August 21, 2025 • 45 mins
Enotoursim has been a staple in the tourism trade. One of my favorite podcast was with JoAnne Dupuy, the woman who delivered the wines from Napa to Steven Spurrier in Paris for the Judgement In Paris. She was the leading Enotourist company in America.
As time would have it, Enotourism had seen its days, slumping a bit for the past decade...until now. Though wine sales are off and the wine industry is scurrying to define the cause of this slump, enotourism could save the day. Meet Bill Callejas, he is grassroots and has created an enotourism company from sheer passion.
Bill Callejas didn’t just stumble into wine tourism—he reverse-engineered it from the ground up, blending the precision of his production background with a storyteller’s flair and an explorer’s curiosity. You’ll be hard pressed to find a more nuanced perspective on wine travel, or a more convincing case for ditching those cookie-cutter tours. In this episode, you’ll discover the real difference between “just another wine trip” and a thoughtfully crafted, immersive journey that brings you shoulder-to-shoulder with winemakers, artisans, and even the family matriarch preparing your meal. Bill reveals how he and his partners built World Wine Destinations around the idea that travel and wine are each a world unto themselves—each deserving of respect, intention, and creative design. Listeners will learn how each trip is structured like a multi-day live show, full of distinct characters, rising action, and the slow burn of discovery that comes from tasting with local experts in quiet, off-the-map villages. Expect revelations on why genuine wine travel can’t—and shouldn’t—be “dumbed down,” why asking winemakers about their intention often leads to the best stories, and how wine acts as a cultural glue, binding food, land, history, and people in an experience you can literally taste. Whether it’s the ancient amphorae of Greece, the wild terroir of Argentina, or the unexpected intimacy of Paso Robles, you’ll come away with an appreciation for how travel, when done right, changes not just what’s in your glass, but who you are as a drinker and a global citizen. Buckle up—one glass at a time, you’ll learn how the story of wine is best lived, not just told.
✅ Think you know wine travel? Think again.
✅ Discover how storytelling and immersive experiences are redefining wine tourism.
✅ On this episode of Wine Talks, host Paul Kalemkiarian sits down with Bill Callejas of World Wine Destinations to reveal why their unique approach skips the cookie-cutter tours and takes you straight into the heart—and the culture—of the world’s top wine regions.
✅ If you thought wine was just about tasting, you haven’t heard the stories that bring each glass to life. Hit play and get ready to plan your next adventure (and maybe reimagine what a wine trip can be)!
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World Wine Destinations
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Corner Wines (Plano, Texas)
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Website: https://www.cornerwines.com
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#winepodcast #winetourism #winetravel #wineculture #worldwinedestinations #BillCallejas #PaulKalemkiarian #winestories #winemakers #winetasting #culturalexperiences #wineregions #wineeducation #foodandwine #winehistory #immersivetravel #wineindustry #PasoRobles #winetrips #oenotourism
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
Wine is a social and cultural bonding agent,
if you will. It is able to bring people together
around stories and around meals and around
tasting. But there's also historic aspects
to the role that wine has played. Sit back and grab a
glass. It's Wine Talks with Paul K.
(00:26):
Hey, welcome to Wine Talks with Paul K. And we are in studio today in
beautiful Southern California, about to have a conversation with Bill colleges
of world wine destinations. Yes, I am the guy that tastes 17
million bottles of wine. I didn't taste 17 million. I sold 17 million
bottles of wine, but I did taste a hundred thousand bottles along the
way. And I heard a hundred thousand stories. And that's what Wine talks is about.
(00:47):
It's telling the stories of the wine trade. So welcome to the show.
Thank you very much. Really happy to be here. This is going to be a
lot of fun because I was kind of explaining on a previous take of this
show that my
dad had started this idea, and I found one of his business cards. He got
that far in the idea anyway, which was to produce
(01:08):
trips to the famed wine fairs of
the world. At the time, we're talking about 1975, 76, 77.
And, you know, tourism was probably not nearly as
popular as it is today, but that's not what you always did. And
we'll get into that in a second. What. What landed you here in Eno?
Tourism. That became such an interesting idea. It really
(01:31):
stems from personal interest in wine and.
And not as anything serious, but just understanding and learning about
wine and meeting
my partners who had a wine shop in
Plano, Texas. We'd come down from New York. I was looking for a new
bottle shop, and Jim and Linda McDivitt had this
(01:54):
store called Corner Wines. And Jim had a
very, very, very, very effective way
of teaching and expanding your taste. And
that's really what drew me into the shop to understand more and more about
wine. And he just mentioned that they were trying
to get a travel program off the ground that would be
(02:16):
sort of a community built around the win customer
base. And as we talked about that and they
told me about a little bit, I said, you know, that's something
we could probably do ourselves if you wanted to do it. I
come out of the production world, and I've been moving people and
dealing with logistics and hotels and restaurants and
(02:38):
all kinds of destinations, air travel and such, for years. I
can move that. And, you know, the wine. What if we put that
together and started a wine travel company? And that's how world
wine destinations got off the ground. We discussed that Briefly
in our pre call and that is every
company that
(03:01):
entered the wine trade and we were in the direct to consumer wine
business, which is a very important part of the trade now. But every company that
started, that would start with this sort of comprehensive idea of
what they're going to do to the wine trade, they're going to completely revamp the
whole world. They're going to make everybody think differently about wine. And so they're going
to have a subscription model, which we were of course, they were going to have
(03:21):
travel, they were going to have accessories, they're going to have rare wine
finds. All the things that you, that you sort of try to build into a
wine company. And every one of them landed back
at just a subscription model because they found it too expensive and too hard to
do. Was that was logistically were you expecting what
you found when you started this conversation with your wine shop?
(03:45):
There were no real surprises other than
both of us
understood that there was the wine business and there
was the travel business. And they really were two
separate professions and they had to be dealt as such.
And anybody, and I know you have that's led a wine trip before,
(04:09):
it is a nail biting, harrowing experience
because nothing can go wrong and everything
potentially can't. And you're traveling internationally and
we're out in some pretty rural areas as
wine growing, as grape growing tends to be. And
(04:30):
there was a real good respect between us that Jim and
Linda understood the wine and I understood the
logistics and the building of experiences because part of
my background was also in production and as a
creative director, a writer director. And a lot of the
last 15, 20 years of my career was
(04:52):
built around live experiences created for
audiences that were brand storytelling.
And these are huge events and
auto shows and those sorts of things where you
have to emotionally connect an audience with
a product or a service, a story, and
(05:14):
what is actually happening within the
production that stimulates them and engages them and
helps them care. And that's really seemed to be the
secret. Could we build wine experiences
using travel as the way to connect people? And could we
pull it off? And we started back in 2010,
(05:38):
early 2011, and we've been going ever since.
We're now going into the last trips to
2025. How many trips a year are you doing
now? It depends. Sometimes it's two, sometimes
it's four. There's no set, there's no
set, there's no set target, if you will.
(06:03):
We usually present our customer base and the people that we market to
with five or six options and we start to see who's interested in this
and who's interested in that. And
initially we thought, boy, we'll be really lucky if we
can get people to do this once,
maybe twice. There really wasn't a lot of wine travel at
(06:25):
the time, and certainly not the kind we were doing.
And so we now are at a. At a place in
25, 20, 25, where we're entertaining
about a 92, 93% repeat rate.
We have customers that have done 10 and 12
trips with us over the years. And over the last
(06:48):
several years, we've had customers do two trips a year, which
is a pretty big commitment on their part. So
something about these trips is they're finding really
enjoyable. They're telling their friends, they're bringing their friends, and they're
expanding that base. You know, it's interesting you.
You use a term, not what we are doing. And I'm wondering. And
(07:10):
you and I discussed briefly Joanne Dupuis, who was doing shows
in the 70s, and I won't bore you with that detail again, but
I wonder what that. What is different that you think is different about when you
say what, not. What we are doing right off the bat?
I think both Jim and I agreed that we were not real big fans of
tours. And so we wanted to create a
(07:33):
travel experience that was built around wine and food.
That was not the typical tour. It would be something we
would want to go on and not be hustled and moved about
on some relentless schedule that stepped
on your enjoyment of being able to spend time and getting
to know winemakers and getting to know the culture
(07:55):
and other things. But the part that resonated with
me, and it's how we structure trips now,
is out of my experience in production. And if you think
about episodic television, you are doing a
shoot. And this shoot has multiple days, and it has multiple setups.
