Message in a Bottle

The Winefuture 2011 conference will attract stellar names in viniculture to Hong Kong in November. gerrie lim meets Winefuture’s spirited founder, PANCHO CAMPO, who insists only a sea change in attitude will see the industry reach its potential

PANCHO CAMPO, THE debonair president of the Wine Academy of Spain, believes “wine without culture is just alcoholism,” and he has logged up air miles aplenty to extol the virtues of the vine. Campo’s networking savvy finds its latest expression in Winefuture, an international wine-marketing conference that he created, and which was first held in 2009 in La Rioja, Spain.

For three days next month (November 6-8), hotshots of the wine world will descend upon Hong Kong for the second Winefuture Conference (winefuture.hk), a collaboration between Campo’s academy and the Asia Wine Service and Education Centre, a Hong Kong-based wine school. The event will be held at AsiaWorld-Expo, and the staggering array of guest speakers features famous names such as Robert Parker, Jancis Robinson, Randall Grahm, Angelo Gaja, Miguel Torres, Jaime Araujo, Francis Ford Coppola, Christian Seely, Eduardo Chadwick, Mel Dick, Zelma Long, Michel Rolland, Stephen Spurrier, Pierre Lurton and Kevin Zraly. Delegates from Asia include the only three female Masters of Wine on this side of the globe: Jeannie Cho Lee, Debra Meiburg and Lisa Perrotti-Brown.

Leading the pack, Parker will conduct a special Bordeaux tasting, while Robinson will lead a unique master class on the wines of Slovenia, Brazil, China and other emerging wine-producing countries. “She wants to open up people’s eyes,” Campo enthuses with raised eyebrows, “and show them there’s more to wine than Spain, France, Italy, Chile and Argentina.” Campo himself will lead a seminar on Spanish wine, featuring music videos specially created for the event. “I’ve chosen 16 wines that represent the variety and diversity of Spanish wine, from sherry to cava to Rioja and Ribera del Duero, and each wine will be accompanied by a video that takes you into the vineyard, into the winery, and shows you the winemakers, all with accompanying music. The idea is that you watch the video and you’ll be ready to taste the wine.”

The idea of bringing the conference to Hong Kong originally sprang from a chat between Campo and Parker. “We were on the phone, tossing around ideas, and he said, ‘Listen, Pancho, your event is called Winefuture, and the future of wine is in Asia. And in Asia, the capital of wine is Hong Kong. If you do the next one in Hong Kong, I’m in.’” And so the floodgates opened. With Parker on board, other luminaries followed.

The Hong Kong gathering, however, will differ from that in Spain. “We had a very successful event in Rioja,” Campo remembers. “We had over 1,000 delegates from 52 countries, only 28 percent of which were Spaniards, and we had 40 speakers – the 40 most powerful and most influential leaders in the wine industry. There was only one tasting: Robert Parker’s master class on Grenache, or Garnacha, as we say in Spanish, and it was huge. We had 550 tasters, we had to open 750 bottles, and we had 24 sommeliers from all over the world. We used 11,000 glasses. This time, in Hong Kong, we are going to have 20,000 glasses and Bob will conduct a tasting called The Magical 20. He has chosen 20 wines, all Bordeaux, and the beauty of this is that he will be tasting the wines accompanied by all the chateau owners, so it is going to be a legendary tasting, the largest Bordeaux tasting in the history of the industry.”

Campo doesn’t seem at all fazed by the gargantuan task ahead. Prior to gaining his Master of Wine credentials, he worked in sports marketing after retiring as a tennis professional. Born in Chile, he captained the Chilean tennis team at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, after which he experienced an epiphany. “After the Olympics, I noticed that spectators were losing interest in tennis,” he recalls. “They thought the matches were too long and boring, and there were no flamboyant characters – the only one then was Andre Agassi. And the girls’ tennis was not exciting and audiences were falling, so these guys really had to change the whole concept.

“They started introducing music and little shows between games, so it became entertainment. They changed the whole branding. Like now, if you go to watch football, like if you watch the Champions League, in the pre-match entertainment you have rap singers and dancing. It’s cool. And that just doesn’t happen in wine. Why? Because I consider these people a bunch of old farts. You know, they sit there with their glasses of wine…” Campo pauses, picks up a glass, sniffs at the rim and swirls it mockingly. “And they start telling you all these weird names of things you find in the glass, and all that. That’s why we decided to do these videos for the upcoming conference, with all the music, because that’s the only way you’re going to get to the young people. And you have to make your language simple and easy to understand and exciting. When I created Winefuture, there was economic crisis in Europe, but there were also other problems with communicating and marketing, so it felt like the perfect time to do a summit.”

Unlike Parker, Campo is ambivalent about Asia being a supposed godsend in these trying times. “I have heard people say that France is a recuperating territory and gaining market share again, and I say yes and no,” he says. “It has made an impact with Bordeaux because of China, but only for the Grands Crus. The guys who are selling millions of litres of other Bordeaux appellations are still struggling, and the guys making wine in the Languedoc are still struggling. One day, there will be not enough Petrus and Lafite for China and they will start looking to other regions in France or to other countries. You cannot just rely on this. Maybe one day, China will get tired of wine.”

Campo saw the problem coming, back in 2004 in Spain. “I saw that a lot of money was going into building new wineries, employing famous architects, producing expensive wine, and every celebrity in Spain wanted to have his own winery,” he says. “And I said, ‘I don’t see it.’ All this money was going in, wineries were being built by the dozens every month, but consumption was going down, down, down. ‘Who is going to drink all this?’ I explained to people that I came from the world of marketing and sports, which for me is king – sports marketing is the king of marketing – and I see a problem, and eventually the problem is going to be big. There is going to be so much wine, we’re going to be swimming in wine, with no people drinking the wine.”

Campo’s perspective opposes the current bullish optimism regarding the Asian market. “Even considering the increase in wine consumption in Asia, which has gone up about 125 percent,” he argues, “it’s not enough to give a positive balance worldwide. Worldwide wine consumption decreased six percent last year, even with the increase in Asia. This is because in Europe consumption is going down. Cultural behaviour is changing, and the wine industry is here and the consumer is there, and the bridge between the two doesn’t exist. Wine is not communicating properly with the consumer.”

He reserves his harshest criticism for his own kind. “The people who need to be educated are the people in the trade,” Campo says. “People might say we have the Internet and social media now, but I say, ‘No. If the message is wrong, it doesn’t matter if you use Twitter or Facebook. The message will continue to be wrong.’ The wine industry has to design and develop a new message, [be made] more sexy, more appealing, and then you can use social media to communicate that. Winemakers need to understand the value of marketing and communicating. Wine politicians – as I call them, the appellation bodies – need to understand that it’s not about regulating, it’s about promoting. And sommeliers need to understand that they are not the star of the show, and neither is the wine. It’s the consumer. Wine is the vehicle to make the consumer happy, and you are just the guy serving the wine and recommending it.” In that sense, everyone in the wine trade is really a sommelier in disguise, and the resulting commonality underscores what Winefuture 2011 in Hong Kong will surely be about. “Addressing problems,” Campo insists, “that are important for everybody.”