s the only one. It’s that understanding of what happens end to end that makes its success, that makes the head start no one will ever catch up on, that’s undeniable. I could talk endlessly about Apple and about this fabulous company, and there are plenty of things I’ll never be able to say. But it was a real pleasure and a big change for me, in the ability to push myself to my limits, into the details and to keep growing.
You tell us there are quite a few things you kept from that time. You also told me you travelled a lot. Do you take the chance to taste wine on your trips? Is it something you always keep in mind, or not at all?
Oh, always. It’s something that never leaves you. I think in any case when you’re French, when you’re at a restaurant with other people who come from all over the world, the wine list always ends up in your hands. They tell you “wait, you’re the one who’s going to choose the wine.” That’s quite amusing, it already pushes you to be credible and not say any old thing. I didn’t necessarily find my Bergeracs, nor my favourite Bordeaux or Burgundies, so naturally you learn about wine, you discover wine. And when you go, as was my case fairly often, to Silicon Valley, to San Francisco, there’s a region nearby that is fabulous, the Napa Valley, Sonoma, the Russian River, where there are magnificent wines. You taste, you visit, you take an extra day to go for a tour over there. They’re wonderful discoveries. They’re very, very, very great wines. I think back to this story of the list in restaurants, often if we have an Italian or a Spaniard alongside, there’s a battle. So we taste, we discuss. Wine is always there. Wine really is this extraordinary product, of sharing, of conversation. There’s debate of course, there are tastes, there are preferences, but it’s always there. I think it was also in those years that I started, in parallel, through everything I was doing, through everything I was seeing, to think about these subjects of financing properties, to understand how I could get involved, invest. That seed that had been growing for years was resurfacing. I told myself that at some point, when I grew up, that was my phrase, “when I grow up,” I’d make wine. Time passes and at some point you have to tell yourself “you have to go for it, that’s enough. I’m not going to launch the iPhone 13, 14, 15, I need to move on to something else.” Ten lovely years, almost eleven, thank you, goodbye, and then off we go to something new. Life is too short.
That’s very true. So you finish those almost eleven years at Apple, and there you tell yourself “I’m stopping and I’m leaving to make wine”?
So, it’s something I mulled over for a long time, it’s not a whim. It’s a discussion agreed with my managers, to leave the files tidy, clean. We were in London at that point, we’d moved my whole family to London. Brexit had just happened. I lost my dad and my mum one after the other, a bit early. At some point you tell yourself “wow, you mustn’t wait too long, the clock is ticking.” I’d passed 45. This project I’d matured, that I’d studied in detail, I’d looked for a property, I spent almost five years finding this first property, which we’ll perhaps talk about later. The offer is in my hands, I’ve already turned down four, it’s a risk, but there you go, you only live once. So the decision is made, with my wife, my children, we go back to France.
You involve your whole family at that point?
Oh yes, it’s a change of life. It’s not a selfish dream, it’s a real change of life, so everyone has to agree and be ready to take the risk with me, and to put up with me, to support me. It’s a collective decision and we tell ourselves “if we don’t do it now, we’ll never do it, there’s no longer any valid excuse.” We take our savings, our suitcases, we cross the Channel back the other way. My daughters had learned English, they were bilingual, it was done, we’d loved this city of London, but here we are back in France, between Saint-Émilion and Paris. I make the round trips to launch this concept around this first estate.
We’ll of course talk about this estate, but can you tell me a bit more about how it works when you want to buy a wine estate? Do you call specialist estate agents in Bordeaux? First of all, did you know you wanted Saint-Émilion in particular?
