Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service. I'm Jane Chambers. It's wine harvesting time in Chile and vineyards are busy cleaning their barrels to make way for new batches. This South American country has more than 1,000 different varieties of grapes.
But it's proving hard to reach the new generation of wine drinkers, Generation Z. That's people in their early to mid-twenties. It's been a challenge for us to get to this consumer as they see wine as the beverage that their parents drank in the past. And it's not just young people drinking less wine. Around the world, wine production's in decline. This is often due to climate change causing extreme droughts, which affects harvests.
So how do wine-producing countries like Chile respond and keep their industry thriving? That's all coming up in today's Business Daily.
I'm with Denis Isaac, head of new business and product development for Chilean wine producer Conchitoro, which exports to more than 130 different countries. Denis takes me a few blocks down from their Santiago office to the company's new restaurant, Diablo.
Out on the terrace, we're trying out their latest launch, which is... The new Casillero del Diablo sparkling zero alcohol. So this is for people who just want to continue enjoying the taste of something like sparkling wine, but without the alcohol. Exactly. What made you move towards this? There is a trend about low and no alcohol wines, and we are seeing the moderation trend.
in most of the consumers. They want to keep hanging out with friends, they want to keep eating at restaurants but sometimes they have to drive, they don't want to drink too much alcohol maybe because the next day they have something important to do. And we started exploring these low and no alcohol wines and this is the first we launched in Conchitoro with no alcohol.
We're out on the terrace, you can probably hear the traffic below us. It's a beautiful sunny day so let's try. I've never actually had non-alcoholic sparkling wine before. Salud! Mmm, very cold and fresh. I can't really tell the difference actually. Dennis takes me on a tour of the restaurant. So we're standing in front of, they look like fridges, you've got various bottles of wine and you've got different sizes of glasses. How does this work?
You have a membership card, you load it with some money at the front desk and it's completely self-service. You take your glass of wine and you choose which one you want to try. You can be the whole evening tasting different wines
There will be a sommelier that helps you if you want. If not, you can try it by yourself. He tells me his new wine dispenser comes from Italy, where it's already very popular. And you can also find it in resorts in the US and a couple of restaurants in Buenos Aires.
Dennis is passionate about demystifying the wine industry and making it fun for customers, including Generation Z. So how are other wine producers appealing to their consumers? I'm heading two hours' drive west of Chile's capital, Santiago, towards the coast, to a very different location.
It's a beautiful, sunny autumn day. You can maybe hear the birds singing behind us. And I'm in a valley surrounded by vineyards in a garden with lots of brightly coloured flowers and birds, lavender. And I'm here with... Diego Benavente, Export Director for Madelich Vineyards. We're...
Coastal winery right next to the Pacific Ocean in a cool climate appellation called San Antonio and Casablanca. We're right in the border. We're a biodynamic winery that focuses on terroir wines from the coastal range of mountains here in Chile in a cool climate condition.
When Diego talks about terroir, he's referring to the unique combination of environmental factors like soil, climate and topography that give a wine its distinct character or sense of place. This is something that consumers are interested in. A current trend is knowing more about where your wine comes from and feeling a connection with it. He describes how the vineyard's closeness to the ocean reflects this sense of place. It tends to get...
either windy, which lowers the temperatures, or it's cloudier, so there's less hours of sunlight, so that determines the varieties that we can grow properly in the region. So whites in general, Sauvignon Blanc, and our bigger red here is Syrah.
We're on top of the coastal range of mountains. It's granitic-based. The granite defines our wines with the condition of cool climate that assures you to have slow ripeness and good acidities in the wine to make, in our case, quality wines that reflect acidity.
their place, their origins. So now we're in the, we call it the biodynamic garden. There's buzzing of birds, of insects. What we're trying to have is a biodiversity hotspot that helps you to have a better condition for the vineyards.
The biodynamic preparations are made based on natural ingredients like cow manure, quartz and medicinal herbs that help the grapes to grow and improve the quality of the compost. They use these techniques to grow their wine, which is based on the principles of the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner. This is the belief that the field is just one organism, a live being in which all its elements are connected, from the birds and insects to the plants growing around the vines.