And you're trying to accomplish this, and you're trying to string it all together
(08:19):
to a script, to a concept, to an episode,
to bring it to some enjoyable
outcome. And the way we look at it is each
day is like a shoot. Each day has
setups. Each day has characters. Our
talent is both our customer base and the winemakers
(08:41):
or the restaurateurs or the hoteliers, and they
all fit into a day. And we structure where we go
and how long it takes to get there, and what is the wine
experience? What is the eating experience? And we structure all
that on a daily basis, and then we need to raise it the second
day, and we need to give them Some breathing room the third day, and we
(09:03):
have to bring it up again. So we have to orchestrate an
individual day's storytelling with anywhere from seven to
12 days of storytelling, so that the whole experience
feels like an
emotionally based experience, that it feels like a story,
and it presents them with a wide array of things.
(09:26):
And it's very hard for somebody to find something that they don't like within any
given day. So that's really what makes us different.
Because, you know, it's interesting, I suppose. Had you been on a wine tour
by yourself or had your. Your partners been on a wine tour?
Jim and Linda had, and they had originally had a
(09:46):
travel agent that was putting together a couple of trips for
them. Some of those were on a cruise and they would do it
and. But you were sort of bound by the boat,
and you were bound by where the boat was going and what
relationships the cruise company had with what wineries.
And we were very much about wanting to bring people
(10:09):
into the regions, but to find the undiscovered producer,
the small volume, low production, high
quality producer that may or may not have had very much
distribution in the States, in particular in
Texas, you know, more specifically. And
so being able to free ourselves from that
(10:31):
kind of confine, you know, really
led to the creation of an immersive experience
that moved us deeper and deeper, not only into the
wine regions, but deeper and deeper into the conversations
and moments with the winemakers and the marketers
and the staffs and the
(10:53):
culture, the wine culture and that in any of these
countries. So we really take people in
to places that they normally would never go. You know, it's kind
of interesting thought because you said travel agent. My mind went to
an old movie called if It's Tuesday, It Must Be Belgium. Now
that is effectively sort of
(11:17):
a satirical view and almost
depressing view of humanity when it comes to being put on a tour. The title
says it, which, if it's Tuesday, must be Belgium. In other words, we don't know
what we're doing, but if it's Tuesday, we must be in Belgium. Because that's what
the, the, the script says. And
it's, it's, it's not funny. I watched it again. I go, this
(11:37):
is really, really bad. But it was very funny in the 60s. It was a
very important film at the time. And I started thinking when you said, we use
the travel agent to go on a tour, and that certainly would be
exactly the wrong thing to do because the travel
agent's objective is completely different than what sounds like your
objective is which is to tell the story of wine. You know, it's interesting
(11:58):
because I've been pitching on the show forever, and. And
it's. It's part of the complexion of wine right
now to tell the story. And so here you are doing a
story like life. It is. It
does have that, I think, being in the live event experience,
you know, where you've got an audience of 3,000, 5,000,
(12:21):
10,000, you're working
out of a. Sometimes a sports truck, multi camera,
sometimes, you know, the front of house operations,
calling live cues and presenting
a lot of moving parts, a lot of video roles, and of
course, executive speakers who always like to wing it
(12:45):
because it's really confused. She's got her right.
So you're really having to engage people. And one of the things that I
noticed at front of house, which is, you know, really in the
back behind the audience calling the show and
accused, is as soon as the lights would go out, when the
speaker would come up, you would see all the little phones
(13:06):
and all the laptops light up as the audience would immediately
just disconnect from what was going on there. And we
really focused ourselves on how to change that and what
could we do? And that was to somehow involve them in the stories.
So in content that we developed, we involved
a lot of the people in the company and a lot of their outposts and
(13:30):
a lot of their regions and all that in the story. And they were now
seeing themselves as part of what the presentation
was. And it just wasn't talking heads and rolling the financials.
We applied that same thinking. Here is our
winemakers, and I call them ours, they're obviously
not, but we have relationships that we've developed over time
(13:52):
with many winemakers who understand our brand
and they understand our people. They call
one another and they say, definitely meet with the world. Wine
destinations, folks, because they're different. It's
not drive by wine tasting. They're not here to
pound wine. They're here to ask questions,
(14:15):
hear what you've got to say, listen to your stories,
and not a huge thing on the technical side.
They want to get a feeling for what it is that you're doing.
So when we have these families that have been in business, you know,
on farms, and we have one place we go
in South Africa, that they're operating in a winery that
(14:38):
was built in 1798 and still making wine in that
handmade way, it is
just an experience that puts
our guests into their world,
into the winemaker's world. And that's
the only promise we really make everything else sort of spills
(15:00):
out in some wonderful way. We don't overly
describe every minute of the day. There's flexibility,
there's plenty of free time. But we get them
immersed in the wine culture, the food and
the things that there are to see and do. Where else are you going to
go on a safari. Thank you. Than wine tasting in South
(15:23):
Africa? There are things we do there we can't do anywhere else in the world.
As an example, you did this since
2010. So your first actual trip was when.
The first one that we did as worldwide destinations would have been
January. And it may have been 2010, it may be a 2011.
And we went down to South America and we had
(15:46):
had some very good relationships Jim had built with
distributors and he was very keen on
Argentinian and Chilean wines. And so because of the
relationship with the distributors that he had, they would help
open doors for us to get us into the wineries. It was a terrific
model. And that is actually how we met
(16:07):
Stephanie Morton Small when she was the chief brand
officer at Finca to Sara. And you know, that has
become a decades long relationship
and
those kinds of opportunities to bring people to places that they
might not normally go. I want to go to
(16:30):
Rome, I want to go to Paris, I want to go to this.
Well, how about Santiago or how about
Mendoza, Argentina? What? You know, so
it was, it was very new and very different and taking them out
into the rural areas and we would go to the cities too, but
most of it was, was going out into the vineyards and going out into the
(16:53):
rural areas. And that was something that a lot of these folks had never done
before. I think that we were discussed this briefly, but I'm going to say it
here for the listeners. And I, and I. But it's a new. It's not new,
but it's the way I've been placing it in the podcast
and on other shows. It's an important feature of wine, which
is if you were to pick five elements of a culture to
(17:14):
describe a culture, you certainly. If the culture has a
language like Armenian, we have a language. If you have land, Armenian
happens to have land too. They may not, who knows in the near future, but
they currently have land. So those are two important features of a culture.
Certainly cuisine would be part of that and then possibly music
or, you know, books and things. But then wine has to be in the
(17:36):
top five expressions of culture.
If they have a culture of wine in their trade and almost every country in
the world has something or spirit of some sort, how
does that play into your role when you get
to a destination like that? Because we're focused on
wine travel. The way we look at wine
(17:59):
across those points, and they're all part of it, is
wine is a. A social and cultural bonding
agent, if you will. It is able to bring people
together around stories and around
meals and around tasting. But there's also
historic aspects to the role that wine has played. We
(18:20):
find that in Greece. And you know, our Greece folks will tell,
you know, they'll say, well, this is where wine was invented in
winemaking. And then we all know that that didn't happen there.
Armenia, that 6,000 year old Georgia will. Fight you on
that too. Georgia, yeah, it's all that. But the
idea was that the common thread was that
(18:43):
all these folks enjoyed wine. And we were plugging into
not only the culture of a country,
but also into the wine culture and the food and wine.
Because most of the rest of the world,
they don't really treat wine as a cocktail. There's always
food around it, or there seems to be. And
(19:06):
we in the States have tended to substitute
wine for cocktails in a lot of occasions.
And the food and the wine are almost are inseparable.
The idea that having a meal
prepared by the winemaker's mother or by
the family being out in the vineyard, coming in
(19:29):
for a meal that's sourced completely by the food that's around,
that's growing around the area and the region is really a
spectacular experience. And it
pulls all those elements together. Wine seems to be right in the
center of it for this kind of trout. I mean, wine is.
It's been said in various tomes that it's the
(19:51):
intellectual part of a meal and that you don't get that from Jack Daniels
or beer. You have a good time, but you don't get that sort of
cerebral stimulation that you get with a glass of wine. You know,
it's kind of interesting when you're talking about the culture expose. I sent a young
lady off. In fact, she's coming in this week to do a podcast with her
mother. She spent six weeks at Bayi in the pace of my own district.
(20:12):
We got her internship there through the Wine of the Month club.
Internship. And I was just talking
to her the other night. She's a college student, she's probably 19 or 20.
And I said, well, there's a new book out from the Cladstrup
family. They wrote the book Wine and War. And the book is about
Eugenie, the last Empress of France.