For this project I thought a lot about the location, because the location was strategic. Several things were needed. It needed the combination of a terroir, which is the basis, of a team, of the plants, of a history, and then of course a price. It had to be reasonable and above all there had to be development potential. It’s a fairly long set of specifications and right at the top, for me, there’s “I’m looking for an estate that’s organic,” because it’s close to our values, to what we want to do. The list narrows fairly quickly. I’d prospected, it’s word of mouth, it’s friends who tell you “here, I heard about so-and-so, over there,” and then little by little you get referred to other people. The idea is that each time you’re at a meeting, you come out with at least two names, so you can keep going like that and bounce on. In five or six years of prospecting, you eventually start to have a tiny little address book. And then one day, a person I’d already crossed paths with at the very start of my journey calls me back and tells me “here’s the thing Laurent, you’ve come back to France, we didn’t manage to agree a few years ago, but now we’ve evolved a bit and we’d really like to talk with you again.” This person is called Mr Éric Remus, who is the co-founder of Château Edmus. Eric and his partner Phil Edmundson, an American from Boston, wanted to hand over. They’d built this estate in ten years, on superb plots in Saint-Émilion. They tell me “we have specifications too, and we want someone who can continue what we’ve started, we want to possibly still take part in it.” That’s where I present them with the concept I’d developed over those years, that I’d thought about and worked on. That’s how in the end we came to an agreement, with my commitment that these two people could be my first two shareholders, my first two “wine angels” in the company. In the end that’s it, it’s a first refusal and things evolve, in the meantime the estate had been converted to organic, and that was very important to me, I’ve already said so. All of a sudden the planets align. “Chance favours only the prepared mind,” said Montaigne. When you know what you’re looking for, at some point it passes before your eyes or close by, you have to be ready, you have to be ready in your head, you have to be ready in your life. It was the moment. It happened almost a few months before we moved to Paris. The discussions follow. But in fact that’s it, it was word of mouth at first, it was a long prospecting.
Five years of prospecting is a long time. You don’t get discouraged at all? How do you keep going?
Once again, the first thing is: you have to love wine, you have to taste it. To start with, if what’s produced on site doesn’t please you, you’ll never be in harmony with that land. That’s the basis. In Saint-Émilion it’s actually not very complicated to find land and people who really know how to make very good wine. What also interested me is that Saint-Émilion is a very beautiful region, it’s a fairly iconic region, the village is just magnificent. It’s a brand in itself in fact, Saint-Émilion. We’ll come back to brands and their importance, but it’s a quality label, it’s the first vineyard listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It’s known worldwide and that’s already something you can lean on. There’s already, at the base, a thousand-year-old terroir which means there has been wine and the wine does well there. In the thinking it was a good way to start, it was already leaning on things that were strong. After that, it’s expensive. Because the price per hectare only goes up, it’s 4%, 5%, 6% a year. So when you’re an investor you tell yourself it’s a good thing; when you’re a winemaker you suddenly see your children who can no longer pay the inheritance tax and it’s complicated. You should know that over 50% of winemakers in France are over 50 and half of them have no succession plan. There’s an enormous amount of vineyard land coming up, that’s available, with terrible inflation. So you have to see how to organise that. France is still the world’s leading country in wine, not in volume, but in value, it’s a national terroir, a national treasure, and you have to know how to preserve it. But that’s another subject. We find ourselves facing land that’s expensive, you have to be able to finance it. In our case we could finance 1.6 hectares, it’s tiny, but it’s very, very beautiful. It’s a very, very beautiful plot, which is on the Pomerol side, it’s magnificent gravel, it’s a knoll that’s gently rolling, which means it’s very well drained. When you see that, you tell yourself “wow, it’s beautiful.” The vines are 40 years old. Half merlot, half cabernet franc, that’s the originality, that is to say it’s all the elegance of merlot and the originality of cabernet franc, which is capricious. And then it’s also a team already in place, with a gentleman called Stéphane Derenoncourt, who saw this estate born, who advised it, he loved the place. Since 2007, when the estate was born in this form, he’s been at the helm, with his teams, to make it this wine rated 93 points out of 100 with the tasters. The planets align, the offer is there, it’s a great leap into the unknown. You have to put things in place, you have to preserve what exists and then above all you have to find how you’re going to grow it and what its place is when you’re like me, when you’re a new winemaker, what role you play in that team, and how, once again, you take it to a higher level.
Can we come back to the concept of buying the vineyard, because you said you’d bought 1.6 hectares. That’s not the whole estate?
