ARENI Global: In Conversation

In this episode we meet Amrita Banta, founder and director of Agility Research, a luxury consulting company ranked among the top ten globally, which focuses on the affluent consumers of luxury and premium brands. 

We discuss how COVID changed the relationship between Asian consumers and luxury goods, and how the past few months have led to renewed spending, and to Fine Wine finding its way into millions of Asian households for the first time.

In this episode, we share a conversation that took place in the 2021 edition of the Batonnage Forum.

Bâtonnage is a US-based initiative stirring up the conversation on Women and Wine. Its annual forum brings together wine professionals as well as wine industry supporters to discuss and act on the unique challenges and opportunities that women in wine have faced both historically and present-day.

On the 23rd of June 2021, ARENI invited Felicity Carter, Editor-in-Chief at Pix and Jordan Sale, CEO and founder of 81 cents, to talk pay gaps, negotiation skills, globalization of the work place and financial transparency.

In the middle of the UEFA European Football Championship, we meet wine critic and journalist Tim Atkin MW and Phillipe Auclair, England correspondent for France Football. 

In this special episode, we discuss this very popular social phenomenon, while having a lot of fun pairing football players and teams with their wine equivalents.

We meet Tom Marchant, co-founder and director of Black Tomato, an award-winning agency which creates what they describe as unique and perfectly-tailored travel experiences.

We discuss what luxury, hospitality and creating experiences means in practice.

In consideration of ARENI’s latest report, we compare and contrast what fine wine consumers have in common with affluent travellers.

Conversations about diversity and inclusion, along with discussions about how to open the doors to Black and other marginalised groups, have been long-overdue. But, finally, the last 12 months has seen an outburst of publications and initiatives aimed at taking action.

But within wine, many of the voices speaking out were American. Although some wine articles included voices from South Africa, local voices were often missing.

We meet British journalist Tomiwa Owolade to discuss the complexity of the BIPOC situation in Europe and notably in the UK.

It's been a year since the murder of American George Floyd, a crime that galvanised widespread protests and political organising in the US. The world took notice and conversations, protests and other actions against racism spread internationally.

Twelve months later, we meet Dr Akilah Cadet, founder of Change Cadet, a US-based change management and organizational development consulting firm supporting diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in the workplace.

We take a moment to look back, measure the progress and ask what the next steps could be. What would true diversity mean for Fine Wine?

Money is not the most comfortable of topics in the wine world, though fair remuneration is the key to increasing the diversity of voices and talents.

In this episode, we meet Andrew Jefford, an award-winning journalist, wine writer and educator, and one of the only major figures in an otherwise opaque industry to publicly reveal his revenue and earnings. We discuss writing, negotiation power and transparency, and how to define one's worth in today's wine world.

Professor Shirley Mueller has had two careers. Her first was a practising neurologist and a tenured professor at the University of Indiana in the United States. She left both practice and academia to become an investment advisor, and began writing for Physician’s Money Digest about the neuropsychology of investing.

Along the way, she developed a deep passion for Chinese export ceramics and became an ardent collector herself. We meet to discuss her latest book, Inside the Head of a Collector – Neuropsychological Forces at Play. 

In this fascinating conversation, we explore the question of what drives collectors.

Celia Tunc is Secretary General of France’s Culinary College. The association, founded by 18 of the most renowned and influential French chefs – including Alain Ducasse, Joel Robuchon and Paul Bocuse – aims to represent, promote and transmit artisanal culinary heritage through tradition and innovation.

Celia emerges from a year that shook France’s relationships to gastronomy, restaurants, producers and winemakers, with the belief that the future of the world requires a new relationship to food, based on craftsmanship and diversity,

We meet her to discuss the challenges that lie ahead.

The three tier system regulates the distribution of alcohol within the United States. The Federal framework stipulates that a spirits or wine producer (the first tier), should sell first to a distributor (the second tier), that will in turn, sell to a retailer (the third tier). This retailer must have a license to sell alcohol either in a shop (off-premise) or in a restaurant (on-premise). This Federal framework changes at the state level, with each local government putting in place specifications and regulations according to their interpretation of the Federal requirement.

This system, established since the end of Prohibition, makes distribution of alcohol between local zones, counties or state borders extremely difficult.

What if there was a legal way to work alongside the established three-tier system in the US to create a disruptive route to market, based on convenience, while working within the system? What would it take to build a distribution channel that would allow consumers to directly order cocktails - or wine- on their phone, and receive it a mere three hours later at their door?

What would this new “non-premise” channel mean for spirits and wine brands alike? How could it address the upper-end of the market and not only offer convenience but create bespoke, premium experiences?

We talk to Tim Angelillo, founder and CEO of Sourced Craft Cocktails, and discuss how he used his 20 years of experience working for tech giants to create an efficient data and information based system that answers these questions.