(20:35):
And she started to talk. She says, oh, yes, blah, blah, blah. I'm like thinking
to myself, how would you know that you're studying
winemaking at Cornell? You're not. This is. She goes, no, we went to
Chateau Guiscord and they talked about how she used to stop there all the time
on her way to Brittany. And I'm like, oh my gosh. How
important then is culture around wine,
(20:57):
particularly wine of these old districts, like let's call them Old World.
I mean, how important does that feel and how stimulated
do your guests get when they start connecting these dots?
Greece in particular.
I recall that we were visiting a museum in
(21:17):
Crete and
there were the wine vessels, if you will, the
terracotta. Yeah. The amphora and those things. And
you could see wine in the art. You could
see that wine was a through, you know, was sort of a
throughput through the various
(21:39):
aspects of their history and their archeological history.
And so it was very much eye opening in
Mendoza. You hear them talk about
what the Malbec business used to be when it was a
state run. The wine business was a state run
enterprise in Argentina. And Malbec
(22:02):
got a pretty bad name from that. And
later on, when the government let go of that
sort of socialized ownership of that wine business,
Nicholas Catena was sort of the guy that came out and led the
resurgence of Baalbek. And when you meet, you meet his
daughter, you know, you meet Laura, you meet Adriana, you
(22:24):
meet, you know, some of the other kids that I call them
kids, they're, they're, they're all grown. But you need them and you understand
that they are components in a, in a wine story that
is historic and that redefined an industry
within that country. And you can find it in Paso Robles,
which is one of the two domestic trips that we do. When
(22:47):
you're on a property and they're pointing over there to the foundations
where, well, there was the cabin where, you know, Jesse
James, when Frank James was hiding out after they got
run out of Missouri or wherever it was. And you're seeing these
connections to these different, to these different historic
moments. And here they are existing in a vineyard. And
(23:09):
here's stories are fascinating. Here's where James Jean crashed on Highway
46. I was so
disappointed when I went there because I went to the little diner there on the
way. And it goes 300 yards from here. James Jean. I don't want to
be 300 yards from the place. I want to be at the place. You know,
I just passed through it in May on my way
(23:30):
out of one of our wine tours. In Paso Robles.
And they have put the. You know, they got the fence up and they've
got now a new plaque and they've got a light and they've.
They're sort of modernizing it. But. Yeah, it's a bit of a
disappointment. But I don't know what I was expecting. Sort of a torn up
Porsche or what was I expecting? Yeah, I don't know. It's just like you're standing
(23:52):
there and that picture is so iconic. And there's that last. James Dean's
last stop before he died. You know that. Yeah. I mean, it. It's.
You stop and you look. You do. I. You know, we. My
wife and I thought we were going to retire in Paso and we'll. We'll talk
about Paso because I think it's a great wine district. And actually in some
cases. I had a conversation yesterday with Jason Haas of
(24:13):
Tablas Creek, and it's actually a district of California
that actually is rather expressive and in a very short
amount of time has been able to produce wines of terroir character. Now it's
got. It's got that opulent fruit forward sort of mystique.
Mystique, but sort of a public Persona about it because that's what
sells. But you also can insure yourself to have an
(24:35):
Adelaide, you know, district wine that will have a
character that's different than the rest. But I think it's important. But we really
thought we were gonna. We were gonna retire there. And I bought 60 acres
and I went and bought boots, you know, and I have a cowboy stuff.
And I realized that was never gonna happen. You know, that was just not my
Persona. And it ended up being a beach house in Hermosa where you can
(24:58):
see my color. I've been there quite frequently lately, so. But when you go to
Paso and you take these people, are they. Are they abused? Are
they surprised? Are they mystified that this even
exists? And it's so big. The biggest
eye opener. And it's why we. We chose Paso
because it fit our brand and our model of going
(25:20):
into wine producing regions of the world
and finding the undiscovered
gems that were there. And
we started working on Paso in
2021. And I went up and down the
coast, basically.
(25:42):
We had sort of put Napa and Sonoma off to the side
because that was very overdeveloped in its wine
tourism sort of vibe. But basically went
down from Lodi and Livermore all the way down to
Temecula. And taking a look at the wines in
San Diego county, and it came back to
(26:04):
Paso. Paso was doing things with Rhone
wines. And we had
been to the Rhone, we'd been to Southern Rhone, and we have tasted
Rhone wines in Greece. We have tasted, you know,
Rhone wines in South Africa, just understanding what people were doing with the
varieties. But Paso and
(26:27):
Jason Haas is a great example. Jason
took us on probably one of the best vineyard tours that we
had ever been on around the world. And
he. We had been scheduled for a previous visit, and he got
called up to a sustainability conference in Napa, and he said,
I can have somebody else do it. And I said, I'd love for our people
(26:49):
to meet you, and I'd love to wait. So the next year,
he did it. He took us through, and in every
single place in Paso, we learned something. And
now, since so many of our people are now adding Paso
into their mix of world wine experiences, world
wine destinations experiences, they're able to ask questions
(27:12):
that relate to what they learned in South Africa or what they learned
in France or what they learned in Greece. And the
winemakers get into this. So Paso
gave us the intimacy, the time with the
winemakers, and there's some sensational
winemakers there. And it also had multiple districts.
(27:35):
So drinking on the west side with Michael Barreto, with
Carl Boker in Willow Creek area, and then going
over to Creston on the east side and drinking
with Sterling over at Cass or with
Patty Bellow at B and E.
It really gave us a good mix of
(27:58):
what Passer was capable of and some exceptionally
good wine. And now Slow coast as its own
Ava has emerged. It's been quite an experience.
So it filled the things that we had based our development
on internationally. And Paso was the best place
to not replicate it, but to expand that experience and do
(28:22):
it domestically. We're going into our fifth year. You said going into
Paso, I just had this huge flashback. There was
a winery called Creston Manor, and I forgot what it
became. It was owned by Alex Trebek. That's
right. And he had the great. He had this couple
came over their name now, but they were relentless. And they
(28:44):
would come, and the wines were good, and they would come to my office, and
they would just put the pressure on me and squeeze on me to buy
more. And I said, finally, I said, look, if I can come and taste
with Alex Trebek, I'll buy more. And it never happened. So, yeah,
just trying to leverage that. Yeah, the property is just down from
B and E, and. And there's lots of stories about it that
(29:06):
everybody's happy to share. I think there was even a Jeopardy
question about it. But anyway, you know, on the,
on, on the web, it's kind of a confusing and
problematic subjects for me to
follow after all these years of doing this. And every
generation that comes into this trade or comes into any trade really has
(29:27):
fresh eyes, but also has probably neglected some of the history. And
wine is so. Is so unique. And I think your story,
just the idea that you brought from another industry, sort of the
logistical part of it, is pretty rare because there's not too many industries that
cross over into the wine trade because wine is
controlled. There's three tiers here in America. And it's such an
(29:49):
emotional purchase that, you know, none of the business
school. And I can't tell you how many MBAs I've had on this
show that, like, yeah, I tried to use the stuff I learned at school, and
it just doesn't work, you know, because it's so different. But one of the things
that bothers me is most influencers are going to say,
we're going to make wine simple. We're going to dumb it down, we're going to
(30:10):
make it approachable. And I just. I just don't see that's possible.
It is antithetical to the approach that we've taken,
which was to introduce and expand
first an appreciation for international
wines. And so many people have been, if
(30:32):
you're from the east coast, you're drinking a lot of Italian and French wine. If
you're out west, you're drinking a lot of California wine. And if you're in
Texas, it's sort of a fight to see who's going to dominate
in there. But California has a big footprint here.
Our idea was to bring people that
enjoyed wine and enjoyed travel and bring them
(30:55):
into places that they normally wouldn't go and expand their
appreciation of what was being done with these
wines and there and thereby be able to
expand their understanding. Okay. And the
winemakers would certainly all tell us about the wine's
technical aspects. And there are questions asked about
(31:16):
why, why this long in this wood and why this
in, you know, all the sorts of different aspects of how
the wine is being made and what the winemaker does. But
we do ask a question sometimes and we get some amazing
answers. And it was like, what
was your intention for this wine when you first
(31:39):
started putting this in the barrel or in the tank? But what was
your intention and how close did you get? Get to that?
And then you begin to get the stories of the happy accidents
and the things that they thought were not working. And
the slight change and the
suggestion from another winemaker. This is what we're doing
(32:02):
with that thing. And the
stories then speak to a community
in a highly competitive business. And again, Tassel Robles is a
really good example of this, and so is South Africa, for that matter.
These wine makers talk to each other, and they all are of
that idea that especially with international groups coming in,
(32:25):
if we engage with these people and we expand
their knowledge of our wines, it's going to be good for business.