I asked Diego how this differs to traditional wine-growing techniques. Well, the traditional method of agriculture, which is using pesticides and chemicals, doesn't promote that really. The chemicals will mostly kill the life on the soil. This whole idea of regenerative agriculture is to promote the life...
improve the texture. A key element is the composting which takes all the organic matter, the residues from the winery, from the cows, the farm that we have, from the vineyards. We compose that organic matter and then we return that organic matter in a more digested way into the soil.
We're trying to make terroir wines, wines with a big sense of place. And in order to do so, we need to be the most natural. That's our philosophy, to be the most natural as possible. This is Business Daily from the BBC World Service. I'm Jane Chambers in Chile, finding out about how the wine industry is adapting to new market trends.
Matetic, the company Diego works for, has been producing biodynamic wine for years. It's a relatively small wine producer, which makes around 35,000 to 40,000 cases a year.
More than a third of that stays in Chile and the rest gets exported to 30 different countries. Their biggest export market is the United States, Brazil and the UK. The United States has recently introduced a 10% tariff on wine imports from Chile, along with other countries like Australia, Argentina and New Zealand.
It's difficult to tell with President Trump whether these tariffs will go up, but Diego has just got back from a trip to the United States, where he was pleased to see that some of the current trends are in sync with what they're already doing, putting their wine in a strong position. The biggest trend within the wine industry is that the shift between reds to whites and lighter reds. So in general, the consumer is...
It's moving towards that trend, which is great for us because we're heavily leveraged in white wines. Sauvignon black is really important for us. We produce Chardonnay as well and we produce Pinot. And why do you think people are going towards drinking more white wine than red? I think it's a generational shift. If their parents liked really heavy structured wines, probably the younger generations are going to be more towards white.
lighter, juicier, potentially less branded and more terroir driven wines. And you see that in pockets of Brooklyn, for example. The cool, artsy...
The new Sohos that you'll find in New York, they have natural wines, biodynamic wines, organic wines, no sulfate wines, all very eclectic type of wines that are probably for older generations are a bit goofy.
It's also a way to feel closer to the producer, probably. It's more artisanal in a way. Diego says that given they're a small producer, they don't follow big supermarket trends. For them, it's about connecting with their niche customers through wine tasting events. In Chile, they have a boutique hotel which mainly attracts customers from the US and the United Kingdom.
I caught up with an English couple, Carol Ward and her husband Peter, in the vineyards restaurant. We're staying at La Casona in the Matetic vineyards. Do you like Chilean wines? Are they things you generally drink at home? Because a lot of people in the UK drink French wines.
We do a bit. We have drunk some Chilean wines, but you're right, it is mostly French wines that we drink because they are European. But of the South American ones, Chile ones we particularly like because they are cold wines.
red wines unlike France so like Pinot Noir things and they have great white wine here as well we've tried both red and white and they are very different the white and the
the cold climate ones we particularly like yes and thinking about trends for wine are you aware of any trends are you changing how you drink wine we are drinking more south american wines because i think we've got a grown accustomed to european ones and and there's an idea of trying different things from different parts of the world as they develop their wine trade
And I think because if you travel to these countries, that has an impact. You think, oh, when we get back home, we'll probably look now more at the bottles, the labels, where they come from. It is knowing more about them. And if you come somewhere like here, obviously you have the expert people from the vineyard who explain exactly the processes. And that is what we're going to see this afternoon on our vineyard tour.
Well, I hope you have a lovely time. Thank you. Thank you. A pleasure. So fresher wines, lower alcohol and connecting more with the customer are just some of the changes the wine industry is looking at.
As well as consumer trends, climate change is a huge issue. Droughts and heat waves are starting to affect southern Europe and southern California, which impacts on the quality of the grapes and yields. The Chilean wine company Conchitura, which we heard from earlier in the programme, are trying to tackle some of the challenges the industry is facing. With a large-scale centre for research and innovation around three hours south of Chile's capital, Santiago.
