Zoomelier

Hi, good afternoon everybody. For those of us in Asia, good evening in Australia, which is the home of the wine that we're about to speak about.

And good morning for those of you who want to start your day in Europe talking about wines that go with tech.

I'm Aliza Knox. I run APAC for Cloudflare and I am lucky enough to be here with Joe Keats, who represents the fabulous Peterson winery and vineyard in the Hunter Valley in Australia.

And just before we get him to tell us a bit about himself, I want to say that I met him because he lives down the street from us and I noticed that he had Peterson wines.

And I have to say, I've been told to hold this in front of my face, it will show up.

This is one of my very favorite wines in the whole world, the Peterson Semion.

And this is a particularly old one. So Joe, before we get talking, can you tell us, my background is a photo of something that's really famous at Cloudflare, which are the lava lamps that we use for encryption.

But I heard you mention that that might be real behind you.

So can you, even before you tell us about yourself, can you tell me where you're sitting and what that is and why I'm not over there drinking with you?

Yeah, this is a real background. It's not one put on for Zoom.

So this is our tasting room in Emerald Hill Road in Singapore.

And of course, this is my living room. I have to live upstairs on the road from Alize.

So mostly what we do in here is wine tasting since we need a lot of wine on hand.

So yeah, it's real. So not just for show. Nice. Well, I might talk to the folks at Cloudflare if there's a way to do encryption with them diminishing volumes in the wine bottle.

It would be more fun than lava lamps. So Joe, tell us a bit about yourself.

I know that you represent Petersons here, and I've personally been on fantastic calls with you where you explain a lot about wine.

But how did you get to this position?

What's been your career path? I've been working with food and drink for more than 25 years.

I started when I was in high school doing hospitality courses.

And then when I was at university, funnily enough, I did a business degree, nothing to do with food and booze.

But I was always managing restaurants and bars.

And basically, I've just followed my nose and my tongue around the world.

So over the last 25 years, I've worked a lot in Europe, spent about five years living in Russia.

But Sydney has fairly much been my base for most of that time.

So that's come back to where originally I am from New Zealand.

So I started working in restaurants and bars in New Zealand. I've been with Petersons for more than a decade now.

But for a lot of that time, it was a part-time job.

And I also was running a private sommelier business based out of Sydney, which is only two hours' drive away from Hunter Valley.

We opened this little tasting room in Singapore just over three years ago.

So I came up to help set up this tasting room, and then was going back and forth for a couple of years as were a lot of our other staff from Australia.

And then I moved up to Singapore full-time just under a year ago for the past year.

So basically, I just like eating and drinking, and luckily, it pays the bills for me too.

So why don't you tell us a little bit about Petersons?

Ten years is a long time to be there. I expect you know the entire history inside and out.

And maybe even before you do that, if you could explain to people a little bit about the Australian wine regions, where the Hunter Valley is, what kind of wine is grown there, just how to understand that before we sort of position Petersons within it.

Sure. So the wine industry in Australia goes back only about 200 years.

There's no native grape species to Australia.

So everything was imported mostly from Europe. The oldest wine region in Australia is the Hunter Valley, which is where our base is.

We also have other vineyards in Mudgee and Armidale.

And all of those regions are north of Sydney, so in the state of New South Wales.

There is around about 70 recognized wine regions in Australia, spanning the entire continent from Tasmania down at the south, which is a very cool climate.

And then close to Singapore, we've got Margaret River, south of Perth, which is in our time zone, and only a short flight, once we're about to fly.

So yeah, Australia's got a massive variety of teawar, a cool climate, warm climate, but predominantly hot climate wines.

So the New World style is very much an Australian style as well.

Most of our wines seem to be fairly rich and full flavored.

And as a side effect, all of the sunshine we get also tend to be quite high in alcohol.

The Simeon that Elisa loves is an exception to that. It's very low alcohol, only around 12%.

But some of our reds can regularly push 15, 16% plus in the alcohol content.

And that all just comes down to the huge amounts of sunshine we get in Australia.

And that's probably the key defining feature of Australian wines is lots of sun equals big wine.

Is that true for New Zealand too, just while we have you as a Kiwi representative here?

It is not. And I know a lot of people, particularly from the northern hemisphere, think, oh, it's close on the map.

