For this 34th episode of the Wine Makers Show, Vin sur Vin goes to meet Edouard Margain: head of operations at Lavinia. Dive into Edouard’s story as he reveals what really goes on behind one of Europe’s biggest wine cellars. If you enjoy this episode, don’t forget to give it five stars. Happy listening.
Hi Edouard, can you start by introducing yourself?
I’m Edouard Margain, head of operations at Lavinia in France. Nothing predestined me to end up in the wine world. I actually worked in very digital environments: in startups and e-commerce. One day I decided I wanted to join an omnichannel environment. By chance, I met the CEO of the Lavinia group. So I joined Lavinia five years ago, first as digital director, then as marketing director, and since the start of March, as head of operations.
It must have been a wild ride taking on operations during lockdown?
Yes, you’re not wrong. It was both an anxious, tense moment for a lot of people and at the same time exciting because it involved so much change. When you’re working on transforming a 20-year-old company like Lavinia, it’s really exciting to be able to shake things up. We had to shake them up fast.
On a personal level, were you into wine?
I’m originally from Lyon and I’ve always had wine lovers around me. That said, I was a complete novice until I landed at Lavinia and got swept up by the company’s mission, which is to “share the passion for wine”. When I arrived, I started by doing all the tasting workshops we offered. I developed a taste for wines, champagnes and spirits. It’s a field I’m passionate about and I discovered a really wide range in the wine world. I got really interested in oxidative wines, something I’d never tasted before joining Lavinia. That validates the project of helping people discover new wines and new arrivals.
What convinced you about Lavinia?
At the time, I was very interested in Simon Sinek’s work and his “start with why” theory. So I asked everyone the same question: “why did you create this company?”. When I talked to Lavinia, the answer I got was simple: “we created this company to share the passion for wine”. At that moment, I thought to myself that this is a company where, even if we have to change things or models one day, as long as we don’t betray the DNA, then it’s a company that’s much more ready for that transformation. Beyond that, there’s huge diversity in what Lavinia does. There are the cellars of course, but also restaurants, online sales, events and corporate services. So we had a lot of activities in a barely digitized setting when I arrived. It seemed to me that Lavinia had something fundamental: the foundation. A very clear offering, a differentiated positioning and experiences to offer customers. That seemed like a very solid base to build digital ambition on. I was first hired as e-commerce director. I remember telling the CEO that I was happy to come for e-commerce but I also wanted to handle digital. The thing is, digital is everywhere: e-commerce is just one sales channel. What interested me was digitizing our activities and functions to gain growth and efficiency.
Can you tell us what wine e-commerce is actually like?
It is a regulated activity. At Lavinia we’ve thought about e-commerce differently. A few years ago, we did a lot of drive-to-store-to-web. The internet was an audience pool we could present the brand to. We told ourselves that rather than selling, we’d try to bring people in to us. The site mostly served reordering. The Lavinia site has come a long way in recent years and now hits nearly 25% of sales online. Today, our offering is much more complex than just selling wine. There’s a notion of services we bring to our customers. It lives in our offering, it constantly evolves. We’re moving from a very product-driven company to one that’s very driven by the solution we offer customers. For example, a few years ago we created the Personal Wine Shopper position for our prestige customers. We increasingly support our customers in managing their wine cellar. Our goal is to remove all friction points in our customers’ experience.
Can you tell us more about how products are selected at Lavinia?
