The Secrets of Founding a Successful Wine Organization

Are you missing a wine organization at your university – start one. We at CBS Wine are ready to help.

No need to look further – we are here to help

We are offering:

• Access to our network of the best wine importers and other relevant partners in Denmark
• Advice on organizational setup
• Contact information and help to get involved in wine tasting competitions
• Lots of experiences and learnings from our humble start to where we are today
• Help with practicalities

If you are currently enrolled in a programme in a Danish university, you are likely familiar with all the different organizations, clubs, societies etc. that offer everything from sports, networking, career building, friday bars to politics. However in this big pool of organizations, to our knowledge only two related to wine exists; the recently established Juridisk Vinklub (JVK) at University of Copenhagen’s faculty of Law and us, CBS Wine at Copenhagen Business School.

We believe that there is a market (well we are from CBS) for similar organizations at all the Danish universities and larger faculties in Denmark. Students love wine, are interested in learning more about it and want to get to know each other better over a glass of wine. We only have positive experiences, demand for our tastings has never been higher, we have never been to so many competitions and the number of interested partners is continuously growing.

CBS Wine has been very successful with activities in three distinct areas:

1. Organize tastings for students at CBS
2. Actively engage in the student organization community at CBS
3. Participate in wine international wine tasting competitions

We are offering to help anybody at KU, SDU, AU, ASB, AAU, DTU, ITU and RUC in starting a wine organization.

The CBS Wine team at SPIT 2013 in the heart of Champagne

If new organizations start to emerge, we hope to be able to host the Danish Championships in blind tasting for student organization (inspired by the traditional varsity match between Oxford & Cambridge) within a year or two. Also, we are very interested in doing collaborative events between universities and expand our professional and personal networks. Basically we want to open up the wonderful world of wine to all the students in Denmark.

We want you to ride on our learning curve and be a student fav at your campus right from the start. Get in touch if this has sparked your interest and we’ll meet (or skype if distance is an issue) over a glass of wine. We hope to hear from you.

Asbjørn May
VP, CBS Wine
asbjorn@cbswine.dk

Lausanne Calling: 50% More Competitions for CBS Wine in 2014

Asbjørn deciphering a Pauillac wine in the Left Bank Bordeaux Cup final 2013

Terrific news! We have three blind tasting competitions lined up in March and April, where CBS Wine will fly the Copenhagen Business School banner and hopefully be really good at telling pinot noir and nebbiolo apart. You will learn more in the coming weeks, and in this post you get the broad overview of what’s going to happen.

Follow us on Twitter too, if you want.

In 2012 and 2013, CBS Wine won medals in the Left Bank Bordeaux Cup twice and scored silver in the Sciences Po International Tasting. In 2014, we’re adding the Millèsime competition to our repertoire.

Our seasoned wino in CBS Wine Asbjørn May once told us that “competing is fun, competing in wine is fun squared”. He’s right, and over the coming months we will try to convince those who are not already believers. Here’s the line-up:

1) Millèsime

A team from last year’s Millesime in theory round working out some tough wine trivia

When and where: Ecole Hotelliere de Lausanne in Lausanne, Switzerland on March 22

Team: Asbjørn, Peter, Viktor, Allan and Thor

What it’s about: There’s a theory round of questions about anything from grape rot to ownership of famous vineyards. Afterwards, they test your ability to correctly identify grape varieties, vintages and regions of wines you taste. A bit of knowledge about Swiss wine seems to be a good idea.

What it takes to win: Very broad knowledge of wine and an ability to work together efficiently in a big 5-person team. It’s a two-tier competition with an elimination round of ~18 teams and then a final among the top three teams.

2) Sciences Po International Tasting

The 2013 team, Rasmus, Peter and Thor at Maison Bollinger

When and where: Maison Bollinger in Aÿ, France on April 5

Team: Peter, Asbjørn and Nikolaj

What it’s about: A mix of Champagne and general wine knowledge. Since the whole thing takes place in the town of Aÿ in Champagne, a pretty nerdy understanding of bubblies will work in our favor.

What it takes to win: It’s a two-tier competition like Millesime where theory and blind tasting abilities will take you to the final. In the final a champagne and another wine must be guessed correctly by each team individually.

3) The Left Bank Bordeaux Cup

The 2013 team at the Connaught, Asbjørn, Peter, Christian plus Thor, the coach

When and where: The Connaught Hotel in Mayfair (April 26), London and then Chateau Lafite-Rothschild in Bordeaux (June 25)

Team: Rasmus, Mads and Jeppe

What it’s about: It’s the most narrowly defined of all wine competitions – all you need to know about is a 150 km patch of land on the left bank of the Gironde in Bordeaux. You know, Latour, sticky-sweet Sauternes and petit verdot grapes. All that old, good stuff.

