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I’ve a podcast since 2019 July, I talk about wine, technology, wine market and sometimes tales of wine. It’s funny, really.
The episodes are online every Tuesday at 5 p.m. CEST.
Oh, the name of podcast is The Digital Wine, in Italian language. I think I have to learn to speak a better english, before to publish my episode for an international audience.
A wine podcast is an hard way to make podcast, I think. More or less items are ever the same. So, interviews is a good way to talk about it.
Podcasts with interviews are the best, but only if the podcaster is good enough, and to interview people isn’t so easy. A couple of time I’ve invited friends-in-wine, but in the other cases I didn’t know people I’d to talk to. I’ll explain you how I build my interviews in another post.
My guests teached me
Here, I’d like to talk about what I learned speaking with my guests. They are wine growers, founder of start-up, media marketing experts, digital engineers. While the times aren’t the best, all of them found the way to stay in contact with their clients and grow their job. Most of them are young, under 40s, let’s say. There’s who created a platform for online wine tasting, who accelerated the develop of a remote control technology for vineyards, and who tried to build a shared online shop for wine.
Everyone of them used the digital technology in some way, and everyone of them, both wine growers and start-up founders, agrees that this pandemic accelerated not only use of technology, but it has convinced that 4.0 revolution is now ineluctable.
I don’t know how the situation is in USA or Australia or New Zealand, in Europe we go away with two speeds: who run and who walk. Italy is most known for our life-style and less for the tech innovations. But there’s a grassroot push to enhance this, from every level of productive society, workers and business people. I’ve listened this from their mouth in the interviews with them, their will to use digital technology to grow their business. And a wine podcast could be a good way to make it known.
The average size of Italian’s vineyards is 2 to 5 hectars, there are many families producing good wines, from 10k to 50k bottles for year. Sharing technology can help to run where they now only walk. But accessing to cloud services is complicated if you haven’t a good data connection.
Limits to the growth
A great obstacle arises in front of their plans, the limit of the broadband in the rural zones. As I said, I don’t know how the situation is in other countries. In Italy we have many countrysides where Internet is an hard affair, and this is a problem. I attended many online tasting, using really all known video call platforms; wine growers transmitted from their winery, and the limits of their broadband was fully evident.
The 5G technology could be a solution, but a retrograde movement convincted some mayors to prevent installation of test 5G antennas, while just in countryside this technology could be the best way to bring a decent Internet in wineries and factories.
Who has an own activity don’t fall in love with all the news, but they’d want just to test them, and this is what they tell me. Explicitly or implicitly this was their own think.
Technology isn’t the answer, it’s only a way to grow, to improve the business and life in general. The productive forces in Italy are really worried for that. They know that competition in the wine world (and not only) is hard; other countries are producing very good wines, many appreciated in the markets.
They know that it needs new way to produce and propose their wines, because clients are changing too.