Stories of the nominees

Wine Travel Awards at a unique event hosted by Bernard Magrez Start-Up Win and Jane Anson

France

Bernard Magrez Incubator recently hosted Big Mentor Day, an event that combined a conference and business networking.

Almost a year ago, the Wine Travel Awards project became one of the members of Bernard Magrez Start-Up Win, a charity initiative launched by Bernard Magrez to help develop start-ups in the wine sector. The WTA was selected from a few hundred outstanding global initiatives as a promising start-up in wine tourism and as a platform for networking in the wine community.

Wine Travel Awards took part in the Big Mentor Day, as part of the Incubator’s professional community. The event was held at Château Pape Clément, the headquarters of Bernard Magrez Start-Up Win, and organised by the Incubator and Jane Anson – the famous wine critic. The WTA team was represented by our Marketing Director – Lyudmyla Bobyk.

The event began with a presentation of the winners of the Big Mentor Week programme, organised by Jane Anson and Chinedu Rita Rossa with the support of the Gerard Basset Foundation. These are talented young people from different parts of the world (Kenya, Lebanon, Nigeria, India, Thailand, Chile, USA) who are starting their way in the wine business: sommeliers, bloggers, wine consultants, managers, etc.

As part of the event, a business game was organised, in which all those present – start-up companies and a group of talented young people from Jane Anson – took part. Anson’s representatives played the role of investors who, after getting acquainted with the start-up participants, decided how much money they were willing to invest in a particular project. The winner became the company project Vinsulation (co-owners are graduates of KEDGE Business School) in which investors invested the most money. This start-up offers insulative wine shipping packages. Their mission is to upcycle vineyard wastes to create insulative wine shipping packages to replace Styrofoam plastic.

In the afternoon, participants had the opportunity to chat via Zoom with Loiс Pasquet, a legendary modernist winemaker from Bordeaux. He is reviving the autochthonous grape varieties in the Graves appellation, which existed in these places before phylloxera. This is the region where grapes have been grown since the Roman Empire. Paquet follows the principles of the biodynamic philosophy in viticulture and winemaking. Liber Pater 2015 by Louis Paquet costs €30,000.

During the event, Lyudmyla Bobyk managed to interview Jane Anson, who has been living in Bordeaux for over 20 years and is a renowned wine critic and author of the book Inside Bordeaux.