What it takes to win: Get past the European semi-finals in London against seasoned tasters including Oxford and Cambridge and then beat 7 other teams in the final. The competitions starts with 4 regional semi-finals in London, Paris, Shanghai/Hong Kong and New York and a total of about 50 teams from Harvard, Yale, EDHEC Lille, Cambridge etc.

That’s it – less than a month to go before the Millèsime kicks off the season. Happy drinking!

Rapper’s Delight: How Moscato Is Becoming the #1 Drink in Hip Hop

The Champagne boom of the 90s is declining in favor of the moscato grape. Source: RapGenius.com

Cristal has become a hip hop cliché through overexposure in MTV’s Cribs over the past two decades. Meanwhile, the Italian grape Moscato (used in Asti Spumante) is steadily taking over the oversized refrigerators where French bubblies once reigned supreme. There’s a good chance that in 2014, Moscato will finally overtake Cristal in times mentioned on hip hop records.

Rappers called out Moscato in 2011-2013 almost as often as both Cristal and Moët. In case you’re unfamiliar with these champagnes, just know that Moscato overtaking those two is monumental in terms of branding of Moscato wine and will have major effects on world-wide Moscato sales.

What’s funny is that you can get 10 terrific bottles of Asti Spumante for the price of one Cristal or Dom Perignon, so the trend indicates stronger austerity measures among hip hop moguls than in the Portuguese government.

Moscato (formally Moscato Bianco or Muscat Blanc in France) is one of the oldest and most recognized Italian grape varieties. It is especially popular in the Piemonte region of Northern Italy, where it has its own two appellations (designated planting areas with certain rules), Moscato d’Asti and Asti Spumante.

The two appellations make two types of sweet Moscato wine:

• Moscato d’Asti: Light bubbles (“frizzante”) with an alcohol level of 5-6%. It is sweeter than an Asti Spumante because the fermentation of sugar into alcohol is stopped earlier in the process, leaving more natural sugar. Its aromas are typically something like apple pie, fragrant green grapes, peach, cinnamon, citrus and flowers. Usually bottled with a normal cork due to the lower pressure which doesn’t require a metal wire cage (the French term for that is a “muselet”).

• Asti Spumante: Aggressive bubbles (spumante means “foamy”) with an alcohol level above 7%. This is the most common type of bubbly Moscato and is often just referred to as “Asti”. You’ll find this variety at a lot of pre-parties for 16-25-year-olds in Denmark. It has the appearance of a champagne bottle but its carbonation is created under pressure in a big steel tank rather than in each bottle individually.

Asti Spumante on the left, Moscato d’Asti on the right.

How Could Champagne Ever Go out of Style?

The shift away from champagne is puzzling. Global sales figured for champagne are fine, the region is even extending its growing area for champagne. However, three important factors do come to mind:

• The Cristal scandal: Jay-Z boycotted Cristal around 2006 when Managing Director Frédéric Rouzaud from the Champagne house that makes Cristal told reporters that he wasn’t too thrilled with Cristal being associated with the hip hop scene. Jay-Z once rapped “Let’s sip the Cris and get pissy-pissy”, now he raps “I used to drink Cristal, the muh’fuckers racist / So I switched gold bottles on to that Spade shit” in reference to his collaboration with Ace of Spades Champagne from Armand de Brignac.

• Celebrity endorsements: Drake’s 25th birthday in Las Vegas featured not champagne but rather Martini & Rosso Moscato d’Asti. This €8 bottle may not be what he drinks in his mansion, but Martini has without question paid out the nose to be featured in photos at Drake’s party. Money talks, and Asti houses do not have to carefully manage a prestige image like champagne does – it’s just a fun, sweet, bubbly drink. And the commercial Asti houses have such high turnover that endorsement deals are within their grasp.

• Shifting tides: Ultimately, things. just. change. What male rapper could have pulled off a skirt ten years ago? Yet, here we are (see pic below). Same goes for champagne – it’s been a hip hop staple for decades and will continue to be so, but right now the spotlight is on Moscato.

And to round off, here’s a bit of consumer insight: Asti Spumante tastes pretty much the same whatever price you pay. As soon as you’re over DKK 50 per bottle, my experience tells me there’s very little incremental quality per coin. The sugar masks the subtle flavors anyway, so don’t be embarressed about your frugality when it comes to Moscato.

Imagine Kool G Rap wearing something like this in 1998. Not likely, right?

Rick Ross and Diddy super stoked about bathtub of champagne.

Sipping Sensibly: Drinking Wine for the Right and Wrong Reasons

CBS Wine is made up of many people with divergent opinions. The following opinions belong exclusively to the author.