It's going to be good for all of us. Go back to Napa in the
70s. So that has been a big part of
it. And we don't want to dumb anything down. We want
our folks to ask better and better questions. And we
(32:47):
noticed one thing. I think it was somewhere in Spain on a trip. And I
noticed that a couple of our customers always had notebooks
and they were taking notes. And
part of our swag. Now our trip bag is a
World Wine Destinations notebook with the pad, nice, small, can fit the
thing. And people are taking notes. They are
(33:09):
asking questions based on something they heard at a previous
winery. They are getting knowledge about the
varieties. They're getting knowledge about the wood. You know, when
they see their first barrel cooperage, which we ran into in France,
you know, these things are expanding.
They're understanding how complex the business is. And
(33:33):
we sort of tell the winemakers, don't feel like you have to pour a
half a glass in for this tasting. Yeah, right. Because none of us
feels good about dumping your wine, because it's not about it not tasting
good. They'll ask for more. But
they're going through this in a really
expanding way to do that. And that has been
(33:57):
really effective. But they do that about the food, and they do it
about the historic or archeological sites. They do it about
the music. And whether it's Portugal or whether it's
Spain, it doesn't matter. They get into it. It's
the intellectual part of the meal. And I don't see how you can talk about
dumbing it down. In fact, there's a guy from England who's an
(34:18):
amazingly successful influencer called the Wine
Wally, which is sort of the wine idiot in the English language. You
know, the Queen's English. And you should hear
him talk now. I mean, he's talking because he's done this for long enough that
he's learned all this stuff. And he. I don't. You know, now he's no longer
dumbed it down. You know, he's talking about all this stuff. And I don't know
(34:41):
because I don't think it exists. I think you can learn as much as you
want to learn. And there's never ending. Even the winemakers you, you are,
you visit are learning every day, as you said, they're
experimenting and they made a mistake and something happened. White zinfandel was a
mistake, you know,
so I just, it just annoys me that a generation comes in, this is
(35:03):
particularly Gen Z in this case, and
ignores all the previous stuff and
decides that something has to change when it really can't change.
How does it change? How does the interest level of your troop,
of your troops or your guests? How do you change
that?
(35:26):
I don't know that we have to change it. I believe they
change it themselves by us presenting them
with enough of an experience and the ability to have
emotional experience, emotion based
relationships with each
aspect of what constitutes or what comprises the
(35:48):
trip. So some of them were not big
fans of archeology, if you will. They left thinking
differently after they went to a dig in
Santorini, okay? They left differently thinking
about olive oil after Crete. They left differently
thinking about barbecue after they had their first
(36:10):
asado at a winemaker's house
in Mendoza. These things,
each one of these activities in a given day is an opportunity
to engage. And what we've done is simply listen to what they like
and what works and construct the trip around that.
(36:30):
We talk with our guests for months before
these trips go. We are the. Each itinerary
is customized. We mix the winemakers that we go
to. We always add new ones. We go back to some sensational
great experiences. But we are constantly expanding
our own understanding and therefore bringing our customers along with
(36:53):
that. But they're the ones that change themselves. And sometimes
it's pretty amazing to see it especially and the
perceptions that people had about South Africa. It's, it's
absolutely amazing the transformation that they go through. And that
part of travel is extremely. I mean, that's its
superpower. It's transformative. And wine and food
(37:15):
help that you turn a thought. And it's. We were
in, we were on, we were in Paris and this is recently,
but we were with friends who were on a,
you know, corporate thing tour, you know, where they rewards tour.
And so it was like all these. I used to have to build those. For
merit, I'm sure all these carpet guys and we're in the biggest hotel
(37:37):
in Paris. And it was, you know, we went down the. They go, come on
down to the basement and have, you know, it's free breakfast. I'M like, I'm not
going to eat American scrambled eggs and bacon because
you're on a tour. I'm in Paris, you know, I'm going to go get a
Paris pastry or something. But anyway, they had scheduled,
supposedly, a lesson, a cooking lesson with Alanda,
(37:57):
Casa's sous chef at some restaurant. We got on the bus, we got there, and
it was the worst thing you'd ever been through. It was horrible cooking
class. And what I'm saying is it was the kind
of cooking class you'd get on a tour put together by a travel
agent. Then when we were Sicily on the same trip,
we were in this very small town, and we booked ourselves in a cooking
(38:20):
class, and that was amazing. I mean,
we broke open the fava beans and peeled them ourselves, and then we put them
in the pot and we boiled them, and then we rolled the dough and we
put it in the pizza oven, and it was incredible. I'm
guessing that's the difference between your tours and
any other tour. We hand pick these folks because we're not
(38:41):
bound by any previous existing relationship. We
are not compensated in our business model by
commission from the places we go. No, that's important. And
that is something that my partners
and I sort of agreed upon right up in the front. If we
are going to be different, we cannot be beholden to
(39:03):
habits that are linked to how we monetize this
company. And so we pick whoever we
want to deal with. And that's down to guides.
Okay? We hand pick the guides, we hand pick the
restaurants. We hand pick the winemakers and the wineries.
We hand pick the hotels. We stay in boutique
(39:25):
hotels, we stay out at vineyards. We do not rush
to the biggest brand. And, you know, we don't.
But the other thing is, too, is we don't get involved in the airfare.
We give our guests the absolute freedom to
fly however they want on whatever carrier they
want to fly on, use their miles, do whatever they want,
(39:49):
get there, we'll get you at the airport and you're on your way.
Wow, That's a really great feature for somebody traveling who doesn't want to.
I'm one of those guys. I don't want to travel the way most
travel. I done it too much, and I just do it myself. Besides
the fact when I ran Wine of the Month, Club,
Federal Express let me charge our Federal Express
(40:12):
bill on my American Express card, which was amazing. For over 20
years, we were charging over $2 million a year on shipping charges.
And, my friend, none of those numbers are staggered. I had like 4 million points
at any given time. You know, I can go anywhere. I want to do the
highest class that they offered. And it didn't really matter because I. I wasn't paying
for it. So what's next? It makes a huge difference. It makes a
(40:35):
huge difference to. To our. To our guests because
it allows them a great deal of flexibility. And a lot of them will
go in early to a market. You know, if they want to do the
typical tourism things, let's say they've never been to Paris or
they've never been to Athens or whatever, and they want to do some of that.
Sure. They add a couple of days up front, or they add a couple of
(40:57):
days in the back and then get that done.
Or they fly to another destination or another country and finish up
their trip. That's great. It really. It's really built for them.
Well, what's next? What's. What's on the books right now for the next trip?
Our next trip will be into Oregon, into the
(41:19):
Willamette Valley. And Jim and Linda are leading that.
That is only our second domestic destination ever. And this
is the first trip that. That will run there. So we'll
see how that goes. We have great. This schedule already.
Yeah, it was sold out almost immediately. That goes down the 25th through
the 30th of of August. And the
(41:42):
two domestic trips are our shortest trips.
They're, you know, basically five and a half, six days in and out.
Ironically, I don't know what the numbers will end up being in
Oregon, but Paso Robles, on a dollar per dollar
basis, is probably one of the most expensive trips we run.
Because the costs of. Of doing
(42:05):
wine travel in California are significant. Not because it's
California, but because the wine industry. Trades like
that is absolutely, you know, into
maximizing. They have to, I mean, a lot. Of them
without tasting for $85. I mean, it's ridiculous. A lot of people
do it. And that was another thing. And as I lived in
(42:29):
Nap. I love Nap. I lived in nap in the 70s,
in 78, to be specific. And they were
still, despite Chateau
Montelena's rise, became. There was still enough.
There was still enough of what Napa was, where you could
drift in, meet a winemaker, taste,
(42:52):
understand a little bit. It was really approachable. And.
And the case is very different now. And you do
get a feeling in some of the more developed markets
that there's a lot of bottling of lifestyle, and
that lifestyle demands that that be a $350 or
$500 bottle of wine. And I'm enough
(43:15):
of a barbarian that once I get past 150, I really
can't taste the difference. So it's just
the idea of being able to find places that
are undeveloped and undiscovered, even though they've
been making wine for 300 or several thousand years.
Which leads us into next year to Croatia
(43:38):
as an example. We'll be hitting Croatia a year from now, next
September. Wow. For the first time, opening up a new market.