It’s the whole estate. It’s an estate that went up to 6 hectares, then the less beautiful plots were sold off over time. The most beautiful plot was the last one, with the stocks. Because when you start an entrepreneurial project in wine, you should know that you buy vines now, there, you buy them on 22 October, that means your next harvest will be in September 2021, it’ll take you two years for your wine to come out and go into bottle, so September 2021, September 2022, September 2023, and then it still has to round out a tiny bit, you add another two years, 2024, 2025, that means you don’t have a bottle to sell for almost 4 to 5 years. So in the specifications that were mine, we had to be able to have lovely vintages already in stock. We bought back the stock, and we had the fabulous 2014, 2015, marvellous, 2016 vintages, and then all the ones that came after. That was important. The brand: so Château Edmus, from the names of Phil Edmundson and Eric Remus, combined. It was a brand that was nicely done. We told ourselves there’s something around that name. It’s all those tangible, intangible assets, and there are partnerships with the likes of Stéphane Derenoncourt and his consultants, all the teams who manage the vines, who are there, who are mainly the teams from Banton & Lauret, which is a fabulous company, which is in Vignonet, right next door. You have to take all that in, you have to understand it. The relationship with the merchants, even if in the end we chose a slightly different commercial approach. We can talk about it. The relationship with clients, consumers, restaurateurs. It’s a set of things, it’s not just a plot of land. Me, when I studied these different vineyard investment options in detail, I looked at what existed. There are packaged investment schemes, called GFV, so the Groupements Fonciers Viticoles, investors, which are relatively simple schemes: it’s a plot of land that’s bought and then leased to a winemaker who pays me back rent, quite simply. You don’t buy a château, you don’t buy an estate, you buy land, a plot of land, and you receive a rent. It’s different, granted, from buying a building and renting an apartment. I tested it, I did it, I’d made a tiny little investment in a small plot in Pessac-Léognan. It was rather disappointing, for a wine enthusiast like me and like most people who make this investment. Receiving once a year a registered letter with acknowledgement of receipt and maybe a dividend cheque, well, it’s not exactly living the life of a winemaker, understanding what happens on an estate. I told myself there are ways to finance, to work differently on a wine estate, and through what I learned at Apple, at Nokia and in my past lives, I worked a lot with startups, and I could clearly see the incredible energy, the creativity, the responsiveness of these companies and how they financed themselves. They called on business angels, investment funds, various partners, to finance themselves, to find support, to find help, not just funds. I did it myself, I was myself an investor in several startups that later turned out to be wine tech startups. I didn’t really know that at the time. And the wine tech then organised itself around a real association. And there you go, it’s also the pleasure of working with these young entrepreneurs who are bursting with energy, who go at a crazy speed. And I told myself “there’s something here, the way these companies structure themselves, organise themselves, can we apply it, how can we apply it to the wine world? How can we find wine business angels who’ll be able to play their role in this great team that makes a wine’s success? How will each one be able to bring their stone to the building and take part in the success of an estate?”
Can you tell us a bit more about what Wine Angels is and how you see things on that?
Wine Angels is the concept I arrived at after those years of prospecting and study. In fact, being a wine angel today means being part of a hand-picked community of people who have three characteristics: they love wine, if you don’t love wine, if you don’t love the product, there’s no reason to want to become a wine angel; they have an investment quality, they can financially take part in the creation of a company, finance it; and most importantly, they have the ability to promote the estate through their network, through their connections, to talk about it, to have it tasted and to contribute that way to its renown. When earlier I said that for me wine is a team sport, when you have great players who know how to make wine, the likes of Stéphane Derenoncourt, when you have the Banton & Lauret teams, when you have a superb terroir, very beautiful vines, each one has to be able to play their role at a given moment, and there the wine angels are the people who make it possible to create this company, to finance it, and then who also make it possible to promote the wine and talk about it. In fact, they become like co-owners, full and entire, of the estate, they’re people who are going to invest, we ask them to invest 15,000 euros. We’re looking for about thirty of them. The crowdfunding programme has just started, it’s starting very strong. We’ve had an enormous number of applications come in. Well beyond thirty. The selection committee is going to have a bit of trouble finding the right people, but that’s a good problem to have. So that’s the idea, to find people, French, foreign, who’ll be able to have this ambassador role and take part in the life of the estate.
You say it’s 15,000 euros to take part? Obviously that’s a sum that’s far from negligible, but I’d have thought it was a lot more.