Alvaro González, the director of the centre, gives me a tour and tells me about some of the things they're doing. Here we are doing science-based innovation. And we're in a huge, beautifully built, echoey centre surrounded by vineyards. So we are in Maule Valley, which is the heart of the wine industry in Chile. And here we are in an area called Pencaue.
where Viña Conchitoro has a lot of vineyards. Now we go to the labs and our experimental cellar. So this is a big investment. How much money are you spending on this centre every year? So the initial investment was $5 million and we invest in R&D each year close to $3 million. Wow.
Alvaro explains that it's important for them to develop their own solutions to the problems they have in Chile. Things like technology to save water and analysis of the different notes of flavors in the wine. One of their star innovations is working out which vines are more resistant to diseases.
This is the molecular biology lab, and this is so important because here we have all the tools to do qPCR, specifically for the viruses and fungi that we have in our grapevines. So we are trying to select the material, plant material, that are free from these viruses and fungi in order to be more productive and vineyards that can last for longer period of times.
So how is this technology helping with that? How does it actually work? So this is the same technology that we use for the COVID, for example. So for the analysis of COVID cases,
and some technology that allowed us to extract the DNA from samples of grapevines. They look at the sequences of the DNA to see if a fungus or virus is present. Vineyards can take years to reach maturity, and if they have to replant vines due to viruses affecting their crops, they can lose a lot of money. Now down into the cellars.
You can smell the wine. So this is like a test centre for wine where you can do different kind of experiments with the wine. Yeah, so this is the place where the winemakers of the company come here with new ideas and these ideas take place in our tanks.
One of these experiments led to one of the company's best-selling wines, Diablo. They decided to listen to what customers were looking for, things like a deep red colour and a certain flavour, and develop a wine to match it. As Alvaro's colleague, the Innovation Centre's research and product innovation leader, Gerardo Casbon, explained. Based on the research that we carry out, that initially look at the market on United States,
in which a radical red was emerging. We developed with our state-of-the-art analytical and sensory capacities to deconstruct wine and grapes. We designed or rebuilt the way in that the winemakers' teams developed the final flavor.
by using all their knowledge, of course, their expertise, but also these technologies and new capacities that we have. Gerardo says they can play around with more than 120 aromatic compounds to find the perfect blend for their customer. The company is developing this idea further with a new invention they're excited to show me, which won't be on the market for at least another three years and is currently called the Winologist.
A team of people, including Gerardo and the head of new business and product development, Dennis Isaac, unveiled it in their Santiago office. We've got something in front of us which at first glance looks like a fancy coffee maker. What is this? It's a system in which we customise all the experience around wine consumption.
So show me how it works. I think we've got different types of wine that you can blend. Yes, here you have four different wines and we can choose different parameters and we create a wine. So this is personalized wine for people depending on what they're going to eat, what they're feeling like, if they like things to be sweet or more acid, that kind of thing.
Exactly. The idea is we're going to personalize all of it and then with your mobile phone, you will have an app and it will recommend you different food pairings for the different occasion, for the weather you are, for where exactly in the world you are.
So let's see it in action. Okay, here you can have the wines and then you can press the buttons. And it's giving me different options of Caminiere, Melot, Malbec and I can decide what percentage I want. Now I'm a big fan of Caminiere. It's like a traditional wine here in Chile, a very famous iconic wine. So I probably want quite a bit of that. And now the magic moment creating. So let's see what I've invented. It's...
Good, I think very sweet, but I'll keep experimenting. Dennis and his team think that their market for their invention are places like resorts, consumers in Asia who want to show off their latest gadget and wine lovers wanting to try something new.
Whether wine drinkers will want to spend time creating their own wines or would rather just buy a bottle, it's interesting to see how companies are trying out different things to keep their customers happy. I'm Jane Chambers, and if you've enjoyed the programme and want to hear more, search for Business Daily wherever you get your BBC podcasts.