That was a last time we were there, and we're out of time, actually. But
last time we were in Croatia, you know, we traveled the coast. There's some
amazing things. And I didn't recognize any of the grapes. Of course,
you know, they're not even grapes. I know. From different parts of that
(44:01):
part of the world because their Croatian grapes are different. But, man, the wines
were so solid. And I relied on the psalms to
pair things and to just tell us, you know, the stylistically what we're looking for,
and they would pick them for us. This has been quite fascinating. I hope we
can do it again. We're out of. Absolutely. Happy to. It's
really, really fun. I'm interested to watch the progress
(44:23):
of wine world destinations and
what you're doing. And I think the next time we get on the call together,
I'm going to ask you how your personal growth
in wine has become. You just said you had one little threshold there.
You, over 150 bucks can't tell the difference. But
that's probably a good thing, actually. Jim would probably be
(44:46):
screaming right now. It's like these.
The. The. The ability to learn about wine
is always going to be driven by taste. Just my opinion. It's
got to start with what's in the glass. And then if I really want to
analyze that, I can ask questions and I can study and I can
go deeper. If I want to expand my
(45:08):
palette of wines that I like,
then this is how I've been able to do this,
and it seems to work. Well. Good
luck out there. We look forward to hearing more about it in the near future.
And so glad that Stephanie was able to get us together and have this
conversation. I think it's a really important part of our trade. And you
(45:31):
stumbled across, you know, a methodology that seems to
change the landscape of it a little bit. And. And
maybe this is the answer to some of the woes
of the wine tree, which is getting these experiences under people's
belt so they can have that conversation with their friends, and they can
talk about, you know, how interesting the subject matter
(45:53):
is absolutely. Absolutely.
Cheers. Cheers.
Wine is a social and cultural bonding agent,
if you will. It is able to bring people together
around stories and around meals and around
tasting. But there's also historic aspects
to the role that wine has played. Sit back and grab a
glass. It's Wine Talks with Paul K.
(00:26):
Hey, welcome to Wine Talks with Paul K. And we are in studio today in
beautiful Southern California, about to have a conversation with Bill colleges
of world wine destinations. Yes, I am the guy that tastes 17
million bottles of wine. I didn't taste 17 million. I sold 17 million
bottles of wine, but I did taste a hundred thousand bottles along the
way. And I heard a hundred thousand stories. And that's what Wine talks is about.
(00:47):
It's telling the stories of the wine trade. So welcome to the show.
Thank you very much. Really happy to be here. This is going to be a
lot of fun because I was kind of explaining on a previous take of this
show that my
dad had started this idea, and I found one of his business cards. He got
that far in the idea anyway, which was to produce
(01:08):
trips to the famed wine fairs of
the world. At the time, we're talking about 1975, 76, 77.
And, you know, tourism was probably not nearly as
popular as it is today, but that's not what you always did. And
we'll get into that in a second. What. What landed you here in Eno?
Tourism. That became such an interesting idea. It really
(01:31):
stems from personal interest in wine and.
And not as anything serious, but just understanding and learning about
wine and meeting
my partners who had a wine shop in
Plano, Texas. We'd come down from New York. I was looking for a new
bottle shop, and Jim and Linda McDivitt had this
(01:54):
store called Corner Wines. And Jim had a
very, very, very, very effective way
of teaching and expanding your taste. And
that's really what drew me into the shop to understand more and more about
wine. And he just mentioned that they were trying
to get a travel program off the ground that would be
(02:16):
sort of a community built around the win customer
base. And as we talked about that and they
told me about a little bit, I said, you know, that's something
we could probably do ourselves if you wanted to do it. I
come out of the production world, and I've been moving people and
dealing with logistics and hotels and restaurants and
(02:38):
all kinds of destinations, air travel and such, for years. I
can move that. And, you know, the wine. What if we put that
together and started a wine travel company? And that's how world
wine destinations got off the ground. We discussed that Briefly
in our pre call and that is every
company that
(03:01):
entered the wine trade and we were in the direct to consumer wine
business, which is a very important part of the trade now. But every company that
started, that would start with this sort of comprehensive idea of
what they're going to do to the wine trade, they're going to completely revamp the
whole world. They're going to make everybody think differently about wine. And so they're going
to have a subscription model, which we were of course, they were going to have
(03:21):
travel, they were going to have accessories, they're going to have rare wine
finds. All the things that you, that you sort of try to build into a
wine company. And every one of them landed back
at just a subscription model because they found it too expensive and too hard to
do. Was that was logistically were you expecting what
you found when you started this conversation with your wine shop?
(03:45):
There were no real surprises other than
both of us
understood that there was the wine business and there
was the travel business. And they really were two
separate professions and they had to be dealt as such.
And anybody, and I know you have that's led a wine trip before,
(04:09):
it is a nail biting, harrowing experience
because nothing can go wrong and everything
potentially can't. And you're traveling internationally and
we're out in some pretty rural areas as
wine growing, as grape growing tends to be. And
(04:30):
there was a real good respect between us that Jim and
Linda understood the wine and I understood the
logistics and the building of experiences because part of
my background was also in production and as a
creative director, a writer director. And a lot of the
last 15, 20 years of my career was
(04:52):
built around live experiences created for
audiences that were brand storytelling.
And these are huge events and
auto shows and those sorts of things where you
have to emotionally connect an audience with
a product or a service, a story, and
(05:14):
what is actually happening within the
production that stimulates them and engages them and
helps them care. And that's really seemed to be the
secret. Could we build wine experiences
using travel as the way to connect people? And could we
pull it off? And we started back in 2010,
(05:38):
early 2011, and we've been going ever since.
We're now going into the last trips to
2025. How many trips a year are you doing
now? It depends. Sometimes it's two, sometimes
it's four. There's no set, there's no
set, there's no set target, if you will.
(06:03):
We usually present our customer base and the people that we market to
with five or six options and we start to see who's interested in this
and who's interested in that. And
initially we thought, boy, we'll be really lucky if we
can get people to do this once,
maybe twice. There really wasn't a lot of wine travel at
(06:25):
the time, and certainly not the kind we were doing.
And so we now are at a. At a place in
25, 20, 25, where we're entertaining
about a 92, 93% repeat rate.
We have customers that have done 10 and 12
trips with us over the years. And over the last
(06:48):
several years, we've had customers do two trips a year, which
is a pretty big commitment on their part. So
something about these trips is they're finding really
enjoyable. They're telling their friends, they're bringing their friends, and they're
expanding that base. You know, it's interesting you.
You use a term, not what we are doing. And I'm wondering. And
(07:10):
you and I discussed briefly Joanne Dupuis, who was doing shows
in the 70s, and I won't bore you with that detail again, but
I wonder what that. What is different that you think is different about when you
say what, not. What we are doing right off the bat?
I think both Jim and I agreed that we were not real big fans of
tours. And so we wanted to create a
(07:33):
travel experience that was built around wine and food.
That was not the typical tour. It would be something we
would want to go on and not be hustled and moved about
on some relentless schedule that stepped
on your enjoyment of being able to spend time and getting
to know winemakers and getting to know the culture
(07:55):
and other things. But the part that resonated with
me, and it's how we structure trips now,
is out of my experience in production. And if you think
about episodic television, you are doing a
shoot. And this shoot has multiple days, and it has multiple setups.
And you're trying to accomplish this, and you're trying to string it all together
(08:19):
to a script, to a concept, to an episode,
to bring it to some enjoyable
outcome. And the way we look at it is each
day is like a shoot. Each day has
setups. Each day has characters. Our
talent is both our customer base and the winemakers
(08:41):
or the restaurateurs or the hoteliers, and they
all fit into a day. And we structure where we go
and how long it takes to get there, and what is the wine
experience? What is the eating experience? And we structure all
that on a daily basis, and then we need to raise it the second
day, and we need to give them Some breathing room the third day, and we
(09:03):
have to bring it up again. So we have to orchestrate an
individual day's storytelling with anywhere from seven to
12 days of storytelling, so that the whole experience
feels like an
emotionally based experience, that it feels like a story,
and it presents them with a wide array of things.
(09:26):
And it's very hard for somebody to find something that they don't like within any
given day. So that's really what makes us different.
Because, you know, it's interesting, I suppose. Had you been on a wine tour
by yourself or had your. Your partners been on a wine tour?
Jim and Linda had, and they had originally had a
(09:46):
travel agent that was putting together a couple of trips for
them. Some of those were on a cruise and they would do it
and. But you were sort of bound by the boat,
and you were bound by where the boat was going and what
relationships the cruise company had with what wineries.
