Confounded
A high energy podcast with its own video channel featuring interviews with amazing people who have overcome adversity and life’s challenges to be successful in unique and wonderful ways.
Confounded
Uncorking the Artisanal World of Small-Batch Champagne with Sipp Champagne's Founders
Did you know there were 10,000 varieties of Champagnes in France you have never seen in the UK? Me neither!
Peter and Dan are two of the most interesting people i’ve met – the depth and knowledge they have of the wine is amazing.
Add in their energy, humour and sense of mission and this podcast fizzes with energy 🙂
They have launched Sip Champagnes to bring you the very best wines from across France from small local vineyards. These champagnes are the very best they can find and the effort they put into to finding, tasting and importing these wines is immense.
Really worth a listen – their genuine care and passion shines through and it was a pleasure to interview them!
Okay, so here you are on Confident TV Today we have Peter Crawford and Dan Blatchford from Sitch Champaigne's. Welcome to Confident TV, guys. Thanks, so much Thanks, and you guys, that's no problem, and you guys have a really interesting proposition. You have gone out to France of Hadming for a while and you have some amazing stats about how little of the different brands we actually know about in the UK, and your mission, I believe, is to build a website where I can actually go and discover smaller growers, smaller brands, and actually find some of the better champagnes, and you're going to effectively democratise that and make it easy for everyone to find.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly, you said it better than I could Possibly could. So I've been travelling over the last 20 years doing exactly that, trying to just pick up these little producers that we don't already have in the UK shores. And there are thousands, and there are 16,000 growers in the region and in the UK now we only see roughly 190 of them. That's amazing.
Speaker 3:So there's a tiny fraction and those 190 only represent 2% or less than 2% of the total sales. So they're not being given enough space on our I won't say supermarket shelves, because that's all right, I don't want people to see them there, but they're not going to be enough vision. Basically, on the UK market we want to try and give that vision, give the opportunity for consumers, lovers of wine and other people who want to, the opportunity to try them.
Speaker 2:The numbers seem to be off the scale. I mean you're talking thousands and thousands and thousands of growers and different brands which we wouldn't even recognise the name of. I mean thousands of them.
Speaker 3:Absolutely, and I think what's so important about the region is the way it's been brought up over the last few centuries and how it's relied on the big growers that you know of the Moets, the Burves, the Borranges. Those are the core component to what Champagne represents and they are massive. Obviously. They're absolutely massive and they run off the back of buying off those small producers.
Speaker 3:So, it's much easier, especially and I don't want to go into a match with MH because I don't want to do that but it's much easier for these producers to survive selling grapes or selling juice to the likes of Mot Hennessy or Bollinger or others. So what happened in the last few years and sadly we've seen the decline of it in the last probably decade as a whole is we've seen more and more producers come up that are really exciting, and you may not have heard of them, but producers like Pia Pita, selos Buresh these are really fantastic small producers that are on the UK market, that are super good wines and incredible wines, but they're a small fraction of what we could see, and I think what I'd like to see and what we want to try and do is bring on lots more producers and show what incredible wines they do make, and that's what I'm trying to achieve.
Speaker 2:That's fantastic. I think the idea that there are all these people out there who could be. If one takes off, he will change their lives.
Speaker 3:Absolutely, and that's I really do. Every time I look at the list and I've gone down and I've sat down many, many times looking at these lists of the producers that I want to bring across, and there are more and more and more that I want to bring across. Every time I look at them, I look at the list and go these wines are amazing wines. These should be in front of people, these should be in restaurants, these should be everywhere and I do think, give people the opportunity to try them. I'm not trying to change people's talents or change people's minds. If they like going out and they like buying vodka to go, that's absolutely fine. But this is something different. This is a small producer. This guy is on a tractor on a Friday night plowing the vines. He's out there doing his thing and she there are many, many female wine makers as well they're out there making their wines and that's what's important to me getting them a voice.
Speaker 2:That's what's proper craft, as you might say. Sorry, Dan, I was just going to say your job, dan, is to actually build somewhere where at which you've almost finished, I believe where we can actually go and read all about the different wines and buy and subscribe or have tasting. What's the model going to be for the website?
