I heard that you have many individual customers, as well. Could you please tell me how did you set up that opportunity?

The best way to find new customers is to organize wine tastings. We are not selling brands and don’t really care about mass media. We spend all our marketing efforts into opening bottles of wine and putting them in front of potential customers.

Direct marketing is quite simple actually. I can talk for one hour and try to convince you why you should buy this or that, but a glass of wine is worth a thousand words. I can only explain where the wine is from and how it is made. Eventually, you will have to open a bottle, pour wine in a glass, enjoy its color and aromas, taste it, and decide whether you like it or not.

Usually, they do like it. Organic wine tastes better because organic fruits taste better. Take the opposite case, for example, GMO, seedless grapes, full of pesticides and fertilizers, squeeze them to extract the juice and let it ferment, how good can it be?

You said that 'sustainable' is essential. I guess the same in business. Usually, when People starts a business, often invest much money on advertisements. However, it seems you are business style is the opposite way. What do you think about this?

We are a small company with only three people. We only import wine from France to supply restaurants and private clients in Singapore. We are facing multinational companies that produce millions of bottles and generate multimillion-dollar sales around the world. The wine industry is a big business. We are not fighting in the same category as those heavyweights. Big companies do business with big corporations, they are in supermarkets and DFS shops all around the world, they supply airlines and big Hotels and Restaurants chains, they sign exclusivity contracts in exchange for wine fridges, wine glasses, coasters, corkscrews, buckets, bottles free of charge, cash incentives, etc... We are a small business working with small producers and supplying wine to small businesses. It is a different job scope entirely.

To give you an example, we have an excellent sparkling wine, “ Clos des Quarterons Cremant de Loire” they make only 5,000 bottles a year...

It is very limited.

It's microscopic. Not everyone can try this wine, it is not available around the world. It's impossible to find unless you go to visit the winery and talk to the winemaker directly, convince him that you understand his product, that you will deal with it carefully and send it to people who understand and appreciate its quality.

Meanwhile, the largest sparkling winemaker produces maybe 60 million bottles of sparkling wine a year? That is 12,000 times bigger.

Imagine me walking around, knocking at the door of restaurants in Singapore and opening 1 or 2 bottles of sparkling wine for tasting with the Sommelier. In the same time, this multinational company has an entire sales team working here, that will give away 100 bottles for sampling in the same time. And they will do the same in every other country.

The irony is that they spend a lot of money to convince people that their products are rare and limited, almost like a luxury item, something high quality, exclusive, reserved for the elite and the most discerning buyers, but in reality, it is everywhere, in supermarkets, restaurants and wine shops all around the world, it is a prestige product for the mass markets, what advertisers call “masstige”. The more marketing they do, the more expensive it gets, the more marketing they need to do, and as all the marketing costs are included into their pricing, you end up paying at least 50% more than what is in the bottle. You are not paying for wine anymore, you are buying prestige, dream, luxury, etc...

I don't even try to compete with these guys, we focus on sourcing high-quality wines, which are really hard to find and very limited, often underrated and undervalued, and we navigate under the radar, which enables us to offer better value for money. The best quality at the best price, that is our differentiation factor. Very simple yet effective, down to earth marketing strategy.

Even in that sense, I think your business philosophy is real "organic". I believe that it is fascinating.

Yes, we are not only selling wine, we are also looking at the environmental impact of our activity. The wine must be good but it must also help to mitigate climate change, preserve the soil fertility and water reserves. It must encourage wildlife and biodiversity in the vineyards. Planting more trees, building stone walls, or digging ponds will attract birds, bats, frogs, lizards and rodents for example.

Once you have organic grapes, the way you turn the grapes into wine must be clean as well. Winemaking must be as natural as possible, without technology or additives. There is a big difference between industrial and artisanal winemaking. Again, like everything else, quantity and quality usually go in the opposite direction. Hence, our focus on small, artisanal producers. A supermarket chain is looking for volume and consistency, they will overlook a small wine producer because they don’t want to risk running out of stock. For us, it is the opposite, we want to give more visibility to those artisans. And let people have a chance to try their wines.

