What it Takes to Build a Fine Wine Brand: In Conversation with Nigel Greening
Nigel Greening, owner of Felton Road winery, has led a varied life, starting as a rock guitarist, then as a creative director and owner of an international agency, before abandoning that life to become a vigneron 24 years ago. Felton Road makes small quantities of Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Riesling from its biodynamic vineyards in the remote township of Bannockburn, New Zealand. The wines are exported to over 40 countries worldwide.
When not immersed in wine, Nigel makes acoustic and electric guitars in his workshop in Devon UK. He has been known to carve chair legs.
He began Felton Road after an encounter with a futurist made him realise that authentic and artisanal products were going to become increasingly important. In this wide-ranging discussion with ARENI, he talks futurism, planning, and profitability and how it all relates to building a successful fine wine brand.
ARENI
First question for you Nigel. Can you quickly introduce us to Felton Road please?
Nigel Greening
We’re a small family winery. We produce only a very small amount of wine, about 12,000 cases a year. We are in the village of Bannockburn, which has a population of only a couple of hundred people in the middle of nowhere in the mountains in the south of New Zealand. So we are by most criteria, pretty obscure.
ARENI
Chatham House, the Royal Institute of Foreign Affairs here in London, had an influence on you acquiring an estate in the middle of New Zealand. Can you tell us more about this?
Nigel Greening
I’d been working in my old job, which was in marketing in a number of forms, and I’d been doing work with the team that were working on the Millennium celebrations in the UK. The government had set up a team to think about what the future held and when a friend of mine heard that I was contributing, one of the first things he said is, “There’s somebody I need you to go and see, because he can tell you what the next 40 or 50 years are going to be”. And he introduced me to the then-director Oliver Sparrow. I had the opportunity to sit down and join a conversation. We would all slash out, how could this play out, where could the game end up in 40- or 50-years’ time. It was profound. It was 1997 or 1998.
You can see the huge forces that drive things with some accuracy. And so that was how really good thinkers in geopolitics work. It’s not as if you can say, “This football team will beat that football team in 15 years’ time”. But you can see from these huge currents that are happening sociologically around the world, and the forces that are driving and shaping them, what the big considerations are going to be.
ARENI
What Oliver did at the time is draft a vision about who the winners and losers would be in 30 years. Can you touch a bit on that?
Nigel Greening
Essentially, the conversations that we had were regarding the end of the industrial revolution as we know it. Society had been built through needing human beings to make a lot of things that would contribute prosperity to society. And as internationalism and robotics and technology and computers came to the fore, we increasingly didn’t need the human component in manufacturing. And that took us to what we might call a post-industrial kind of feudal era, where we returned to a society where there are overlords who have control of these huge forces, but aren’t dependent really on people to make them happen. They are dependent on people to consume them. So that was a start point. You could unpeel it and start to see which groups in society would be successful in that kind of near feudal world.
There was a group that we called the surfers. Surfers were people who were, I suppose, today’s big wigs within the world of commerce. These were the people who were able to see the waves coming, who could predict where these socioeconomic waves would be, jump on them, catch them, ride them to considerable success, but be able to jump off before they crash—and get back out and catch the next one. And so today of course it’s pretty easy to name the people who became the giant surfers of the early part of the millennium.
A couple of other groups that we’ll talk about quickly. Artisans and artists play an important part, because in a world where everything can be mass manufactured to high quality and to low cost, things that are the product of original thinking and original craft will be valued by people as something above and beyond the norm.
In a world where everything can be mass manufactured to high quality and to low cost, things that are the product of original thinking and original craft will be valued by people as something above and beyond the norm.
Nigel Greening, owner, Felton Road
ARENI
And that’s the rise of authenticity that we see today and why we use that word so much.
Nigel Greening
‘Authentics’ were another group that we discussed. The last group were the carers, people who supplied human values for people. Because again, in a world where technology could do so much, people still want human beings.
We have pilots and planes not because they can necessarily fly the plane better than the automatic systems can, but because people want to know there’s a person up there looking after us. They just wouldn’t tolerate it any other way.
I didn’t end those sessions coming out and saying, “I know the future, I’m going to make wine”. I finished the sessions with a map that said I want to change my job and find something that I think will better equip me for whatever’s coming. And by coincidence, one of my larger customers asked if I’d go work for them in the Far East for a year. And I liked New Zealand. I’d been there on holiday and almost on a whim I said, “Yeah, okay, I’ll do it if I can live in New Zealand”. They said, “Yeah, absolutely we’re fine with that”.
And so I ended up going to live in Central Otago just because I’d been there on holiday and liked it. And on my first day I went into a wine shop to buy some wine. I was a keen wine consumer and there was a little sign about a event that evening where local winemakers were going be presenting some of New Zealand’s most successful Chardonnays. And I kind of thought, “Oh, I’ll go to that”. And so that was really my first contact with the wine industry there. And it left me thinking, “oh this is interesting. There’s stuff going on here. I might be in that lucky position where you are in the right place at the right time”.