And we were very much about wanting to bring people
(10:09):
into the regions, but to find the undiscovered producer,
the small volume, low production, high
quality producer that may or may not have had very much
distribution in the States, in particular in
Texas, you know, more specifically. And
so being able to free ourselves from that
(10:31):
kind of confine, you know, really
led to the creation of an immersive experience
that moved us deeper and deeper, not only into the
wine regions, but deeper and deeper into the conversations
and moments with the winemakers and the marketers
and the staffs and the
(10:53):
culture, the wine culture and that in any of these
countries. So we really take people in
to places that they normally would never go. You know, it's kind
of interesting thought because you said travel agent. My mind went to
an old movie called if It's Tuesday, It Must Be Belgium. Now
that is effectively sort of
(11:17):
a satirical view and almost
depressing view of humanity when it comes to being put on a tour. The title
says it, which, if it's Tuesday, must be Belgium. In other words, we don't know
what we're doing, but if it's Tuesday, we must be in Belgium. Because that's what
the, the, the script says. And
it's, it's, it's not funny. I watched it again. I go, this
(11:37):
is really, really bad. But it was very funny in the 60s. It was a
very important film at the time. And I started thinking when you said, we use
the travel agent to go on a tour, and that certainly would be
exactly the wrong thing to do because the travel
agent's objective is completely different than what sounds like your
objective is which is to tell the story of wine. You know, it's interesting
(11:58):
because I've been pitching on the show forever, and. And
it's. It's part of the complexion of wine right
now to tell the story. And so here you are doing a
story like life. It is. It
does have that, I think, being in the live event experience,
you know, where you've got an audience of 3,000, 5,000,
(12:21):
10,000, you're working
out of a. Sometimes a sports truck, multi camera,
sometimes, you know, the front of house operations,
calling live cues and presenting
a lot of moving parts, a lot of video roles, and of
course, executive speakers who always like to wing it
(12:45):
because it's really confused. She's got her right.
So you're really having to engage people. And one of the things that I
noticed at front of house, which is, you know, really in the
back behind the audience calling the show and
accused, is as soon as the lights would go out, when the
speaker would come up, you would see all the little phones
(13:06):
and all the laptops light up as the audience would immediately
just disconnect from what was going on there. And we
really focused ourselves on how to change that and what
could we do? And that was to somehow involve them in the stories.
So in content that we developed, we involved
a lot of the people in the company and a lot of their outposts and
(13:30):
a lot of their regions and all that in the story. And they were now
seeing themselves as part of what the presentation
was. And it just wasn't talking heads and rolling the financials.
We applied that same thinking. Here is our
winemakers, and I call them ours, they're obviously
not, but we have relationships that we've developed over time
(13:52):
with many winemakers who understand our brand
and they understand our people. They call
one another and they say, definitely meet with the world. Wine
destinations, folks, because they're different. It's
not drive by wine tasting. They're not here to
pound wine. They're here to ask questions,
(14:15):
hear what you've got to say, listen to your stories,
and not a huge thing on the technical side.
They want to get a feeling for what it is that you're doing.
So when we have these families that have been in business, you know,
on farms, and we have one place we go
in South Africa, that they're operating in a winery that
(14:38):
was built in 1798 and still making wine in that
handmade way, it is
just an experience that puts
our guests into their world,
into the winemaker's world. And that's
the only promise we really make everything else sort of spills
(15:00):
out in some wonderful way. We don't overly
describe every minute of the day. There's flexibility,
there's plenty of free time. But we get them
immersed in the wine culture, the food and
the things that there are to see and do. Where else are you going to
go on a safari. Thank you. Than wine tasting in South
(15:23):
Africa? There are things we do there we can't do anywhere else in the world.
As an example, you did this since
2010. So your first actual trip was when.
The first one that we did as worldwide destinations would have been
January. And it may have been 2010, it may be a 2011.
And we went down to South America and we had
(15:46):
had some very good relationships Jim had built with
distributors and he was very keen on
Argentinian and Chilean wines. And so because of the
relationship with the distributors that he had, they would help
open doors for us to get us into the wineries. It was a terrific
model. And that is actually how we met
(16:07):
Stephanie Morton Small when she was the chief brand
officer at Finca to Sara. And you know, that has
become a decades long relationship
and
those kinds of opportunities to bring people to places that they
might not normally go. I want to go to
(16:30):
Rome, I want to go to Paris, I want to go to this.
Well, how about Santiago or how about
Mendoza, Argentina? What? You know, so
it was, it was very new and very different and taking them out
into the rural areas and we would go to the cities too, but
most of it was, was going out into the vineyards and going out into the
(16:53):
rural areas. And that was something that a lot of these folks had never done
before. I think that we were discussed this briefly, but I'm going to say it
here for the listeners. And I, and I. But it's a new. It's not new,
but it's the way I've been placing it in the podcast
and on other shows. It's an important feature of wine, which
is if you were to pick five elements of a culture to
(17:14):
describe a culture, you certainly. If the culture has a
language like Armenian, we have a language. If you have land, Armenian
happens to have land too. They may not, who knows in the near future, but
they currently have land. So those are two important features of a culture.
Certainly cuisine would be part of that and then possibly music
or, you know, books and things. But then wine has to be in the
(17:36):
top five expressions of culture.
If they have a culture of wine in their trade and almost every country in
the world has something or spirit of some sort, how
does that play into your role when you get
to a destination like that? Because we're focused on
wine travel. The way we look at wine
(17:59):
across those points, and they're all part of it, is
wine is a. A social and cultural bonding
agent, if you will. It is able to bring people
together around stories and around
meals and around tasting. But there's also
historic aspects to the role that wine has played. We
(18:20):
find that in Greece. And you know, our Greece folks will tell,
you know, they'll say, well, this is where wine was invented in
winemaking. And then we all know that that didn't happen there.
Armenia, that 6,000 year old Georgia will. Fight you on
that too. Georgia, yeah, it's all that. But the
idea was that the common thread was that
(18:43):
all these folks enjoyed wine. And we were plugging into
not only the culture of a country,
but also into the wine culture and the food and wine.
Because most of the rest of the world,
they don't really treat wine as a cocktail. There's always
food around it, or there seems to be. And
(19:06):
we in the States have tended to substitute
wine for cocktails in a lot of occasions.
And the food and the wine are almost are inseparable.
The idea that having a meal
prepared by the winemaker's mother or by
the family being out in the vineyard, coming in
(19:29):
for a meal that's sourced completely by the food that's around,
that's growing around the area and the region is really a
spectacular experience. And it
pulls all those elements together. Wine seems to be right in the
center of it for this kind of trout. I mean, wine is.
It's been said in various tomes that it's the
(19:51):
intellectual part of a meal and that you don't get that from Jack Daniels
or beer. You have a good time, but you don't get that sort of
cerebral stimulation that you get with a glass of wine. You know,
it's kind of interesting when you're talking about the culture expose. I sent a young
lady off. In fact, she's coming in this week to do a podcast with her
mother. She spent six weeks at Bayi in the pace of my own district.
(20:12):
We got her internship there through the Wine of the Month club.
Internship. And I was just talking
to her the other night. She's a college student, she's probably 19 or 20.
And I said, well, there's a new book out from the Cladstrup
family. They wrote the book Wine and War. And the book is about
Eugenie, the last Empress of France.
(20:35):
And she started to talk. She says, oh, yes, blah, blah, blah. I'm like thinking
to myself, how would you know that you're studying
winemaking at Cornell? You're not. This is. She goes, no, we went to
Chateau Guiscord and they talked about how she used to stop there all the time
on her way to Brittany. And I'm like, oh my gosh. How
important then is culture around wine,
(20:57):
particularly wine of these old districts, like let's call them Old World.
I mean, how important does that feel and how stimulated
do your guests get when they start connecting these dots?
Greece in particular.
I recall that we were visiting a museum in
(21:17):
Crete and
there were the wine vessels, if you will, the
terracotta. Yeah. The amphora and those things. And
you could see wine in the art. You could
see that wine was a through, you know, was sort of a
throughput through the various
(21:39):
aspects of their history and their archeological history.
And so it was very much eye opening in
Mendoza. You hear them talk about
what the Malbec business used to be when it was a
state run. The wine business was a state run
enterprise in Argentina. And Malbec
(22:02):
got a pretty bad name from that. And
later on, when the government let go of that
sort of socialized ownership of that wine business,
Nicholas Catena was sort of the guy that came out and led the
resurgence of Baalbek. And when you meet, you meet his
daughter, you know, you meet Laura, you meet Adriana, you
(22:24):
meet, you know, some of the other kids that I call them
kids, they're, they're, they're all grown. But you need them and you understand
that they are components in a, in a wine story that
is historic and that redefined an industry
within that country. And you can find it in Paso Robles,
which is one of the two domestic trips that we do. When
(22:47):
you're on a property and they're pointing over there to the foundations
where, well, there was the cabin where, you know, Jesse
James, when Frank James was hiding out after they got
run out of Missouri or wherever it was. And you're seeing these
connections to these different, to these different historic
moments. And here they are existing in a vineyard. And
(23:09):
here's stories are fascinating. Here's where James Jean crashed on Highway
46. I was so
disappointed when I went there because I went to the little diner there on the
way. And it goes 300 yards from here. James Jean. I don't want to
be 300 yards from the place. I want to be at the place. You know,
I just passed through it in May on my way
(23:30):
out of one of our wine tours. In Paso Robles.