It’s a substantial sum, 15,000 euros is a choice that’s committing. It’s not “here, I’ll put in 500 euros.” No, no, we’re on something that’s committing and that’s already a way of selecting. That is to say that when you commit that much it’s because somewhere, you expect something. The more you expect something, the more you’ll get involved. That’s the first thing. We set the bar at that level. Then, we have a sum to gather that should let us finance the new cellar. So all that sum has to let us finance the new cellar. It’s a capital contribution to the company, which should let us carry out this project.
With this investment, you finance an asset, that’s present.
That’s tangible. Yes, you buy something. It’s not bitcoin, we’re not on something virtual, we’re on the real, the tangible, on 1.6 hectares, stocks of wine, a cellar, a superb manor house. There are completely real things that are part of this company that you become a shareholder of. When you’re a shareholder you also expect a return on investment. When you’re in a startup, when you invest in a startup, you know you’re taking a risk. So there, we’re a bit between the two. We’re on a measured risk, since in the end there are completely tangible assets, vines, stocks, a cellar, a manor house, that’s the tangible part. The yield offered is a yield that’s guaranteed over the first three years, that is to say we guarantee 1.9% yield over the first three years. After that, it’ll depend on whether the company flourishes or not, so it’ll depend a bit on the work, on the involvement too of the wine angels and of the rest of the team. And then there you go, it’s taking part in the life of the estate, it’s coming to the harvest if you want, taking part in the blending, it’s being at the en primeur, it’s a set of things. We’ll be able to get to know our property, of course know how to talk about it around us, that’s the goal. You can sleep there of course, when you become a wine angel, you can sleep at the château, at the estate. There’s a superb suite that’s been created there and which will let you live this experience from the inside as well. It’s a set of advantages we’ve accumulated. The most important is that each wine angel has an annual allocation of bottles of wine, between 70 and 90 bottles. It’s so they buy them. Because we need them to help us sell them. A bottle of Château Edmus, today, whether you go on our site, on Vivino, costs 43 euros, roughly. The wine angel price is almost 10 euros less. It’s an important advantage. We don’t turn our wine angels into sandwich-board men. They have a certain number of bottles with this discount capacity, and behind it we of course take care of collecting the money, of doing the shipping. They don’t store bottles of wine in their cellar, with the order forms to handle, no. They’re not there for that, that’s our job, we simplify the experience for them on that front. So that’s how we organised distribution. And if it goes well, they could almost help us sell half our sales. The other half being cafés, hotels, restaurants, which are precious. So in fact, there are only two ways to get hold of these superb bottles of Château Edmus: it’s either via a wine angel, online, at 40 euros; or on superb tables you find here in Paris, or in France, in a restaurant.
How does it work? Very concretely, afterwards you do become a shareholder of the company?
After that, you become a shareholder of the company, you have a share of the company.
And it’s a capital increase that’s done that way?
That’s it, a capital increase to finance the cellar. Go and look on chateauedmus.com, everything is described, you can see the cellar project, everything is presented in a completely transparent way.
Can you tell me a bit more about what the Wine Tech is? You said a tiny word about it just before, about players who have structured themselves, but precisely, I’d welcome your view on that.