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I find that drinking wine in aspiration of social status is the worst reason for drinking at all. Drinking wine for nothing but escapist pleasure is better, because at least the motive is pure. Better yet is drinking wine because wine inspires, challenges and educates you.

But let’s not kid ourselves, we have all drunk wine within each of these mindsets and continue to switch back and forth depending on the situation and our disposition. Hopefully, for the most part we move between the second and third motivation.

Can Wine Offer Meaning to Life?

Everybody searches for meaning in their life. Søren Kierkegaard reminds us that we are individually responsible for finding the meaning to our individual existences – just asking what the meaning of life is does not make the grade.

We might be so lucky to stumble on grains, pebbles and boulders of meaning in our continuous search for answers. At other times, we walk head-first into pillars of non-meaning, things that at best do not fill this existential vacuum. I place status-driven wine drinking squarely in the category of non-meaning.

What Does Status Drinking Look Like?

You have come across status drinkers in your career in wine and probably know the character I am trying to isolate here. Still, for clarity’s sake, let us define the phenomenon.

The status drinker wants a specific outcome from showing you his wine collection and sharing his wine with you. The wine itself is inconsequential; it’s a delivery vessel for prestige intended to reflect back onto him. Outcomes of drinking his wine that don’t involve oohs and aahs are not desirable. These are the trademarks of status drinkers.

There is also the benevolent hope that wines we serve friends are well received, but this is vastly different. We all reinforce the bonds of friendship through positive, memorable experiences. Nothing conspicuous about that. In contrast, while the status drinker also wants his wine to be appreciated, his motivation is fully driven by ego.

So What’s Wrong with That?

Well, it’s a bit of an uphill battle for the status drinker for the following reasons.

The point that must be hammered in is that drinking wine has no intrinsic value. Glugging down wine, however prestigious the bottle, does not make you a contributor to human progress. You’re not decorating the fucking Alhambra, you’re putting a glass to you mouth. The drunkard’s Pinard Rouge, the oligarch’s Dugat-Py and the insider’s Jean-Francois Ganevat – it’s all mostly water and alcohol. And all we as consumers do is point at shelves in stores and whip out our plastic.

Yes, Dugat-Py might be the avant-garde of viticulture and objectively a healthier product than Pinard, but the drinker plays the exact same role with both wines. The wine drinker is just a strainer at day’s end, metabolizing the alcohol and pissing out the rest.

For this reason, there is no enduring benefit to wine-drinking in itself. It’s either going in or coming out. What can make wine an important activity is on the periphery of drinking; the meaning in life that wine represents to you – the ways in which it helps develop you as a person.

Drink For Yourself

I fear that status drinkers will never find peace in their hobby. What pleasure could they hope to extract from mixing good, clean fun with self-imposed social pressures. When a consumer buys the crop of legendary vineyards, hoping that his selections might reflect back onto him with a Pulp Fiction briefcase glow, he’s setting himself up for a serious disappointment.

Because, in the long run nobody cares what wines we have drunk. Nobody will speak at our funeral about last week’s Ducru-Beaucaillou vertical. So shouldn’t the choices we make about wine and what role we allow it to play in our lives be made entirely for our own wants and needs?

#dkwine – Good Idea or the Greatest Idea?

The Danish wine scene is right now embracing Twitter in explosive numbers. We’ve thought of a way for everybody to benefit even more from the trend.

Sommeliers, industry people and wine lovers use Twitter with an enthusiasm that we’ve never seen among Danes. Chances are that if you read these words, you’re on Twitter and you follow the funny-because-it’s-true Guide to Wine Biz, Hvirvelvin’s Anders Frederik Steen, JP.dk’s Niels Lillelund, Shit My Sommelier Says and so many more.

28,000 Danes or just 0.5% of the population are active Twitter users. And among those 28,000, the 90-9-1 rule undoubtedly applies.

In contrast, the wine community is very active on Twitter, better at using it and more interconnected than most other non-IT subcultures. I would bet good money that our community’s share of both creators and contributors is over-represented by a factor of three compared to the general Twitter usage.

To bring this trend to a new plateau, we have a simple idea. The hashtag #dkwine.

One Hashtag to Rule Them All

The benefit of a single hashtag, #dkwine, for the Danish wine scene is to spread meaningful content among the more or less connected users who want to explore wine.

CBS Wine are the Johnny-come-latelies on the medium. We’re there because we enjoy the insights, the links to blogs and articles and the random knowledge you get from diving down the rabbit holes of Twitter.

We think #dkwine will be a very cool way to unite the ragtag wine nerds across the country and let the content creators of our hoards of wine bloggers find the audience they deserve (we’re looking at you, Drueposten.dk!)

It’s there, it’s free and there’s only been two prior uses of the hashtag before now. It’s ours for the taking!