Speaker 3:Exactly that, yeah a bit of a hybrid model really. So we really want you to ultimately subscribe and let us introduce you to these incredible champagnes that we're finding and bringing to the UK. But we will have sort of an open bottle shop as well for you to browse and purchase. So we'll slice those up and position them in the right way so they're easy to find, with their particular finishes or whether they're what we're calling the SIP collection, which are I've seen that on Instagram.
Speaker 2:You've already got me pegged on Instagram with your ablution, yeah.
Speaker 3:They just represent some of the best bottles out there. At the moment that we've come across the farmers, the producers are reading something extraordinary and we think they just need to be known about. Everyone should know about this.
Speaker 2:You guys I love guys with a passion to zeal You're going to change the world, right? At least you know. I think it's fantastic. It means far too many businesses. One of the reasons I started this podcast was too many businesses who just literally, you know, cut and paste the McKinsey and start up business plan and go and everything is just transactional. And it's so boring, Right, it's just so boring. If there's no passion, there's no love, then I just don't know what you're doing it for.
Speaker 3:apart from that, that's exactly it, like we're part of the reason where we were hoping to have launched by now and we're very close. We're no more than a week or two, really to properly.
Speaker 2:Let me remind this might be live in two weeks. Okay, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:But, like, because we are, we are going back to the farmers here and they are farmers. They're not used to doing something like this. They're not used to like we say, to working with the staff that we're trying to sell their product, which means we need to pick it up from certain locations, we need to package that, ship it across.
Speaker 2:It's all complexity that we've had to work out because no one else is doing it I was going to say my next question to you both was the logistics around this sound horrible.
Speaker 3:I can't explain it enough, alastair, because the problem we're having is that the French and don't get me wrong, I love the French, but when it comes to this type of thing, they are problematic at best. What we're fighting against now, whenever you do go live with this, what we're fighting with now is August, the whole month of August.
Speaker 2:Everybody's on holiday. Yeah, it doesn't matter when you have an order of five pallets.
Speaker 3:It will not arrive until September the earliest.
Speaker 2:Although, interestingly, if you drive through that part of France and you happen to stop at a shatter, they will open the door, give you a tasting and then sell you a whole case. Of course, if you rock up with the euros in your pocket to buy it, they'll definitely be there. But even if you just start, I don't know how many brands are you going to have on the website when you go live.
Speaker 3:We've got about 25 producers. What's very important that I try to get from the producers, which is unique in the world of trading with wine is and this is no, I'm not being awful to the producers and saying this I don't want to work with just their standard wines. I'm not suggesting that their standard wines are good. I want unique, individual wines, these wines that stop you and go, wow, that's different. It doesn't have to be their prestige wine or there doesn't have to be a single vintage, but something that makes you stop and think.
Speaker 3:I've gone to producers, I've kicked out their one or two best wines and that's what we're working with. We've got like 40, 50 wines to work with, to start off with, and I say we'll be bringing more and more wines in as we develop. We will be shelving wines because I hope what would be absolutely fantastic is that some of these producers can springboard off the back of us and develop more in the UK market. I don't want to hold on to producers and hold them back. I want to keep working with their wines and get them into restaurants, get them into the entree and develop their relationship with the UK, which is really important to me.
Speaker 2:So are you actually bringing all that wine here and then having it bonded warehouse or whatever and then selling it, or are you waiting to resort so you are actually going to have stock in the? You're going to actually go and get it all by all? Bring it all over here? Yes, because you need a bonded warehouse and all that jazz. Yes, and then you sell it on the website and then you ship it from there.
Speaker 3:Yes, so it's actually a really significant undertaking this Some of these we've had to actually create, generate unique SKUs SKU codes for They've never made it to the UK before, so that even that took quite a bit of back and forth just to get these unique codes generases.
Speaker 2:So that we could track them. That's fantastic, though to bring that over, create SKUs for them, actually have a warehouse, actually be doing all the work and then saying if we make this work for you, we're not going to hold you contractually, you could only sell to us. We want you to be successful and I guess you've got plenty of choice, because there are another 10,000 out there to help.