That’s the most obvious link between my previous life and my new life. In my change of life, it’s the perfect link, which arrived like that, a little by chance, even if chance favours only the prepared mind. To understand investment, me who was absolutely not from that field, I took part in startup fundraising rounds, and so I saw these general meetings, I saw how you could support startuppers, work with them, understood their difficulties, how you could coach them, help them. I really liked it. We’re in passing on, we’re in sharing once again, it’s always the same things that drive me. When I made a first investment, then a second, then a third, I realised that it was all in a field that connected wine and technology, things that are dear to me, beautiful products, talented people, ultra-motivated. And then, I realise at that point that there’s an association, I didn’t really know what it was, called the WineTech. It was created in 2015, it had a lot of success, it’s Vincent Chevrier who is the genius behind the creation of this banner. It grows, grows, grows. We reach almost 35 startups at the end of 2019. And there, these startups, they’ve grown, they’ve grown bigger, they’ve come out of childhood a bit, they all have common issues which are: we need to finance ourselves, we need to be visible, to find clients and partners. That’s summing up the WineTech. And there, they decide in the end together to equip themselves with a real structure, so the creation of a 1901-law association, the perfect structure for that need. They equip themselves with colleges, they organise themselves around four colleges, which covers, from production to distribution, the different activities of these startups. They equip themselves with a board of directors with the most motivated among them, who have energy, who have the seniority too to be able to help the younger ones. And then they look for a president who is a bit tech, a bit of a new winemaker like me, a bit of an investor like I was. The meeting happens, they ask me “do you have a little time to dedicate to us?”, I say “listen, I guarantee you I’ll give you half a day a week.” And today I do a lot more. But there’s such energy, such passion. Very quickly we explain our story, we put out a press release and the media take an interest in us. We hold a press conference at Wine Paris 2020, the room is full, it overflows, everyone comes to see us. The WineTech only grows, we get almost two or three requests, a week maybe not, but a good two a week currently, from startups that want to join us. We’re already at fifty. We’re very selective. We don’t just want projects, we want companies that are in innovation, that are in a field connected to digital, and then a project that isn’t just a few slides. Then, we have a fairly strict selection process. I apologise, I beg the pardon of all those we haven’t been able to accept for now, but let them come back to see us in a few months, a few years. We have this energy that’s there, this banner, and we have magnificent projects to make them known. If the Vinexpo, Wine Paris 2021 show is held in February, you’ll see a huge WineTech stand with all our startups, conference cycles over three days, where there are almost forty hours organised with round tables, with headliners who will come from fields that aren’t necessarily that of wine, to share their experiences. We have the future first WineTech unicorn called Vivino, which was founded by a brilliant Dane, he’s even from the Faroe Islands by the way, who did us the honour of coming as a headliner to share his experience for the first time in France. We have absolutely fascinating debates. We’ll talk about battles of drones and robots, we’ll talk about innovation, we’ll explain how technology makes it possible to produce greener, how you can mobilise online distribution channels in times of crisis and lockdown. Incredible things happened during the 2020 lockdown, where the startups organised themselves to give away delivery costs for free, to bring together bloggers who gave visibility for free to winemakers. The #jaimemonvigneron that was created to help nearly 200 winemakers. The startups mobilised, they have this agility, this ability to move fast, to reinvent themselves. As I like to say: alone you go faster, together you go further. And so the WineTech really is this armed wing, this echo chamber for all these startups. There’s a bright future. You have to invest in the WineTech startups, ladies and gentlemen investors who are listening to us.
I suppose people can contact you on LinkedIn fairly easily, so don’t hesitate to contact Laurent to invest in the WineTech or to discover all these companies.
Yes, on LinkedIn of course.
Is there also a WineTech website?
Yes: lawinetech.com. I’d just like to add: we’re often told, it’s the preconception I hear most often, “the wine sector is a traditional sector, that doesn’t move much, that doesn’t innovate.” Me, I perceived completely the opposite, and I was exceptionally well received by all the winemakers I met. Of course there’s the curiosity about this guy who arrives with his ideas, but there’s a benevolence, there’s a desire to share, when you’re authentic, to pass on. I’ve had an enormous number of people help me, selflessly. Me, winemakers, what I understood is that it’s a job that’s very, very hard. You’re at once in the vines, in the cellar, the accounting, the sales, the marketing, all that is one single person, it’s still very heavy. You can’t be good everywhere, it’s complicated. What I understood quickly is that in fact winemakers are researchers. Each time, each year, with what nature gives them, they have to compose, to draw the best possible from the potential they’re given. You have to be very, very, very humble when you’re a winemaker and you have to respect exactly what’s around. But there’s