So New Zealand must be full of sunny beaches too.

If you fly from London to Moscow, that's approximately the same flight from Australia to New Zealand, just to give you an idea of the scope.

So New Zealand is all cool climate. We have no hot climate vineyards.

So some people tease me about being in New Zealand, they're working for an Australian winery, but we are comparing apples and oranges here, two very different climates.

So Tasmania, down the bottom of Australia, closest to New Zealand, both in terms of geography and in terms of the wines we make.

So Australian wines, Shiraz, Chardonnay, big full flavor, juicy wines.

New Zealand wines are a lot cooler, so they tend to be a lot leaner, crisper and more acidic.

Okay. And so then tell us, you said 70 wine regions, and I know that you can get to the Hunter Valley in a couple of hours, driving from Sydney, a little bit similar, I guess, for some people in the US for going from, say, the Bay Area to Napa.

How did that region develop as a wine region?

And then how did Petersons come to be there? So the first grapes planted in Australia, a lot of people listening today might have actually been there, because if you go to Sydney, invariably, you're going to go and look at the Sydney Opera House, and probably walk into the Botanic Gardens right beside, that's where the first grapes were planted in Australia.

That's not real smart, right beside the ocean doesn't work too well for the grapes.

Are they still there? I've never noticed the grapes in the Botanic Garden, are they still there?

No, no grapes do well that close.

So a few other sites were tried, and the oldest surviving area of planted grapes in Australia is the Hunter Valley, which is, at the moment, I think it's 197, 198 years, so just under 200 years of history there.

And it's quite interesting to note that Australia is home to a lot of the world's oldest grape vines.

So the oldest Shiraz or Sirah in the world, the oldest vines are found in Australia.

The same goes for Cabernet Sauvignon, Grenache, Mataro, Massan. Unfortunately, a lot of European vineyards got destroyed through the middle of the 1800s by a little bug called Phylloxera, and the Hunter Valley and other parts of Australia were largely spared that little bug.

So it's kind of weird to think that one of the newest wine producing regions in the world is actually home to some of the oldest vines.

Peterson's history in the Hunter goes back about 50 years. I know the family well, I love them dearly, it doesn't feel like a job for me, it's very much sort of a passion project working for them.

And even at more than 10 years, I'm not one of the longest serving employees by any stretch.

Ian and Shirley, who are the grandparents in the family, bought a farm, and they had day jobs, so that's just sort of farm, it's a bit of a lifestyle block with a little bit of extra revenue from milking cows and selling grapes to wineries.

In the evenings, they got a little bit bored, so they started messing around in the kitchen with making wine.

And after a few years of making small amounts using a little antique grape crusher, put about five kilograms of fruit in the top and then crush it by hand, they were giving bottles to their neighbours, bottles to their friends, and they were getting really good feedback.

So they took a gamble one year, didn't sell the grapes, bought a few bottles and printed some labels and went professional.

Within 20 years of doing that, they've been judged to be the best small winery in the entire country.

Now, if you know about winemaking, you're probably a bit sceptical, so I should tell you that they're day jobs.

Shirley was a nurse and Ian was a chemist.

Okay, so a winemaking degree is massive amounts of chemistry, so they had a massive head start than if you or I tried to make wine in our bathtub.

They're also smart enough to employ a very talented young winemaker who had recently graduated.

His name is Gary Reed and he's still our head winemaker and he's now working along the third generation of Petersons making wine in the valley.

So Ian and Shirley, who founded it, have both passed, but their son Colin is the owner and his daughter Savannah is now in her early 20s and she's the third generation working alongside Gary, which is quite neat.

It's really cool to be a part of that.

So were Ian and Shirley already living in the Hunter? Because I know that some of the Hunter Valley wine histories are in people who are living in Sydney who decided to have, you know, that it would be fun to have like a hobby vineyard or a farm and sort of got started that way.

So when they were doing this on the side, were they already living in the Hunter or was this a commute from Sydney for both of them?

No, they're both Hunter Valley born and bred, so their respective sides of the family were several generations in the Hunter Valley before they started the winery.

And I still regularly will talk to, when I'm in the Hunter Valley, I'll have older people from the region come in and I'll say, I remember when I was a young man, you know, family was going through a tough time, couldn't afford medication.

