Thierry Desseauve is a really cool dude.  He’s obviously had a huge role in creating the contemporary wine scene that exists in France.  He’s come a long way since his departure from RDF and I’m glad he had time to talk at Vin 2.0 (a conference I talked about previously) since he’s usually busy with the multitude of projects that he spearheads with Michel Bettane.

Actually, with the Grand Tasting right around the corner, I was very surprised to learn that he’d be presenting at Vin 2.0 on the same panel as me.  We bookended it.  I started with a talk on how a winemaker can use social media to build a brand, and he finished.  And this was a great boon because he was able to address a lot of what I said in his presentation.  Several parts of his speech are addressed to me, and I think that in some sense, I was a proxy for all the world’s winemakers making good wine and looking for solutions.

I said some things in my presentation that he could have taken the wrong way.  About the high cost of live events and conventional advertising.  But instead he acknowledged that he as a media man has the important job of finding the people who do value old school marketing while simultaneously placing himself in the arena that folks like me value.

He’s talking about his efforts to change the focus of the wine business.   So that everybody focuses on the drinkers instead of each segment catering to some other middle man without ever thinking about our consumers.

I enjoyed the presentation.

And a big thanks to Isabelle from Vizioz Communication who filmed Desseauve’s presentation and put it on youtube.