With so much recent dialogue about the challenges our industry faces in engaging with and acquiring young consumers – from competition with other beverage categories, reduced alcohol consumption and general intimidation and wine snobbery – Patritti GM Justin Tiller thought he would conduct an experiment.
With an 18 year old recent Year 12 graduate living under my roof and a winery at my disposal, what better opportunity? I’ll let my daughter Annabelle tell the story…
“As a young person, I have always felt overwhelmed when met with anything to do with wine.
“It feels like there are unwritten rules around the types of wine I should be drinking, the way I should be smelling it and the flavours I should be tasting as I drink it.
“When my Dad first suggested that I should bring some friends to Patritti for a wine tour and tasting, I was nervous.
“None of my friends drink wine and haven’t had the exposure to wine that I have had, with my Dad being in the wine industry.
“To my surprise, all my friends were really interested in the way that wine is created and the different processes that the grapes go through, especially my two friends who studied chemistry and biology in high school.
“Following the tour, we tasted a variety of different wines, commenting on the flavours we could smell and taste, as well as the colours of the different wines.
“We all learnt a valuable lesson that day: that wine and how you drink it can be whatever you want.
“There are no rules.
“We learnt that wine changes based on the food you eat it with, the amount of oxygen it is exposed to, and most of all, your own taste buds.
“The wine industry intrigues us because there is something for everyone, alongside the ideology of bringing a bottle of wine to share, something we don’t do with alcohol a lot.
“After this experience, we now highly recommend for people our age to go on wine tours and tastings as the process of making wine really interested us and we believe other young people would enjoy it too.
“We are excited to try new varieties of wine in the future, as well as experiment with adding flavours to wine, especially the sparkling wines like Prosecco, so we can continue to enjoy wine in the future!”
Funnily enough, the outcome of this ‘experiment’ didn’t really surprise me.
If us dinosaurs cast our minds back, most of us were very much the same at 18, experimenting with lambrusco, spumante, wine coolers, flagons of port and goon bags.
So what better time to experiment with wine?
To be honest, most of us are probably equally intimated trying to engage with these young consumers and also don’t invest a great deal of time because they won’t pay the bills today.
But they are smart, savvy, social and inquisitive and are tomorrow’s consumers.
Many of them, including several in this group, are already hospitality professionals working in bars and restaurants and will be great allies for our industry.
As an industry we need to continue to find ways to engage with these new consumers to secure our future.
A key element is to be open minded, flexible and to adapt.
Nothing should be off limits.
As they mature, their tastes and interests will as well and I am certain they will enjoy the same wines in the same way that we all do, plus they will no doubt also introduce us to other new ways of enjoying wine.
After tasting through an extensive range of wines, I offered them each a bottle to take home and share with their friends and family.
And sure enough, every one of them chose a bottle of pink Moscato!
But thinking about those girls sharing that bottle, engaging with wine and making memories makes me smile.
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