So Ian, the chemist, would just say, oh look, just take the medicine you need and, you know, sort me out later, we'll be fine.

Or, you know, Shirley, nursed my mother, like they do have deep roots in the Hunter, but you're dead right Aliza, because Sydney's so cosmopolitan, there are a lot of people who think it'd be a nice little hobby to pop up to the winery for fun.

It's not as easy as it sounds, unfortunately, even though it sounds like Ian and Shirley did it quite easily.

There's an expression in winemaking that if you want to make a small fortune in wine, you should probably start with a large one and watch it shrink.

Great, that's pretty fun.

And so within the Hunter, where would somebody go if they wanted to go to the cellar door?

Is there more than one place? I know you mentioned vineyards in Mudgee, so where is Peterson's?

Yeah, we're sort of tucked away on the side a little bit.

So the original Peterson's property, which is still the heart of Peterson's, is on Mount View.

So the Hunter Valley, those of you who have visited will know, it's fairly flat terrain, just some gentle slopes, and then you've got the Brokenback Ranges that kind of frame one side of the valley.

Now it's a huge valley, the area is roughly 160 kilometers by about 80 kilometers, so it's a very, very big wine producing area.

Where we are on Mount View, we've got some steeper slopes and some excellent vineyards there, particularly on our original property.

But we do have several other properties. In fact, we've got 11 properties now in New South Wales.

In the Hunter, we have a couple of other wineries, and the story behind those are quite cool.

When Ian and Shirley had grandchildren arriving, by then they were a successful winery, and they wanted to celebrate the birth of their grandchildren.

They had a couple of boys first, grandsons, so they changed the label on their port.

So instead of saying Petersons across the top, it would have the first name of the little boy born into the family, which is pretty cute.

Then they had a granddaughter on the way, and Shirley was adamant that they weren't making a port to celebrate their little princess.

She thought it was a very masculine style wine. She wanted to make something a little more feminine for their first granddaughter.

Those of you that have been to Australia or are from Australia may have noticed that in Australia, pretty much any wine with bubbles in it gets referred to as champagne.

I know a few French people just spat out their cornflakes at the moment. Australians call anything with bubbles in it champagne.

It's better now than it used to be, but 30 years ago, Ian and Shirley were no different from anybody else.

So they opened a second winery to specialise in making traditional method wines or the champagne method.

They very bravely called it Petersons Champagne House. That name didn't last for very long because the French would understandably missed and said that we weren't allowed to use the C word.

So they changed it from Petersons Champagne House down to Petersons House.

That's what their label looks like there.

So you'll see it's quite different. So that's the second winery that the family has in the valley.

And they specialise in all things sparkling.

It's now the busiest cellar door in the Hunter Valley. We've made more than 300 other wineries sparkling wine for them.

So they'll bring us their wine, we'll give it back to them as a sparkling wine.

There's a few different methods you can do that, including the champagne method.

And it's very specialist, so that's why they get us to do it rather than trying to do it themselves.

And I'm really glad to ask how old the sparkling young lady is now. How long ago was this?

Oh, she would be in her early 30s.

Savannah, who was the last grandchild born into the family, she had a wine name for her birth.

So there was Savannah Lee Sparkling.

And then when she was about five years old, her father Colin wanted to open another winery and he named it after his little girl.

So now there is Savannah Peterson, the winemaker, and Savannah Estate, the third winery that the family has.

And they're all in the Hunter Valley there and we've purchased some additional vineyards in there as well.

So it is a very small company in the grand scheme of things, but we do have 11 properties in Australia plus the one here in Singapore.

But we don't sell in shops.

So even if you're in Sydney, just two hours from where we grow our fruit, you can't walk into one of the big supermarkets style liquor stores and buy our wines off the shelf.

Everything we do has a personal touch.

So putting wine in people's glasses is how we advertise. We don't do TV campaigns or billboards.

It's just about throwing some wine at people and having a chat.

And that's one thing that drew me to working for Peterson's with my experience in the industry.

I love that social side of it. And the fact that everyone in the company is on a first name basis with everybody in the Peterson family.

Does Peterson supply restaurants and hotels or it's all cellar door and mailing out?

Yep, absolutely.

Because we're a small production, we don't discount very much. And obviously most liquor stores, for example, even restaurants or hotels, when they want to stock a wine, they want to be very sharp on the pricing.