Speaker 3:No, the joy for me is bringing them onto the market. We obviously want to have, we want the producers to work with us individually to start off, because that's the only way we can create our USP, which is bringing over unique and individual Champagne. But I've got the relationships, I've got the people I know where. I'm already working with another five producers to bring them in. What post? Our launch to get them. It's the first waves coming after launch. So I've already got those lined up and I'll be going over in both August and September to develop more relationships for the next five from there as well.
Speaker 3:So there are so many more the types of producers we're working with. There are a couple I would say 10, 15% that are quite frankly too big for us. In a sense, we'll bring them all and then we'll have to ship them on because we won't be able to engage with them long term because their numbers will be up in the tens of thousands of bottles that they want to ship. But I want to keep the relationship, nurture that relationship and that will no doubt bring us more wines in the future.
Speaker 2:You've got the two sides of this. You've got the restaurants and the trade, obviously, which is a key thing, for I guess I will tell you if I'm right or wrong here it feels to me that that would be the volume. And then you've got the consumers. But if you get the consumer play right with the website and you get your marketing right, that could be the volume. So you've got double-sided two audiences here.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely, and those are definitely me. We can all learn from COVID a little bit with that. Having a finger in each prize is very important because the restaurants are in front of you.
Speaker 2:in September, for three months, you're going to need that consumer space.
Speaker 3:Absolutely, and I've been on the phone with Champagne as a whole, Lots of CEOs from various Champagne houses, much bigger Champagne houses than we're dealing with and it's just been catastrophic in Champagne. Sales are down 20%, 30% at least. So it is vast, vast ways of Champagne just sitting in bonded accounts just waiting for something to happen.
Speaker 2:That's amazing too. And is that because the restaurants are shut up because people aren't buying it?
Speaker 3:I think they're both together and I can't. The problem with Champagne and this is what we want to try and change is it is so linked up to the thought of celebration and something special, and all of that has been taken away by COVID. Yes, so not just the on trade, restaurants, et cetera, bars, but also the idea of celebration through birthday parties and where you bring people together. It's just gone. So there's no reason to open a bottle of Champagne, and what we want to try and do is, with sit and I hope we can do that is translate that Champagne is more than that. It can be something you open, it's a course. You can open it to celebrate a birthday or a anniversary or something like that, or whatever it may be for you. But Champagne, for me, is about something you enjoy with food or something you enjoy on your own, which I do quite often.
Speaker 2:That's going to sound all wrong. Peter Crawford, the man who drinks Champagne by himself. So when I was a small boy, my dad, he worked really, really hard and they'd have a bottle of it on a Friday night not to celebrate, I think, just because, thank God it's Friday. Yeah, yeah, I think that was it for the night. It wasn't like then I bought the red, then I bought the white, like our generation did. It was literally that was it, yeah.
Speaker 3:But I think what's happened in the last couple of decades with Champagne is it's returning to its roots a little bit. Champagne used to be vinified. You know it used to be vinified with a cork. These processes bring about what's called micro-alternation and a number of other factors which I won't get into today. What those bring to your glass especially if you don't have it in a food but you have it in a red or white wine glass is structure that people don't expect from Champagne. So when you open your bottle of Merit Riches Perils, you get a and I really do respect the wine maker, ben Laguerre's full Merit you get a consistent, sparkling wine. That is exactly what you expect from a Merit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it smells, the same, tastes, the same, its consistency is key yeah. Consistency is phenomenal. When you look at that thing, it's, it tastes McDonald's or Champagne. But that's not very polite. No, no, no, no, I wouldn't do, but the system's the same right. Exactly, the systematic thing is that you get the same thing. You can take it to something for present, you're not going to like, you know, etc. Etc.
Speaker 3:Exactly so. What I want to do, and what Dan and I hope to achieve from this, is to give people the opportunity to try something that is genuinely unique. Many of these producers that we're bringing over produce six, seven, 800 bottles total. Wow. So when you try a wine from one of these producers, you are trying something that's been vinified in one or maybe two barrels and you're getting something that is very unique in flavour profile that next year will not be the same.
