Dan's Harvest Updates

I'm getting my Mum Skype

Thur 15 July 2010

It’s my Mum’s birthday, so always a day tinged with a fair bit of melancholy and guilt as she is so far away in England.  Also, what on Earth do you give a little old lady in a small unit with absolutely everything she needs?  Smelly soap would be an insult, and she doesn’t really want another motorbike.

This year I’m getting my Mum Skyped.  I’ve arranged for a nice computer-wizz chap to turn up at her place and install a camera and software.  For those of you who don’t know, Skype is a telephone over the Internet that includes video.  Log on and a board comes up showing who is on line.  A couple of clicks and you can then chat, with visual, to any of your Skype buddies around the world – for free.  Amazing.  It is really not long ago at all, that moving overseas was a huge wrench away from family and friends.  With my family I spent two years in Brazil when I was around nine years old.  We called home once a month and I was allowed to speak to a grandparent for one minute, no more.  We even had to book the phone call in advance. 

With Skype, my kids will be able to sing, dance, play guitar, put on puppet shows, have books read to them and anything else they can think of, for as long as they like, or until Granny pretends to fall asleep.  All that’s missing will be hugs and home-made jam.

What has this got to do with wine? Everything and nothing really.  The world has shrunk, dramatically. Everything is local and everyone is your neighbour; information is instant and the whole world is the market.  As all this has changed, so has the world of wine.  We are now colleagues and competitors with every winemaker on the planet.  There was a fear that globalization would bring homogeneity, and this may be partly the case in terms of high-street fashion, TV and popular music; but the opposite is also true.  The modern information age has provided access to layers of detail that can be mined with a simple keyboard and mouse to reveal almost anything you could possibly want to know about any wine made anywhere on the planet. Weather, soils, wine show results, winemaking reference tools, winemakers’ blogs, wine marketers’ blogs, drinkers’ blogs, sommeliers’ blogs and on and on and on.

 It has become increasingly clear that our customers want honesty and a sense of place in the wines that we present to them.  On our part we know that we have great wines to make and a fantastic story to tell.  This may be our treasured corner of North-East Victoria, but it is also now ‘just around the corner’ from Paris, New York, Buenos Aires, Beijing and, thankfully, my Mum’s place in the little English country town of Subury in Suffolk.

See Also: Ask Dan