Thus said, the transportation is still an unresolved issue.

When you are carrying goods around the world, you have to wonder what's the carbon footprint of these trucks, ships and aircraft. There is an organic certification in Switzerland that prohibits the use of airfreight for example. So do we. But, it is practically complicated. I don't see people changing their way of life radically in the near future. I hope that engineers will find a way to improve the efficiency of transporting goods sooner than later.

This kind of education we need more. However, I think Singapore is shifting to Organic, not only the wine but also Lifestyle.

A little bit yes. I don’t think Singapore is going to promote organic wines anytime soon, because of the health implications of drinking alcohol, however, you can already see now, they are limiting the number of cars in circulation; there are more organic fruits and vegetables in supermarkets, and modern buildings design are environmentally friendly.

Everyone understands now that we need to do something for the environment. We have had the “COP21” in Paris recently, and the “World Summit Council” where decisions makers get together to think about the future sustainably.

I try to do my part; even if it is on a tiny scale. I try to educate the market, not only push wine. I take every opportunity to explain how wine can be made, either with a machine and agrochemicals or with cow manure and horsepower. How these processes will affect the environment, the people living and working on the farms, and the consumer’s health of course.

This is one of the reasons I created the “Organic Wine Community” on Facebook, a group to share information and knowledge, not advertising.

Through the wine, we can know that far. Many people like wine. So it would be helpful to all of us to have such knowledge.

I didn’t know much about agriculture when I began, so I had to learn about plant nutrition, soil microbiology, farming methods and sustainability. We live in a fantastic era with so many resources available online, I keep learning new things every day. I think that education is a big part of what I do. Most of the people I talk to have no idea of what is going on in a farm and how the plants and animals they are eating every day are raised or produced. To me, this is really, basic, fundamental knowledge that we should teach every child in school.

I began to be conscious of organic, and found Japanese "Kimura’s methods (natural farming method)". Mr Akinori Kimura became the first modern farmer who cultivated apples without using pesticides and fertilisers. "Natural farming is similar biodynamics. The name of Mr Masanobu Fukuoka may be better known in the world. Thanks to their achievements, sustainable agriculture is being reviewed in Japan as well. I hope to expand more.

Yes! “Nothing added, nothing taken, let Nature do its thing. Or let’s promote biodiversity." Encourage bacterias, fungus, earthworms, bugs and birds to come and leave, seasonally. It's very different from conventional farming which means industrial in polite terms.

“The Green Revolution” has done a lot of damage, weedkiller leads to naked soil and erosion, fertilizers and irrigation lead to mineralisation, while pesticides are poisoning the animals and the people living on and around the farm. In less than 3 generations, we have transformed fertile agricultural lands into deserts. It's a catastrophe.

When you look at mother nature, on the other hand, forests have been growing for millions of years. Nobody is around to cut the trees or pick up leaves. Nobody put fertiliser in the forest but trees are still growing up. When the trees or leaves fall on the ground, they are broken down into small pieces by crawling insects that can digest the hard fibres in wood, their excrements and the leftover small pieces of fibres are then feeding a fungus, the mycorrhiza, which is going to provide nutrients for bacteria to grow, bacteria that will help the plants absorb minerals available in the soil, and the cycle will repeat itself and continue forever. We can see through this symbiotic relationship the complexity of life. I maybe not the right person to talk about soil chemistry, as I am not a scientist, but I reckon it is about time we put ‘culture’ back into ‘agriculture’. Nature is like a book, we need to read it if we want to live on this planet.

We are also in this natural cycle.

The former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon famously said: “There is no plan B for climate change because there is no planet B.” We are in a dead end now and it doesn’t matter if we slow down, we are still going to hit the wall, in 20, 50 or 100 years. We need to reverse and change drastically our direction, our way of living.