Speaker 2:That is amazing. So if I get to see a really like, there's a chance I mean never get to taste anything like it again.
Speaker 3:Which is why you can obviously go on to the website and buy six bottles and buy the whole rest of the juice.
Speaker 2:Why not? Because I think the other thing is there must be. Well, there are. I know some of them. There are people who actually, you know, lay down wine. I mean it doesn't necessarily need to be that expensive, but they know enough to chew some reds and lay them down. And actually I don't think I've ever seen a bottle of champagne in one of their houses, you know. So you've got the chance to say this is a wine like others. We actually, if you know what you're buying and you like, like, you find the one you like, you can actually buy five and just keep it Because it won't come round again.
Speaker 2:Because there was a whiskey I bought which the name has completely escaped me at Rosebank and I was first given it was about 25 quid or something and I had a drank of. It was great. Actually, it was only whiskey I really liked. I bought another one. This time it was 50 quid and me, being a man, I didn't go. What I should do is buy 10 bottles. And now if because I didn't realize Rosebank had shut Now if you want to buy the same 12 year old bottle, it's 812. And now, of course, I ain't drinking any Rosebank unless you know some, somebody has to drop up Medura step, and I guess this is the same principle, right? You're going to find something from a small producer which is really, really special and it ain't coming back.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly, and that's just happened in the champagne market, but only really the upper end of the prestige Cubase. I do think there is an opportunity. We see it with a very few small producers or growers in the region, but I think there's definitely an opportunity with a number of these wines where you lay it down, you enjoy it over a period of five, 10 years, depending on what your palate likes. I love old champagnes. Some people don't.
Speaker 2:So I wish I knew the difference. We're going to have to do a tasting session. I have no idea what that means. I've been in the cuba for 20 years. What does that mean? I was such a champagne heathen. This is going to be a really interesting journey watching you guys.
Speaker 3:Absolutely, but it's well worth doing and something I think we can help people understand a little bit.
Speaker 2:So, assuming you've got you know, so you'll have a marketing strategy to get people to the website. You've got a bit of education to do, obviously, because what you're explaining to me just now is it's straightforward but it needs. I presume you love videos off the website. How would you actually get? Have you get any like real world consumer experiences planned, like tasting or, you know, even just video tasting? There's another unnamed wine company here. I wouldn't promote you. I saw they do a drinks evening with a winemaker and it's quite well. I think 5,000 people attending the webinar I saw and she said the next day she sold her entire year within three hours of that finishing. So that seems like a great way to engage people. You don't necessarily buy and taste it there and then you get the producer on, you talk to them. It's interesting and actually you can start that. And small. You know 5,000 people, you know 50 people. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3:And I think that's again. Covid has delivered us a very open set for exactly that. The last three, four, five months I've been doing these IG live sessions with the number of wine makers. You can promote that by the way.
Speaker 2:If you want to, if you want to drop your name in there, you can.
Speaker 3:My handle is alivolay, if you can spell it a-l-a-v-o-l-e-e.
Speaker 2:I'll stick that in the show notes as well, for people.
Speaker 3:Exactly so.
Speaker 3:I've been doing a number of these with the winemakers and I very much intend to develop that concept onto the SIP, specifically the SIP subscription model, because I think it works really nicely.
Speaker 3:You get your case and with that case you get the opportunity to have a sit down with the winemaker, with all the other subscribers, and you can talk about the wine with the winemaker there and we'll bring them out on. A number of the issues we have with winemakers, I must say at this point is because they're so fresh to the market, a number of them don't speak English, which I should, something we'll need to work on. So it'll be either with the winemaker or with myself running the webinar with the Hats, with the winemaker in the background. It's exactly what we want to find to you, because it's definitely the best way to understand and get to grips with what the wine is bringing. I think sometimes with any wine tasting, it's quite hard to see beyond the glass and what's going on, and if you're talking to the winemaker, you're talking to the person who's working those vineyards. You can get a little bit more of a flavour of what they're trying to achieve.