And they have put the. You know, they got the fence up and they've
got now a new plaque and they've got a light and they've.
They're sort of modernizing it. But. Yeah, it's a bit of a
disappointment. But I don't know what I was expecting. Sort of a torn up
Porsche or what was I expecting? Yeah, I don't know. It's just like you're standing
(23:52):
there and that picture is so iconic. And there's that last. James Dean's
last stop before he died. You know that. Yeah. I mean, it. It's.
You stop and you look. You do. I. You know, we. My
wife and I thought we were going to retire in Paso and we'll. We'll talk
about Paso because I think it's a great wine district. And actually in some
cases. I had a conversation yesterday with Jason Haas of
(24:13):
Tablas Creek, and it's actually a district of California
that actually is rather expressive and in a very short
amount of time has been able to produce wines of terroir character. Now it's
got. It's got that opulent fruit forward sort of mystique.
Mystique, but sort of a public Persona about it because that's what
sells. But you also can insure yourself to have an
(24:35):
Adelaide, you know, district wine that will have a
character that's different than the rest. But I think it's important. But we really
thought we were gonna. We were gonna retire there. And I bought 60 acres
and I went and bought boots, you know, and I have a cowboy stuff.
And I realized that was never gonna happen. You know, that was just not my
Persona. And it ended up being a beach house in Hermosa where you can
(24:58):
see my color. I've been there quite frequently lately, so. But when you go to
Paso and you take these people, are they. Are they abused? Are
they surprised? Are they mystified that this even
exists? And it's so big. The biggest
eye opener. And it's why we. We chose Paso
because it fit our brand and our model of going
(25:20):
into wine producing regions of the world
and finding the undiscovered
gems that were there. And
we started working on Paso in
2021. And I went up and down the
coast, basically.
(25:42):
We had sort of put Napa and Sonoma off to the side
because that was very overdeveloped in its wine
tourism sort of vibe. But basically went
down from Lodi and Livermore all the way down to
Temecula. And taking a look at the wines in
San Diego county, and it came back to
(26:04):
Paso. Paso was doing things with Rhone
wines. And we had
been to the Rhone, we'd been to Southern Rhone, and we have tasted
Rhone wines in Greece. We have tasted, you know,
Rhone wines in South Africa, just understanding what people were doing with the
varieties. But Paso and
(26:27):
Jason Haas is a great example. Jason
took us on probably one of the best vineyard tours that we
had ever been on around the world. And
he. We had been scheduled for a previous visit, and he got
called up to a sustainability conference in Napa, and he said,
I can have somebody else do it. And I said, I'd love for our people
(26:49):
to meet you, and I'd love to wait. So the next year,
he did it. He took us through, and in every
single place in Paso, we learned something. And
now, since so many of our people are now adding Paso
into their mix of world wine experiences, world
wine destinations experiences, they're able to ask questions
(27:12):
that relate to what they learned in South Africa or what they learned
in France or what they learned in Greece. And the
winemakers get into this. So Paso
gave us the intimacy, the time with the
winemakers, and there's some sensational
winemakers there. And it also had multiple districts.
(27:35):
So drinking on the west side with Michael Barreto, with
Carl Boker in Willow Creek area, and then going
over to Creston on the east side and drinking
with Sterling over at Cass or with
Patty Bellow at B and E.
It really gave us a good mix of
(27:58):
what Passer was capable of and some exceptionally
good wine. And now Slow coast as its own
Ava has emerged. It's been quite an experience.
So it filled the things that we had based our development
on internationally. And Paso was the best place
to not replicate it, but to expand that experience and do
(28:22):
it domestically. We're going into our fifth year. You said going into
Paso, I just had this huge flashback. There was
a winery called Creston Manor, and I forgot what it
became. It was owned by Alex Trebek. That's
right. And he had the great. He had this couple
came over their name now, but they were relentless. And they
(28:44):
would come, and the wines were good, and they would come to my office, and
they would just put the pressure on me and squeeze on me to buy
more. And I said, finally, I said, look, if I can come and taste
with Alex Trebek, I'll buy more. And it never happened. So, yeah,
just trying to leverage that. Yeah, the property is just down from
B and E, and. And there's lots of stories about it that
(29:06):
everybody's happy to share. I think there was even a Jeopardy
question about it. But anyway, you know, on the,
on, on the web, it's kind of a confusing and
problematic subjects for me to
follow after all these years of doing this. And every
generation that comes into this trade or comes into any trade really has
(29:27):
fresh eyes, but also has probably neglected some of the history. And
wine is so. Is so unique. And I think your story,
just the idea that you brought from another industry, sort of the
logistical part of it, is pretty rare because there's not too many industries that
cross over into the wine trade because wine is
controlled. There's three tiers here in America. And it's such an
(29:49):
emotional purchase that, you know, none of the business
school. And I can't tell you how many MBAs I've had on this
show that, like, yeah, I tried to use the stuff I learned at school, and
it just doesn't work, you know, because it's so different. But one of the things
that bothers me is most influencers are going to say,
we're going to make wine simple. We're going to dumb it down, we're going to
(30:10):
make it approachable. And I just. I just don't see that's possible.
It is antithetical to the approach that we've taken,
which was to introduce and expand
first an appreciation for international
wines. And so many people have been, if
(30:32):
you're from the east coast, you're drinking a lot of Italian and French wine. If
you're out west, you're drinking a lot of California wine. And if you're in
Texas, it's sort of a fight to see who's going to dominate
in there. But California has a big footprint here.
Our idea was to bring people that
enjoyed wine and enjoyed travel and bring them
(30:55):
into places that they normally wouldn't go and expand their
appreciation of what was being done with these
wines and there and thereby be able to
expand their understanding. Okay. And the
winemakers would certainly all tell us about the wine's
technical aspects. And there are questions asked about
(31:16):
why, why this long in this wood and why this
in, you know, all the sorts of different aspects of how
the wine is being made and what the winemaker does. But
we do ask a question sometimes and we get some amazing
answers. And it was like, what
was your intention for this wine when you first
(31:39):
started putting this in the barrel or in the tank? But what was
your intention and how close did you get? Get to that?
And then you begin to get the stories of the happy accidents
and the things that they thought were not working. And
the slight change and the
suggestion from another winemaker. This is what we're doing
(32:02):
with that thing. And the
stories then speak to a community
in a highly competitive business. And again, Tassel Robles is a
really good example of this, and so is South Africa, for that matter.
These wine makers talk to each other, and they all are of
that idea that especially with international groups coming in,
(32:25):
if we engage with these people and we expand
their knowledge of our wines, it's going to be good for business.
It's going to be good for all of us. Go back to Napa in the
70s. So that has been a big part of
it. And we don't want to dumb anything down. We want
our folks to ask better and better questions. And we
(32:47):
noticed one thing. I think it was somewhere in Spain on a trip. And I
noticed that a couple of our customers always had notebooks
and they were taking notes. And
part of our swag. Now our trip bag is a
World Wine Destinations notebook with the pad, nice, small, can fit the
thing. And people are taking notes. They are
(33:09):
asking questions based on something they heard at a previous
winery. They are getting knowledge about the
varieties. They're getting knowledge about the wood. You know, when
they see their first barrel cooperage, which we ran into in France,
you know, these things are expanding.
They're understanding how complex the business is. And
(33:33):
we sort of tell the winemakers, don't feel like you have to pour a
half a glass in for this tasting. Yeah, right. Because none of us
feels good about dumping your wine, because it's not about it not tasting
good. They'll ask for more. But
they're going through this in a really
expanding way to do that. And that has been
(33:57):
really effective. But they do that about the food, and they do it
about the historic or archeological sites. They do it about
the music. And whether it's Portugal or whether it's
Spain, it doesn't matter. They get into it. It's
the intellectual part of the meal. And I don't see how you can talk about
dumbing it down. In fact, there's a guy from England who's an
(34:18):
amazingly successful influencer called the Wine
Wally, which is sort of the wine idiot in the English language. You
know, the Queen's English. And you should hear
him talk now. I mean, he's talking because he's done this for long enough that
he's learned all this stuff. And he. I don't. You know, now he's no longer
dumbed it down. You know, he's talking about all this stuff. And I don't know
(34:41):
because I don't think it exists. I think you can learn as much as you
want to learn. And there's never ending. Even the winemakers you, you are,
you visit are learning every day, as you said, they're
experimenting and they made a mistake and something happened. White zinfandel was a
mistake, you know,
so I just, it just annoys me that a generation comes in, this is
(35:03):
particularly Gen Z in this case, and
ignores all the previous stuff and
decides that something has to change when it really can't change.