We would rather not discount heavily because we only have a small amount of wine to sell.

But here in Singapore, there's some great places that have our wines on the list because I've had a chat to us and typically like it and we're happy to pay your prices.

So the Hilton Hotel down the road on Orchard Road here, the Conrad Centennial Hotel, establishments at Dempsey Hill and Marina Bay Sands, which is really nice food and beverage areas for those of you that don't know Singapore.

And some little cool places as well that are maybe off the beaten track.

So it tends to be people coming to us and say, I love your wine, I've got this little shop, can I stock this particular wine?

I think mostly they just want to get it cheaper for themselves and I'm okay with it.

So I have to admit to everybody on that this idea of having the Zumelier came from Joe.

I stole it. I'm giving him full credit here. He started doing these online wine tasting sessions, which I think other wineries have done as well.

But the Zumelier title goes solely to Joe and I am stealing with credit.

But I wanted to ask him, is Peterson's a high tech winery? Is that how you came up with this idea?

Like it's everything digital all the time and it was just one easy step during COVID into working with people online?

No, we're sort of in a way famously low tech.

You've seen that Delightfully Retro yellow label. Look, we have some very high tech toys in our wineries and serious winemaking equipment.

So our winemaking team have all the budget they need to get anything we need for a laboratory or winemaking.

So yeah, there is a lot of tech involved in testing the grapes as they're ripening and testing the wine as it's fermenting, things like that.

The owner Colin is famous in the Hunter Valley for being very low tech.

So he is a very casual, very friendly, lovely guy. But he will typically be wearing sort of little football shorts and maybe flip flops on his feet and a Polo shirt with a couple of grape stains and a tractor stain because he's been doing a bit of work on one of the vehicles or something like that.

So whilst he's a very talented winemaker, he's also a super down to earth guy.

He's a man who does not have an email address.

He's only in his early 60s. It's not like he's 93.

He actually does not still in this day and age have an email address. So a lot of my time working for Petersons was sort of acting as his de facto secretary sometimes.

He will now read a text message if we send it to him on his phone but refuses to reply via text.

So he'll just ring and have a chat and do what needs to happen.

And when it comes to the social media side of things, I personally am not particularly strong in that area.

I'd say our company on the whole is also not particularly strong because everything we do is face to face and get around hospitality sort of in real life.

And when we had our lockdown in Singapore, Caroline, my colleague here and I were both like, what are we going to do?

We can't entertain people here.

We can't pour wine in their glasses. So we did come up with the idea of doing the little tastings.

And one thing that is probably a bit different with what we do is because the geography of Singapore is quite confined, we're able to send six little medicine bottles of wine to every person that books a tasting.

So we send them six different wines in these neat little bottles, which people love getting.

It makes them very excited to have the little bottles.

And then we'll guide them through over about an hour and a quarter through an online tasting as if they were sitting in here in the cellar door.

And we just basically sent out an email to launch that and a couple of Facebook posts.

And it's been us very, very busy over the last couple of months.

So it's worked really well and a really good sense of engagement with our community here in Singapore too.

So we're thrilled with the way it's gone.

Yeah, no, we at home were lucky enough to join two of those and they were a lot of fun, really a lot of fun.

It's hard to just hang on to one bottle when the next one's sitting there and it's not time to taste yet.

So what have you noticed about life during COVID in terms of wine? Are people drinking themselves silly?

Wine's flying out the door? I know restaurants have been closed.

So how is that affecting the wine industry? Or you guys? Yeah, look, here in Singapore for us, like I said, we thought it was going to be quite tough and we've been doing okay.

There's, I think, a bit of a perception around the world and at least in Western countries that alcohol drinking has spiked massively.

But the figures I've seen have showed a slight increase in most countries.

So whilst the restaurants and the bars are closed, people might be drinking more at home since they can't go out.

But overall, it's not like everybody suddenly turned into a mush.

For a little company like us, it's worked great. We use couriers to deliver wine directly to our customers.

And if they don't want to pop out to go get a bottle of wine, they know that we can have it to them within a couple of hours and they also know what they're getting with us.

It's not a random lottery when you're shopping in a supermarket or something like that.

So yeah, I saw something on Facebook, which was everybody in lockdown is either coming out a hunk, a chunk, or a drunk.