Speaker 2:I think also, people drive past their stuff in France and do realize we stayed once in the house where it was owned by. It was a tiny vineyard, I think it was like seven acres, nine acres, I mean it really wasn't an awful lot, Made a few bottles and I remember being at three o'clock one afternoon sitting where I rented the converted barn as a pool and everything. They're going nice, the kids are in the pool, I'm sitting at the edge and I watched him break his back going up in that vineyard in 40 degrees heat in the middle of August and I thought that's actually really there's some real love and sweat and tears goes into that production isn't there, Thank you.
Speaker 3:Absolutely, and it is proper back-breaking work because it is on hills, it's all one. That's the beauty of Champagne. It's on these beautiful east-sackey spacing vineyards and they're all. I mean, I've been one of the producers who I'm bringing on later on has, I think, the highest angle vineyard, or something like 38 degrees, which is just Wow. I don't know how they work at a really different. It's absolutely phenomenal.
Speaker 2:And so, Dan, how does the subscription model work? I mean because the website is almost there, just about to go live or will be live, so I produced this. What are my options as a subscriber?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we're launching with three tiers of subscription. We're basically around three price points where we'll deliver a range of unique bottles to the subscribers each month. So I'm starting at around two to three Sorry, one to two bottles. Let me say that again, starting at one to two bottles and then getting up to the maximum number, which is around about nine bottles. Okay, so what?
Speaker 2:you're saying here is this is not just like my majestic delivery, which I sort of apply with every month and just get the next case in. This is actually because I might drink one, keep one. I'm not supposed to be drinking all this just because it's sitting in my house, right?
Speaker 3:There's certainly that in there, right, like Peter touched on, there will be a sit down, likely mostly a video chat, to begin with. So with either Peter and or the producers themselves, we'll include a little bit of information in the subscription so you can find out about the producers and how they're working the lands and the tasting notes for the bottles, so trying to really promote these farmers, these producers, and why should you trust us to package these up? So, although there won't initially be any choice to select the exact bottles that you get, we want to surprise you with these unique bottles, so we'll just tell you what's right for you.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Well, I actually think you're quite right. I think it's bang on trend, because the other thing I think you've got going for right now is, I think, the being a home thing, and I don't know if you've seen, there was some stats day before yesterday that on Google Shopping type searches, quality is now a bigger search than price. So, weirdly, we're all at home. I don't know what the 9 million people on furlough are doing, but I presume they're saying actually they don't want to buy more cheap shit. I'm actually going to buy something nice because I'm going to have to use it every day. Whatever this reason is, people are now seeing quality and I think that's probably maybe a combination of let's not be frivolous with our money, let's buy stuff that lasts a bit longer, etc. Etc. And, yeah, I think that other thing that's happening that you perfect timing, is the rise of all the more niche products which are better quality and even if they have a smaller audience.
Speaker 2:That audience there's a guy in LinkedIn. You must have seen him. Is it Simon Bourne? The handmade shoe company guy who went on to LinkedIn, on to Dragonstone. He's got that huge audience on LinkedIn because it's just him doing something and trying to do it really well and people are more and feel more connected to the product. So if you guys are saying here is something we recommend and we've talked to, I mean, are you going to do stuff like videos with the actual production when you can go back Videos with the producers because that'd be fascinating to actually see the vineyard and the process and the family and where they make it?
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's exactly it, absolutely our plans. So August and September, as Peter mentioned, we're planning to be out there, assuming we can travel and the restrictions aren't in place.
Speaker 2:For we in place, I hope. Then I bought my Euro tunnel so it gets to go in a whole bit.
Speaker 3:That's absolutely our plan Video content, interviews with the producers, and so just trying to introduce the roots of these bottles these shumites, yeah, personalizing it and making it.
Speaker 2:you know, like you're there and you're creating the brand around Sip and Y, but I think if you could bring in the producers and actually make it real that man there and his family make this champagne, we can tell you it's fantastic. I think that's really, really powerful.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, you bear in mind as well that the so generational, generation-wise, so we have like the millennial generation now is the. Is the the largest or has the largest spending power of any generation in the UK? I think it's. I think it's from this year onwards. They sort of shifted into that, into that phase, and I'm an older millennial.