ARENI
And for you it was about being an artisan. Having the possibility to do something with your hands and create an authentic brand.
Nigel Greening
To begin with. Probably the thing I was thinking about: would it be possible at all for me to move into wine without crashing and burning? I was not someone who had enough money to be able to do it and then shrug off. I was aware that the majority of new wineries fail. So I had to think very hard about my competence to step into that role—would it be a disaster?
I was pretty confident I understood brand management and brand authenticity very well. So I had a pretty clear vision that if I did it, I knew what it would be in brand terms. But wasn’t one of my priorities. I knew if I couldn’t find a way to make very good wine, no matter what else I did, I was going to go broke.
I knew if I couldn’t find a way to make very good wine, no matter what else I did, I was going to go broke.
Nigel Greening, Owner, Felton Road
ARENI
The financial aspect is so important. You’ve mentioned the carers as well. You’re very involved in organic and biodynamic farming. Could we potentially put winemakers or your kind of wineries in the carer category as well?
Nigel Greening
I personally am very wary of making that kind of jump. It’s my clear experience that when I look at the move into organics and biodynamics, that was a move that was spearheaded by very successful, smaller estates making very expensive wines from very expensive vineyards. And I suspect that a lot of the motivation for this wasn’t a desire to save the world, it was a desire to protect their very valuable investment and enable them to make the highest quality wines that could achieve the highest returns on. I’m not saying everybody’s like that and I don’t think it’s really our motivation, but I’m not happy to say, yeah, because you are biodynamic, you doing good to the planet.
But having said that, there are others who do care passionately about the bigger picture and are prepared to even risk damaging or lessening what they can achieve in order to be compatible with the bigger picture. So I’m not trying to slight everybody, I’m just saying the two don’t necessarily go hand in hand.
ARENI
If you were to have the Chatham House conversation today, do you think the analysis would be the same? Do you think we could do the same plan for the next 30 years?
Nigel Greening
I think it would be much, much harder. The forces that we were talking about were ones that we’ve seen happening. The combination of an aging population globally and an accelerating change of technology would almost inevitably lead to an increased group of people who were frightened or unhappy at the pace of change around them.
And it was clear that that was going to create a collision and that collision would not be pretty. We’re seeing that now. We see it in conflict, we see it in political collapse, we see it in regression to fundamentalism.
The trouble is, you could see a crash coming, but you couldn’t tell what the crash was going to be. And that’s the trouble looking forward at the moment. The crashes are greater, closer and certainly more concerning than they were even back then. But we still can’t really tell how they play out. Crashes are chaotic by their nature. And so you can’t predict what the wreckage is.
ARENI
Do you think that wine is equipped to prosper in the next decade?
Nigel Greening
Yes, the wine industry does have a fundamental opportunity. I think what it’s going to take is people who are brave enough to understand that almost everything that we have assumed in the past about what makes things economically successful in commerce is maybe up for change. We as a company were somewhat revolutionary 20 years ago when I really began my enterprise. We set a goal that we would be zero growth and we set a size we thought would be sustainable and compatible, which we could make work economically. And when we achieved that some 15 years ago, we said, that’s it. We’ll never grow any more. And we never did. Now that’s still an evolutionary thought. There are a lot of people who would say from a point of view of commerce, that’s almost an oxymoron. Commerce has to grow, economics have to grow. I disagree.
We set a goal that we would be zero growth and we set a size we thought would be sustainable and compatible, which we could make work economically. And when we achieved that some 15 years ago, we said, that’s it. We’ll never grow any more. And we never did.
Nigel Greening, Owner, Felton Road
ARENI
How did you decide how big you wanted to be and how did that influence your commercial strategy in picking the people that you wanted to work with and all of this?
Nigel Greening
We determined it on the day that I bought Felton Road. Blair, who’s the winemaker, and I had lunch and we had a beer. My first question to Blair was: “What’s the right size for you?” And he thought for a while and said, “For me it’s 400 barrels. I can do it in my head. After that, I’m a winemaker on a laptop.” That gave us a size that we could model, we could build.
It’s a very simple calculation. It was saying, a 400 barrel winery, that’s a 200 ton winery. What we’re going to have to build is a 200-ton winery. We can figure out what that costs. We can figure out how much land we’re going to need . We can then say, well what would our sales price be that would stop us from going broke and enable us to pay ourselves? That was a piece of work that only took 45 minutes and at the end of it we could see a 400-barrel winery making Pinot Noir. And that’s a really important factor because most other great varieties wouldn’t be able to achieve it.
We knew we had to achieve a high price point. We knew to be financially successful as a winery that small, we would need to be hitting price points that put us in the top 1% of pricing around the world. And Pinot Noir can do that.
You’ve got to bear in mind that the top 1% by price is surprisingly low. This wasn’t saying it’s going to have to be hideously expensive, it’s just simply it will never be a manufactured product. It’s going to be within the fine wine sector, albeit at the lower end of the fine wine sector, because we didn’t want to make wine for rich people.