And I think there's many people that might be up to the wine drinking.

A lot of people also taking the extra time they might have in their lives to get fit and cut out a bit of booze and do a bit of exercise or maybe combine the two.

So yeah, it's been really good for us.

It's good to see people taking a bit of care about what they're drinking.

Has it been hard to get the wine shipped? I know for a while, you know, it's been, I tried to early on, I tried to get something to Australia via DHL and it took a week just because there was nothing, you know, no planes were flying, ships don't go that fast.

So has it been hard for you to get supply?

Look, we sort of plan our shipments to Singapore quite far in advance and we had one arrive in April, just after the circuit breaker here started.

It was actually the quickest clearance we've ever had through Customs in Singapore.

So because it's an essential service, all of the workers were still on, but there were less vehicles coming in carrying goods.

So we actually had our wine clear Customs super quick, which is great.

We've got another shipment due soon and we don't see any problems.

We send it up on a ship to keep the temperature controlled the whole way through and we're sending quite a bit of wine.

So it takes a while to get here, but we've factored that in.

But we've done some international wine tastings on the Zooms.

So we've sent wine via DHL, who are normally fantastic at getting wine at the right temperature all around the world.

So we've had multi -country tastings for the same company with offices in Tokyo and Hong Kong and Australia and Singapore all tuning in.

One of those last week though, it took three times as long as forecast to get the wine to Japan, so it arrived the day after we did the Zoom.

Oh no, but at least you knew what they were drinking by the time they got it, right?

They've been through the tasting with you? Yeah, they were pretty innovative themselves.

They ducked down to a store and came back with a six-pack of beer and sat in on the wine tasting anyway, so they figured it out.

You mentioned that even though Colin doesn't have an email address, that you do use technology in the winery.

Just tell me a little bit more about that. We don't have to go too deep, but since this is a slightly technology-oriented TV set of programs, what is the technology used for?

Look, when it comes to the winemaking itself, we're using the human touch, the art as well as the science.

So when it comes to something as simple as harvesting the grapes, or as seemingly simple as that, our winemaking guys will walk through the vineyard and they'll taste grapes all along the road, and they're looking for the flavor ripeness.

So does it taste good?

Is this the taste we want in the grape? Because that's obviously going to translate through to the wine.

In your really big corporate wineries, that human touch is largely absent.

So they'll do the same, which we do as well. That involves taking the grape samples, crushing them, putting them through machines in the laboratory that measure things like the acid reading and the sugar reading.

But the concept of sugar ripeness in a grape and flavor ripeness, they don't always occur at the same time.

So if you just rely on the laboratory, it might be that overall the sugars are high enough in a grape to pick, and so they'll use that reading and say, okay, harvest that vineyard.

Whereas our guys might go, we're going to leave it for another few days.

The sugar levels will continue to rise, which might mean we have a higher alcohol wine at the end of things, but it's not flavor ripe yet.

It just doesn't taste as good as it could. And that's something that a machine can't do for you.

It can't go and taste it and say, does this taste like what I want the Shiraz berry to taste like?

We have some very high-tech tools in our actual winery where we crush the fruit and then ferment it.

Very, very sensitive to temperature in the winery.

So we need to make sure everything is temperature controlled the whole way through.

So we've got little lasers that measure temperature at all different points of our winery, the fermenting tanks, the rooms where we store our barrels and things like that.

But our laboratory is pretty high-tech and our winery is actually cleaner than a hospital.

So it's more sterile and cleaner than going into a hospital.

We just keep everything as pristine as we can. So if we have the flu or COVID, we can show up and hang out at the winery.

It kills all the germs.

So that's a good, it's a good thing to have in parallel. So we're getting down to our final minutes.

I want to do a couple things. I'd love for you to tell us a little bit about some of your standout wines.

I hope that includes the Semillon.

And then before we wrap up, I'll just, as you're talking, I might interrupt at the very end and get you to just give us some hints of wines to drink with various technology occasions.

Okay, so the Hunter Valley where we're based is world famous for its Semillon and that's the variety that Elisa loves.

So it's like a dry Riesling, if you're not familiar with Semillon.

It tends to be quite low in alcohol and it will sell it for a very long time.

So if I'm not mistaken, the bottle that Elisa held up earlier was from 2005 and still has plenty of age in it.