Speaker 2:But we're all different. Sure, Dan, he needs to get better lights. We can't tell from here that you're a millennial. People listen to the podcast. Dan is sitting in the dark and we can't tell if he's 20 or something.
Speaker 3:I will get lights. But there were, there was an interesting concept wine bars, not necessarily champagne bars, but popping up in East London pre-COVID, really starting to tap into that. That, that that market for not wanting the norm, not wanting these established brands so unique, just personal, different it's. It's it's still getting back to those roots and and and that's why we we feel that like now is so important. It just like this, it feels like the right time to do it, and the data shows this. It's the right time to do it, like the numbers speak to themselves. So yeah, it's the exact same.
Speaker 2:But you do have a massive slump of champagne sales across the board, right Consumer and on-premise and stuff. So you do have a never mountain in terms of is that because people aren't going out and or you were seeing out of the link to celebration, or is it financial, like I'm not going to spend that money on this just now?
Speaker 3:Yeah, that was absolutely. I'm sorry. I was going to say there suddenly was a game and for we can say to say the majority of the lockdown and so on. There is some interesting data released yesterday around alcohol generally. So sales have rebounded quite significantly over the last month or so.
Speaker 2:We sorry. Is that champagne or all alcohol? That's quite interesting. That was generally all alcohol. I would have said it was me. I thought everyone was drinking every day of the first few weeks because it was just me. Everyone seemed to be on Zoom every Friday night, completely half-cut.
Speaker 3:We also have the numbers from the beginning of this year. So just before the COVID crisis, the sales by volume in champagne had come down slightly and I think that's the exact percentage of the total I have over the last 12 months. But, interestingly, the pricing, so the sales average so that was the world of Zygmortz had increased quite significantly, although the and fitting that by the, say, the large houses and the grow producers, you see a massive imbalance and that's where we see this opportunity. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think so. I think definitely in the more unique element is the key here, isn't it? It's not just another bottle of the same stuff, as you said, no disparaging the fact that it is incredibly popular and the big names that we bought still be the thing that everybody thinks about. I think that is definitely on point right now. Yes, absolutely. It's interesting that people worry about retail, because all we hear about is retail, retail, retail. Obviously, I'd do a bit of work for RedBrain In fact, I've just interviewed somebody for them.
Speaker 2:Of course, you try and buy a mountain bike. You try and buy any bicycle. On any of the big names, like chain reactions, you can go and find a popular size mountain bike for about a grand. This is not cheap bikes for chucking around the garden and they'll be out of stock until June, january 2021. This is across the board, and there's so many. I don't even still can get one. You couldn't get an Oculus Rift. That's a 500-pound toy.
Speaker 2:Stuff is still selling out. Money is being spent. It's just being reallocated, I think, in some cases to well, the bike's more useful than a new car. I'd rather have a case of nice champagne from a little grower that I've seen a video about it and actually just go to a big brand and just buy something because for the sake of it. That is on point. Here's the tough question. Website goes live in two weeks, maybe live on the day we produce this. Am I even timing? It's the same thing. To help you guys, along With my 50 subscribers, obviously, if you're all listening, you should all buy a bottle of sipchampionscom. What is your go-to market strategy for the website? Obviously, you've got a lot of noise to get cut through and you've got to get that positioning out there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I can talk a little bit about that. We have essentially five to the market which we should try. One is going to be referral. We are increasingly talking to, as you mentioned earlier, the Alavale audience. We're producing content there, we're introducing and integrating the producers themselves and referring through to SIP. We're going to build that momentum over the next. We have been over the last couple of weeks and built that over the next couple of weeks. We were launching with an affiliate network that's coming together at the moment. We have the PPC campaign, so that's going to be across, obviously AdWords and Bing, but also Facebook and Instagram. We have a huge audience with yeah.
Speaker 2:I hear you've been going to Instagram right?