We knew we had to achieve a high price point. We knew to be financially successful as a winery that small, we would need to be hitting price points that put us in the top 1% of pricing around the world. And Pinot Noir can do that.
Nigel Greening, Owner, Felton Road
ARENI
Are fine wines the same thing as authentic wine for you? And how do they differ from luxury wines?
Nigel Greening
I think they’re separate categories. It’s a Venn diagram. There will be an overlap between the fine wine and luxury wine. There’ll be some that live in both. But I think there are no shortage of luxury wines that I would not class as fine wines. And there would similarly be a large number of fine wines that I think have no aspiration to be luxury wines. So it’s certainly not a particularly close fitting Venn diagram.
You clearly see people today who established themselves in the wine world with the sole objective that they want to be a luxury brand. Most Burgundies for example, regardless of the stratospheric prices, were never designed that way. And it’s the same for most of the people in Burgundy. Even if they hit enormously high price points, they’re producers of authenticity rather than luxury. Although people then ascribe luxury to them simply because the price point kind of puts them in the category.
ARENI
As you were saying, there is some overlap and some are both luxury and fine wine because some fine wines also have a very consumer-centric marketing and vice versa.
Nigel Greening
I grew up marketing cars and they were at the high performance end of the spectrum. I was working with Porsche, with BMW, with brands like this. And certainly in the earlier days—I think it’s changed now—there was a very strong ethos that it was not the customer’s job to tell us what kind of car they want. It was our job to make the best car we can and then see which customers it fits. And there was that confidence that said, we know about making cars, they don’t, so I’m not going to ask them how to do it. I’m going to make the best I can and have faith that will resonate with enough people.
I think it’s true with wine. Great wine is always made by people who have never ever considered, “How can I make people like this wine?” They just make the wine that moves them and they then have faith that there will be people out there who will share their view.
I’m going to make the best I can and have faith that will resonate with enough people.
Nigel Greening, Owner, Felton Road
ARENI
If we take those people, what kind of skills do they need to invest in to be fit for the next 20 years?
Nigel Greening
I think you have to start by considering very carefully the concepts of honesty and the way they fit into authenticity. You cannot be authentic and you cannot succeed in authenticity if you aren’t fundamentally honest in the way that you create and present your product. Because you can have a luxury product that is essentially almost a myth. It’s a fiction created by a marketing department, but something like good, fine wine has to be about the truth.
We’ve always been very open with our customers about precisely how we make the wines, whether we’ve ever added anything to wine, the processes we’ve undertaken. There’s always been a simple openness there. There’s never been anything that’s been shrouded in mystery. Our website is designed to educate people on every aspect. That kind of inherent honesty is a very powerful tool in getting people to resonate with your product.
I think the more honest we are, the more successful we’ll be, because people do not trust very much right now. So that’s a key one I’d get people to think about.
ARENI
Would you also say that it impacted your distribution system? You’ve always controlled your distribution as much as possible.
Nigel Greening
That began with what I’d learned in the car industry. I had very good teachers there because the car industry, especially with upmarket cars, is a global one and very sophisticated thinking goes into distribution. One of the things I learned early on is people think that success is about marketing, but it’s normally about distribution. And our starting point was nothing to do with how many markets will we need to be in to sell our wine. It went the other way around. It said, you look at the world, if you look in a particular city or a particular country, is there a group of people there that want to buy the kind of wines that we make? Are there the kind of restaurants that could sell them? If all of these things are saying yes, we have to be there.
So we export to 40 markets. We could sell our production in two, but we need to be part of the world of fine wine. And it’s no good if people read about it but can’t get it.
One of the things I learned early on is people think that success is about marketing, but it’s normally about distribution.
Nigel Greening, Owner, Felton Road
ARENI
What would you like Felton Road to be in 25 years time and what do you think you need to start doing now so that you can achieve that vision in 25 years?
Nigel Greening
Almost everything that we would want to achieve within that period is already mapped out. And we have a plan because it concerns viticulture more than anything else and it in concerns farming and those things take a very long time to achieve.
These days we look at our vines not as a collective but as individuals. And we have a team that specifically go and do health checks and examination and measure the individual performance in great detail of individual vines so that we can learn to address them as individuals, not just as a population. So things like that.
ARENI
Any last word or life lessons that you want to share with us?
Nigel Greening
I think what might be the most important thing right now is considering the human aspect of what we do, not just in wider society but also very much within our own organizations. People who produce wine are making an agricultural product. People who grow grapes live at the bottom of the heap in financial terms. They tend to be poorly paid. They’re living at a subsistence level. It’s not a pretty picture. I like to feel that we are very proud of the fact that we pay people who work in our vineyards exceptionally well. But I think to make something work in the future and in this time of great uncertainty, I think you can do no better than to look at the human aspect of everything around you that you are impacting upon. How do you make that more harmonious? Because buried in that is a key to a strength of longevity and stability and longevity and stability are two things that are in very short supply in the world at the moment.
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