So that's a 15 year old one.

So Hunter Valley Semillon is a superb food wine when it's young and fresh and citrusy, it goes great with fresh seafood.

And then as it ages, it gets deeper and darker in color, more robust flavors, and you can pair it with damn near anything.

It's a very, very versatile food wine. So it's not one of the world's most famous grape varieties, but the Hunter Valley is the most famous region in the world for producing that style of wine.

What we're best known for in whites, the Semillon and then the Chardonnay, we're probably even better known for Chardonnay.

That's what's in my glass here, having a sneaky five o'clock wine.

So we make a very Australian style Chardonnay, but not the mouthful of oak that some of you remember from the 80s and 90s.

So very well balanced, but more of a Montrose style than a Chablis style, if you need a European reference to put the wine style inside your head.

And what we're really probably best known for is big red wines.

Because of the climate of most of our vineyards, it's pretty rare to find a Pinot Noir on our list, but you'll find a ton of Shiraz, you'll find a ton of Cabernet, Mataro, Grenache, Chambourcin, Zinfandel, Juref, a lot of big, heavy red grape varieties.

And that's probably what we're most famous for overall. All right, well, so it gives us an idea of the kinds of grapes.

So let's just get to the most important part, what everybody's been waiting for.

I'm going to ask you four questions, four sort of tech occasions, what wine to drink.

So what, maybe you're demonstrating it now, but what is the best wine to drink while you're on a Zoom conference call or any video conference call?

Well, if you're allowed to drink, then a Chardonnay, I think is great.

If you're not allowed to drink, that's when you can always use the coffee mug and pour the wine into there.

In which case, I'd recommend sticking to a white rather than a red so that your teeth don't get stained.

But yeah, I think if you're on a Zoom call and it's a social Zoom call, something like a Chardonnay is perfect, or a crisp dry white.

And what if you're in the zone coding?

What if you're a software engineer really thinking through very complicated coding decisions, headphones on, sorry, earphones on, really in the zone, what would you drink?

Sounds like my brother. And I normally recommend for him in that situation, something lightish in alcohol.

So the Semillon would be perfect. It can be anywhere from as low as nine and a half percent up to 12 or 13.

Obviously, if you're coding, it's something you want to be quite precise about.

So something high octane in terms of alcohol might inhibit you after a glass or two.

Whereas the Semillon is very light for us in terms of alcohol content.

So that might be a sensible option to go with it.

And what about the experience which most of us don't like to have and we work very hard to avoid, which is you're under attack.

You're either under a DDoS attack or you find malicious bots attacking your site.

And it's pretty stressful and you've got to do something to prevent this.

What kind of wine would you want to be having at that time?

I think that's where you need to whistle up the big guns and get something that's going to relax you in a hurry.

So something like one of our Cabernets, which are not made in a Bordeaux style, they're made in an Australian style.

So we've got a Cabernet on our list at the moment named after Dan, who's worked for us for nearly 20 years, and it tips the scales at 16 and a half percent alcohol.

So it's bordering on a port.

That would certainly calm me down in the event that all hell is breaking loose. All right.

And last but not least, before we run out of time, what if we just built a new system and it's up and running?

We're super excited that it all works or we have a business deal to celebrate, a new website launch.

What do we do to, what do we drink to accompany that success and celebration?

Well, I guess nothing to celebration quite like sparkling wine.

We obviously have a huge array of sparkling wines because of Peterson House that I mentioned earlier.

Look, if you're going to have a bit of food to celebrate as well, maybe you live in an area that likes barbecue, then a sparkling red wine is a great alternative to your champagne or Prosecco style.

And we make a huge array of sparkling red wines. Shiraz is what most people know, and we make a lot of sparkling Shiraz, but we also have these very long-term wines that we might spend a decade or two decades making a sparkling red wine.

And if you haven't experienced sparkling red wine, it's an amazing food line and festive because it's bubbly.

Well, thank you very much. I might go and open my bottle of Peterson Semi on now to celebrate the end of this segment.

I really, really enjoyed it.

Thank you, Joe, for spending the time and sharing all this information with us.

My pleasure. We're closing out on Zoo by Day with Joe Keats from Peterson's.

Cheers. Thanks very much, guys. Thanks for that. Bye.