We have 6,500 references with about 3,000 French wines. This range includes both star cuvées and the great classified growths from Bordeaux, the legendary star winemakers, the big allocations. We also have a range with all the new winemakers. So I have to give credit to Virginie Morvan, our product and purchasing director. She has the talent of knowing how to maintain a close relationship with winemakers. She also has a knack for discovering and supporting young winemakers: those taking over and those just starting out. Our sommeliers tour vineyards in France and abroad when they can. They talk with the winemakers we already work with, who often point out new ones near them. Then, selection at Lavinia is always done based on tasting. It’s not blind tasting because they taste wines for what they are. We don’t taste a Vosne-Romanée and a casual everyday wine the same way, without judgement. We don’t expect the same thing from them. We have a lot of people contacting us through a small link at the bottom of our site, around 800 a year. We first ask them to present their philosophy. Even though taste quality comes first, we notice common traits in the wines we keep: human-scale estates, low intervention, focused on organic or biodynamic. Sometimes winemakers leave the selection. Generally, we work with winemakers over several years, but if there’s a change in philosophy that no longer matches our standards, the winemakers leave the selection. Virginie is completely independent because that’s a guarantee we give our customers.
Can you tell me a bit more about your exceptional wines list?
The exceptional wines list is something we created to address a wine dilemma. There are sometimes wines that are very expensive on the market price, even though they weren’t bought at that price from the winemaker. The problem is, if we respect the winemaker’s philosophy by selling the wine with a fair markup in the shop, that bottle gets bought and probably resold within days. On the other hand, if we sold them at market price, we’d betray the winemaker’s philosophy. To guarantee something to both winemakers and customers, we set up an exceptional wines list based on the principle that the bottle opened for the customer won’t be resold. That’s how you can find wines from Emmanuel Reynaud, for example, starting at around 40 euros, and plenty of others.
You mentioned exclusive cuvées, what are those?
It’s first a way of supporting the winemaker. We commit to volumes in exchange for a cuvée dedicated to Lavinia. We give the winemaker the guarantee of a commitment on volume and over time.
You have a huge stock of bottles here, that represents serious value. Do you know the value of the cellar?
Monitoring buy and sell prices is very complicated in wine. There are tons of wines with no EAN, meaning no barcode. We have a very strong purchasing team. At Lavinia we hold the stock because it’s a guarantee of authenticity, conservation and traceability for our customers, but it’s complex. It’s even more complex because to offer ready-to-drink wines, you have to have bought them years ago.
Can you tell us more about the events Lavinia organizes?
It’s something we’ve invested heavily in and right now we’re really sad because we miss the contact in our cellars a lot. Wine experiences are fundamental. In 2019, we put on nearly 100 events in the year: from tasting workshops to prestige dinners and events our regulars know well. That didn’t stop with lockdown, but it transformed into something more digital, on social media or via video conference.
What would it take to change the way wine is sold online?
We still have a lot of room to maneuver. The choice we made, a few years ago now, is to digitize our offering and make it visible to people who don’t know us. We’re on the Amazon marketplace, on Rakuten. We were the first Amazon Prime Now partner with two-hour delivery in Paris. That meant being able to prepare orders in 15 minutes in store. We’re also on the Carrefour marketplace. For a few weeks now, we’ve also been on Veepee. We do it under the Lavinia brand, with our selection where we control the game. When we opened our first store in a shopping mall, it was obvious we needed to be at an audience crossroads. We’re doing the same thing online here. We’re making ourselves visible to people who are used to being on these marketplaces. We see it as a real lever for awareness, to get our offering and selection out there. We’re moving step by step and we’re very vigilant when it comes to our winemakers. Through this journey, we show that we’re a reference player and we hope to make our offering known to those people.
Do you have a wine book to recommend?
Yes, I’d talk about Ophélie Neiman’s book: “Le vin pour ceux qui n’y connaissent rien”. We had planned a nice event for this book and we can’t wait to do it, so I’d say the book by Miss Glouglou.
Do you have a recent wine you fell in love with?
Vignoble Deleu, who’s a young winemaker. His cuvée is called Virgule, 100% Roussanne. It’s maybe a tiny bit reductive at first but it’s a real way to discover this grape variety and to put a young winemaker forward, and we love that.
Who should be my next guest?
I have a friendly thought for Nicolas Goldschmidt, who’s the director of the master in international wine management at the OIV. We host him with his whole class at the end of each cycle, but this year we can’t do it. He helps create entire classes who go on to become decision-makers in the wine world.