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly, we have a huge audience there at the moment by Alavale, who are already interested in unique bottles. That's why they engage so much. What we found is a lot of the current, let's say, retailers. They don't really look after their SEO, so there's such huge gaps there that we've already identified.
Speaker 2:There's a technical challenge here. We're going to beat the big boys with SEO.
Speaker 3:Long, long time. Look, we're not. There are some interesting gaps that we've already identified at which that we're going to be going after. All of that will then drive into a totally joined up email marketing bunch of campaigns Talking to. We've already gathered close to 100 individuals, unique email addresses, who have engaged with us, who have expressed interest and who are ready to go. We're tailoring our experience for those users. Look, we're quite in conflict. We've got a number of different routes. We have some I can't decide the next phases of the business, again, we touched on it earlier in terms of, say, there's restaurants, there's events. So the next stages where we want to get to you, more likely next year, assuming the world starts to open up a little bit more than it has been this year.
Speaker 2:Yeah but I think you've got interesting thing because even if it doesn't, even if COVID comes back, even if there's another lockdown, there's a sort of uncertainty of whatever thing is, and then it's oh, it's coming back. Does it become a kind of oh, it's come back? So therefore, instead of mass panic and furlough and all this stuff, it just becomes more normal to have a certain amount of uncertainty and therefore that actually creates certainty. Weirdly, because it was the opposite, isn't it? And there you get people going actually, I'm going to buy it, instead of fearing for everything. They start saying, well, I'm going to buy a bottle of champagne and send it to somebody, because that's the other thing, like the whiskey exchange has done really well because of the gifting. Yeah, and you go there and you buy something I actually wouldn't buy myself.
Speaker 2:I sent to a friend the other day because I'm going to spend more as a gift than I probably would on my own sometimes. So therefore, if you can nail that bit, that it becomes part of that gifting process, I would love to send a bottle of, you know, unique, bespoke champagne that nobody's ever heard of and it blows your palate. And of course I'm going to do that rather than go click button, send bottle of brand name, because that just the brand name gift. You know that's like the laziest champagne present you could ever get. So brand name gift, you know it's fine if you know that's what you want to do, but if you actually want to put some thought into it, you just don't do that. Yeah, I think that's right. At least you've got an audience of one, right? I'm with you.
Speaker 3:You're such a great. I wondered in something that we've been exploring with one of the producers and we haven't quite nailed how to fully do this yet, but we're exploring a particularly unique bottle, that we have caught a large chunk of the entire line that will ever be produced and we were exploring options to totally personalise the.
Speaker 2:Oh, my God, you have got this one of 300, like if you buy a Macaron or a Ferrari. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:It can do that. So, yeah, we were hoping to have that in place for launch, but it's proving, as things always do, literally it's worth doing because it's a little bit harder to truly get there.
Speaker 2:But even without the, even just using the limited nature of some of the producers, like you were saying, there's one barrel right. That's your lot. How many bottles is that?
Speaker 3:It depends on the barrel size, but usually they use 228-litre barrels, so you're looking around about 300 bottles.
Speaker 2:So you get one out of 300, two out of 300. I mean, that's a great way to do it, isn't it To actually have that limited edition type thing.
Speaker 3:For me, that's what's so exciting about it and I buy into that because I love the opportunity to try something that is so unique, so one-off. I think that's really exciting.
Speaker 2:That's brilliant. Well, I wish you all the best. It's been absolutely fascinating and it would be great to have you back on, maybe just as a pop into one of the shows later on in the year, with how you're getting on.
Speaker 3:Yeah, perhaps next time we all get a bottle and we can drink and taste at the same time. I think that'd be wonderful. What?
Speaker 2:we should actually do is because we do have all 50 subscribers now. It was only last I did episode with one, so this is really good. That's growth that you guys could only dream of. Right, we could choose a couple of other people as well at random and get them on and get. We could do a little LinkedIn thing and see who it was to come on and actually taste it with us. Fantastic idea, absolutely. So it's been great to have you on. That's Dan and Peter from sipchampainscom with their new business, and we're going to hear more about them in the future. Thank you very much, guys.
Speaker 3:Thanks a lot. You.