this concern for perfection, for research, and innovation, people are much more inclined to adopt it, to embrace it, than we think and than we say. I think it’s quite the opposite, I think they’re precisely among the professions most able to feed on novelty. The only difference is the cycles. That is to say that in ten years, you’ll release ten versions of your product. Mind you, iPhones are the same, there’s one every year, but it’s software versions that change every two months. In wine that’s not possible, we have one release a year, you mustn’t miss it. The cycle is the cycle of nature, it’s the cycle of the vine, it’s very slow. But the spirit of the entrepreneur, of the winemaker, that listening, that will for perfection, for research, it’s a job, if you’re not authentic you don’t do it, it’s too difficult, it’s too hard. Me, I was exceptionally well received, I thank all the people who helped me, and in the end when you come to see them with our startups, with our ideas, the rooms are full. People are always looking for an idea of how I’ll be able to do better, improve, differently. They’re people, we saw it during the lockdown, dozens of them rushed onto the internet, opened online shops in a few weeks and the WineTech startups helped them at an incredible speed. I’m not sure there are many sectors, during this lockdown, that reinvented themselves so quickly. We need these winemakers, we need this ecosystem. That’s why I think France is the perfect ground for the WineTech, we have an entrepreneurial spirit in France. The word “entrepreneur” is a French word, by the way. We have grandes écoles, we have well-made minds, we have an ecosystem of wine regions, which are fabulous, from North to South, from East to West, we have completely different vineyards. And then we have these tens of thousands of winemakers who ask for nothing more than to improve their wine. So when you combine all that, it can only work. France is THE global playground for the WineTech, there’s no debate about it. What will be lacking is the ability to finance. That’s where these startups need us to talk about them, we need to know who they are, and that’s the whole challenge of the WineTech. Once again, if France wants to remain world leader in wine, well it has to keep investing. If we don’t invest, if we don’t innovate, if we don’t invest in innovation, well we get overtaken. Loads of sectors were digitalised, didn’t see it coming and find themselves today completely lagging behind, and so wake up with an incredible headache. That’s not at all the case for winemakers, who stay alert. You have to organise these meetings between these startuppers and these winemakers, so the mayonnaise sets. The binding in the middle of all that is financing. The startups need to be financed. There are incredible opportunities. Wine sales online were 9%, before Covid. I think we’ll have passed 15% by the end of this year. Everyone who works in online commerce, on the internet, in wine, this year they made a good investment. Look at these young shoots, go on the lawinetech.com site, you’ll see, it’s full of creativity, it’s bursting with energy, with talent. And me, that’s what fascinates me.
Listen Laurent, I’ve already done a nice tour, we’ve exhausted quite a few questions I had. Unless there’s one you wanted me to ask you?
I think we’ve talked about all the things close to my heart: about these winemakers, about this innovation, about Wine Angel, about Château Edmus. I think, once again we have a sector in France where we’re world leader. It’s the second source of revenue for France, in exports. So we can’t fail. After Airbus and aviation, and ahead of cosmetics, it’s wine. There are plenty of wine regions in the world that are flourishing, that are growing, the Chinese are planting more vines, and considerable investments. I saw it in the Napa Valley, which is a region that was a bit behind compared to what France was capable of doing, but which has equipped itself with structures for innovation, for financing. It’s two hours from Silicon Valley. That’s no coincidence. I have many of my Apple friends who go there at weekends, because the region is just magnificent, and some have also become winemakers, like me, in the Napa Valley. And they innovate. A very simple example: it’s true that wine tourism wasn’t necessarily born there, but it became body and soul tied to the destiny of these vineyards. It’s the Disneyland of wine, the Napa Valley, it’s just manicured, beautiful as can be, it’s restaurants, it’s fabulous culinary experiences, it’s landscaped, it’s really very, very beautiful, and then you go there any day of the year, you’re welcomed, you go through the shop with the goodies and you don’t necessarily buy wine. The proximity to San Francisco helps of course, there are plenty of reasons that help, but they did it. And they’re people who in the end also understood, when we were talking earlier about distribution, they understood you had to talk to consumers directly. No matter where they were going to buy the wine, but you had to be able to talk, tell your story, present the authenticity of what you did, your difference. The Napa estates, today sell 70% to 80% of their wine directly to consumers. It’s incredible. And they did it in a few years. It’s a lot of work. Of course, it’s a lot of investment, but these are lessons. You have to know how to draw inspiration from that.
Near Bordeaux, in Pessac-Léognan, it’s Smith Haut Lafitte that impressed me a lot on this, on precisely their ability to develop new products, to offer experiences, whether the visit to the forest of the senses, which we got to do, the Caudalie spas, the shop, etc. There’s an enormous amount to do. So it’s an example that’s on a large scale all the same, because the estate is very, very big, but there’s a lot to do and we very much agree.