How does it change? How does the interest level of your troop,
of your troops or your guests? How do you change
that?
(35:26):
I don't know that we have to change it. I believe they
change it themselves by us presenting them
with enough of an experience and the ability to have
emotional experience, emotion based
relationships with each
aspect of what constitutes or what comprises the
(35:48):
trip. So some of them were not big
fans of archeology, if you will. They left thinking
differently after they went to a dig in
Santorini, okay? They left differently thinking
about olive oil after Crete. They left differently
thinking about barbecue after they had their first
(36:10):
asado at a winemaker's house
in Mendoza. These things,
each one of these activities in a given day is an opportunity
to engage. And what we've done is simply listen to what they like
and what works and construct the trip around that.
(36:30):
We talk with our guests for months before
these trips go. We are the. Each itinerary
is customized. We mix the winemakers that we go
to. We always add new ones. We go back to some sensational
great experiences. But we are constantly expanding
our own understanding and therefore bringing our customers along with
(36:53):
that. But they're the ones that change themselves. And sometimes
it's pretty amazing to see it especially and the
perceptions that people had about South Africa. It's, it's
absolutely amazing the transformation that they go through. And that
part of travel is extremely. I mean, that's its
superpower. It's transformative. And wine and food
(37:15):
help that you turn a thought. And it's. We were
in, we were on, we were in Paris and this is recently,
but we were with friends who were on a,
you know, corporate thing tour, you know, where they rewards tour.
And so it was like all these. I used to have to build those. For
merit, I'm sure all these carpet guys and we're in the biggest hotel
(37:37):
in Paris. And it was, you know, we went down the. They go, come on
down to the basement and have, you know, it's free breakfast. I'M like, I'm not
going to eat American scrambled eggs and bacon because
you're on a tour. I'm in Paris, you know, I'm going to go get a
Paris pastry or something. But anyway, they had scheduled,
supposedly, a lesson, a cooking lesson with Alanda,
(37:57):
Casa's sous chef at some restaurant. We got on the bus, we got there, and
it was the worst thing you'd ever been through. It was horrible cooking
class. And what I'm saying is it was the kind
of cooking class you'd get on a tour put together by a travel
agent. Then when we were Sicily on the same trip,
we were in this very small town, and we booked ourselves in a cooking
(38:20):
class, and that was amazing. I mean,
we broke open the fava beans and peeled them ourselves, and then we put them
in the pot and we boiled them, and then we rolled the dough and we
put it in the pizza oven, and it was incredible. I'm
guessing that's the difference between your tours and
any other tour. We hand pick these folks because we're not
(38:41):
bound by any previous existing relationship. We
are not compensated in our business model by
commission from the places we go. No, that's important. And
that is something that my partners
and I sort of agreed upon right up in the front. If we
are going to be different, we cannot be beholden to
(39:03):
habits that are linked to how we monetize this
company. And so we pick whoever we
want to deal with. And that's down to guides.
Okay? We hand pick the guides, we hand pick the
restaurants. We hand pick the winemakers and the wineries.
We hand pick the hotels. We stay in boutique
(39:25):
hotels, we stay out at vineyards. We do not rush
to the biggest brand. And, you know, we don't.
But the other thing is, too, is we don't get involved in the airfare.
We give our guests the absolute freedom to
fly however they want on whatever carrier they
want to fly on, use their miles, do whatever they want,
(39:49):
get there, we'll get you at the airport and you're on your way.
Wow, That's a really great feature for somebody traveling who doesn't want to.
I'm one of those guys. I don't want to travel the way most
travel. I done it too much, and I just do it myself. Besides
the fact when I ran Wine of the Month, Club,
Federal Express let me charge our Federal Express
(40:12):
bill on my American Express card, which was amazing. For over 20
years, we were charging over $2 million a year on shipping charges.
And, my friend, none of those numbers are staggered. I had like 4 million points
at any given time. You know, I can go anywhere. I want to do the
highest class that they offered. And it didn't really matter because I. I wasn't paying
for it. So what's next? It makes a huge difference. It makes a
(40:35):
huge difference to. To our. To our guests because
it allows them a great deal of flexibility. And a lot of them will
go in early to a market. You know, if they want to do the
typical tourism things, let's say they've never been to Paris or
they've never been to Athens or whatever, and they want to do some of that.
Sure. They add a couple of days up front, or they add a couple of
(40:57):
days in the back and then get that done.
Or they fly to another destination or another country and finish up
their trip. That's great. It really. It's really built for them.
Well, what's next? What's. What's on the books right now for the next trip?
Our next trip will be into Oregon, into the
(41:19):
Willamette Valley. And Jim and Linda are leading that.
That is only our second domestic destination ever. And this
is the first trip that. That will run there. So we'll
see how that goes. We have great. This schedule already.
Yeah, it was sold out almost immediately. That goes down the 25th through
the 30th of of August. And the
(41:42):
two domestic trips are our shortest trips.
They're, you know, basically five and a half, six days in and out.
Ironically, I don't know what the numbers will end up being in
Oregon, but Paso Robles, on a dollar per dollar
basis, is probably one of the most expensive trips we run.
Because the costs of. Of doing
(42:05):
wine travel in California are significant. Not because it's
California, but because the wine industry. Trades like
that is absolutely, you know, into
maximizing. They have to, I mean, a lot. Of them
without tasting for $85. I mean, it's ridiculous. A lot of people
do it. And that was another thing. And as I lived in
(42:29):
Nap. I love Nap. I lived in nap in the 70s,
in 78, to be specific. And they were
still, despite Chateau
Montelena's rise, became. There was still enough.
There was still enough of what Napa was, where you could
drift in, meet a winemaker, taste,
(42:52):
understand a little bit. It was really approachable. And.
And the case is very different now. And you do
get a feeling in some of the more developed markets
that there's a lot of bottling of lifestyle, and
that lifestyle demands that that be a $350 or
$500 bottle of wine. And I'm enough
(43:15):
of a barbarian that once I get past 150, I really
can't taste the difference. So it's just
the idea of being able to find places that
are undeveloped and undiscovered, even though they've
been making wine for 300 or several thousand years.
Which leads us into next year to Croatia
(43:38):
as an example. We'll be hitting Croatia a year from now, next
September. Wow. For the first time, opening up a new market.
That was a last time we were there, and we're out of time, actually. But
last time we were in Croatia, you know, we traveled the coast. There's some
amazing things. And I didn't recognize any of the grapes. Of course,
you know, they're not even grapes. I know. From different parts of that
(44:01):
part of the world because their Croatian grapes are different. But, man, the wines
were so solid. And I relied on the psalms to
pair things and to just tell us, you know, the stylistically what we're looking for,
and they would pick them for us. This has been quite fascinating. I hope we
can do it again. We're out of. Absolutely. Happy to. It's
really, really fun. I'm interested to watch the progress
(44:23):
of wine world destinations and
what you're doing. And I think the next time we get on the call together,
I'm going to ask you how your personal growth
in wine has become. You just said you had one little threshold there.
You, over 150 bucks can't tell the difference. But
that's probably a good thing, actually. Jim would probably be
(44:46):
screaming right now. It's like these.
The. The. The ability to learn about wine
is always going to be driven by taste. Just my opinion. It's
got to start with what's in the glass. And then if I really want to
analyze that, I can ask questions and I can study and I can
go deeper. If I want to expand my
(45:08):
palette of wines that I like,
then this is how I've been able to do this,
and it seems to work. Well. Good
luck out there. We look forward to hearing more about it in the near future.
And so glad that Stephanie was able to get us together and have this
conversation. I think it's a really important part of our trade. And you
(45:31):
stumbled across, you know, a methodology that seems to
change the landscape of it a little bit. And. And
maybe this is the answer to some of the woes
of the wine tree, which is getting these experiences under people's
belt so they can have that conversation with their friends, and they can
talk about, you know, how interesting the subject matter
(45:53):
is absolutely. Absolutely.
Cheers. Cheers.
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