But Smith Haut Lafitte, Caudalie, it’s an impressive success. A few years ago it was the sleeping beauty, Smith Haut Lafitte, nobody wanted it. The work, the investment, the genius of the Cathiard family and their children mean that today it’s certainly one of the estates that inspires the whole world. They’re also certainly going to open new Caudalie hotel-spas elsewhere in France and in the world. And it’s all that experience that means the wine you taste has another story. It has another story because you know where it comes from. You understand it and I think that’s the whole authenticity of what they’ve managed to do and which inspires many of us, each on their own scale obviously.
I have three questions left. The first is: do you have a wine book to recommend to me?
Listen, yes and it’s a book I’ve just finished, that I really liked. It’s “L’Incroyable Histoire du vin,” by Benoist Simmat. It’s a book in the form of a graphic novel, that tells the incredible story of wine. It’s funny, there’s humour, you learn loads of things like that, without realising it. You go back to the Greeks and well before. You see the evolution and you understand, you learn loads of things about why wine today is so present in our French and global culture. It’s Benoist Simmat who made it, who co-wrote it. I think it’s already translated into about twenty languages, into Korean, in short it’s a huge success. It’s well deserved.
Buy L’Incroyable Histoire du vin
Do you have a recent favourite tasting?
Oh, I have several. Me, I love all wines, from Burgundy, from Bordeaux, from Languedoc, from Alsace, from the Rhône, from the Loire, from everywhere, I’m going to forget some of course, but I love all French wines, all foreign wines, it’s a bit of a problem sometimes. But my latest wine emotion was a Monbazillac. You see, I go back to the Monbazillac I was telling you about earlier. In fact, it’s the Pierre-Louis cuvée, which is made by Château Fagé. It was even voted Best Monbazillac by its peers. It’s a balance between tension, acidity, sweetness and aromas. It’s far from cloying. Always in moderation, but once you’ve started it’s hard to stop. But it’s a real delight, what the Monbazillacs have become, which now have a success that’s accelerating. So there you go, the Pierre-Louis cuvée, Château Fagé, it’s Benoît Gérardin who makes it, who is a great, great, great winemaker in the Monbazillac region.
To finish, do you have a guest to recommend to me for the next episodes of this podcast?
Listen, me, I like to give space to all these teams who make the wine and who you don’t necessarily see. Of course there are the winemakers, they’re at the heart, but I think for example of Virginie Fournier, who took over what’s called l’Œuf de Beaune. It’s in Burgundy, it’s vinification eggs, that are just incredible in technology, in precision, that know how to control micro-oxygenation. It’s a thing of beauty. The object itself is already beautiful. We were lucky, at Château Edmus, to have one, our first: we’re going to attempt a sulphur-free vinification on the cabernet francs, we’re super excited to be able to do that. L’Œuf de Beaune, Virginie Fournier, to understand another facet of wine. Another personality, again, who are people you don’t necessarily see, in the shadows, it’s I think a company called Banton & Lauret, whose new generation has just come to power: Benjamin Banton. Benjamin Banton, he leads it, he’s very young, he has incredible energy. He’s really one of those people who are always searching, for innovation, for improvement, for perfection, for detail. It’s a company that’s in subcontracting and that has dozens, hundreds of highly trained people to work in the vines. It’s complicated for winemakers to find staff overnight. It’s a company that’s clearly there to help. They help all the great châteaux of the Bordeaux region, of the Médoc, the right bank, the left bank, they’re absolutely present everywhere. They have the latest high-tech machines. When at Château Edmus we use a sorting table to separate the berries, the grapes we’ve just picked, we use it for a day. Banton & Lauret provides a densimetric sorting table, which costs the price of a Formula 1, we use it for a few hours and we have access to the best technology, set by a team that knows how to use it. Those are key players in the industry, who you have to go and see, who you have to bring to light. And then maybe a last one, again, a new winemaker, a bit like me, even if he already has several vintages of experience. It’s Jean-Baptiste Duquesne, who is behind the Bordeaux Pirate movement; he’s the pirate, the captain-in-chief. They’re people who love Bordeaux, just like me, who want it to change, who want to make people understand that there are very beautiful terroirs, there are winemakers who know how to make wine there and who try to do new things. He’s replanted forgotten grape varieties, but incredible ones, and now his first cuvées have just arrived, it’s just delicious. They’re people who take risks, who arrive with a new approach, who are superbly well received and who try to shift the lines. You have to meet him, he’s inexhaustible.
