Rian Hill: The Advisor’s Guide to Hosting High-End Wine Events

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Taylor Swift is Time's Person of the Year, and she's in the middle of what will likely become the biggest-grossing concert tour of all time. She's a perfect example of how people crave experiences. You can listen to her music at home, but there's nothing that comes close to being at her concert with 70,000 screaming fans and having that communal experience. In a similar way, for decades, financial advisors have been hosting their own events and bringing their clients and potential clients together. Hi everyone, I'm business coach Steve Sandusky for Barron's Advisor, The Way Forward Podcast. My guest today is Ryan Hill. Ryan is a wine expert with Left Bank Wine and Spirits out of Madison, Wisconsin. In today's show, Ryan and I talk about how to host and produce a high-end wine event. And while it may not attract tens of thousands of fans like a Taylor Swift concert, you can deliver a highly intimate experience that will deepen relationships with your top clients, attract new clients, and have fun and learn something new in the process. With that, please enjoy my conversation with Ryan Hill. This is gonna be really fun because we are going to talk about wine. And while we're having this conversation, we happen to have a glass of wine in our hand. So what is the wine that we're drinking here?

Indeed. Yeah, we are drinking some Valpolicella from northern Italy, from Pra, the producer. And my first goal here during your podcast is to not spill my wine across your desk.

So that would be appreciated.

Thank you very much. But it's the afternoon. This is a very appropriate time to be sipping a little wine. And it's very apropos to the topic at hand.

Right. And this was one that you had recommended.

Yes. I wonder actually if you and I have tasted this in one of our tastings.

I'm sure we have.

So it's a favorite of mine. It drinks like Beaujolais or Pinot Noir, if that helps to put someone who's listening in the zone of what it is that we're tasting right now. So versatile and transparent and yeah, all sorts of favorite words of mine all bundled into one.

Yeah. So in the past few years, I've been to several wine tasting events that you have led. And I thought it would be a great idea for a show here to talk about how to produce and host a high-end wine event. Let's talk about if we want to have some kind of theme to this event? And that's one of the fun things about the different wine tastings that I've been to with you is for each one of these, you have a different theme.

So, yes.

Is that a good idea to start with, to have a theme for the event? Or should we do a blind tasting? Could we do both at different times? What are your thoughts on that?

I think both are great ideas. I personally love to theme things. It keeps you on topic. It creates, I think, a little bit of excitement and enthusiasm. Boils a great big world of wine down into something that is contained and digestible. You were very kind to print off a few that I have prepared here. And in years past, one of my themes was Taste the Rainbow. And this was just an opportunity to taste through quite literally just different colors of wine, to walk someone through white, orange, rosé, red, different colors, textures, hues.

Let's talk about some logistics related to that. So this particular one, Taste the Rainbow, there's 6 different wines that we went through there. And approximately how much time would you want to allocate for something like this? And should we have cheese and crackers that go with it? Should we have chocolates? Should we have food? What do you suggest in terms of how to complement the wines? And is 6 wines— is that a good number?

I think 6 wines is a great number. I think that it depends how much time you'd like to spend talking about each wine. When I'm conducting one of my tastings, one of my classes, I love to just get the conversation started. I try to not get too lost in the weeds. You can print out what are called tech sheets for these wines that will tell you exactly when it was harvested, exactly how much time it spent in barrel, just the absolute nuts and bolts of these bottles. Maybe that's very interesting to you. If it is, print those out and feel free to share them. I love it. But I think that these bottles are perhaps more easily expressed just by sharing a little bit of a story about them. And then over the course of 6 wines, you can piece those stories together into a greater whole, into a more complete picture wherein lies the theme. Yeah, 10 minutes of wine, 60 minutes for a tasting. That sounds great to me. It's easy to go farther. These things have a way of slowing down as you keep sipping, I should add. You might start on a particular pace and find that you're just rolling by that 4th wine. Everybody's enjoying themselves. People are asking questions and engaging with one another. Great. Feel the moment and rise to it, I think, and just let your clients, in that case, steer that particular tasting.

And then always a good idea to have some wine and crackers or some pairings with it, or what do you think?

I think so. You know, just a little something to nosh on. It could be as simple as crackers or bread just to clean up your palate in between wines. And again, from there, the sky's the limit. You could decide to have some, some dried fruits or some olives. You could go a little bit farther and have canapés, little hors d'oeuvres that you might choose to enjoy. And perhaps that final step would be actually coursing things appropriately to pair with each and every wine, which is an art in and of itself.

Okay, so this first one we did was this Taste the Rainbow. And I'm looking here, we've got a wine from Germany, Slovenia, California, France, and Portugal.

Yes.

So what was your thinking as you were trying to come up with these?

So Taste the Rainbow was definitely about colors and textures. We started out drinking dry Riesling from the Mosel here, from a little place called Bremmerkalmans, which is, if my memory serves, the steepest site in all of Germany, and perhaps the world as well. It is just this amazingly steep—

And that's where they had to be belayed down to pick the grapes, right?

You need some, you need a proper safety harness here. You cannot get machinery up there. It is all done by hand. So we started quite dry, and then we moved. Our second wine was from Slovenia, from a winery called Rodica, and it was an orange Malvasia. The sort of wine that you just want a little taste of because that skin contact, it gave it a lot of astringency. There were just these rich honeycomb notes to the wine. It's fantastic, actually. I'm like looking at the sheet for the first time. You surprised me.

Making you thirsty, huh?

And it's making me thirsty, and it's reminding me about all of these delicious different wines. And then we tasted a Pét-Nat Rosé. It's a very naturally sparkling wine from Northern California. And then we got bigger. We tasted a great big Cabernet from Keenan up in Napa Valley. And then we finished sweet. To Bordeaux, we finished with Sauternes, and then a special little Portuguese wine called Carcavelos. That rounded things out for us. Again, we just kept building and building until there was no place left to build to. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I'm enjoying looking back on it now.

Yeah, we bought several of these. Now these are all reasonably priced. And so I'm looking at these and the prices are anywhere from $24 a bottle to, I think the high one here is like $46. So for not cheap necessarily, but yeah, you're gonna get some good wines. And I think you always did a good job of finding good value in quality wines.

My goal is always to help people think outside of the box when it comes to these tastings. That's even what we call this particular class. It's hosted via the Clearing Folk School here in Door County, and it's just getting people out of their comfort zone. It is far too easy, I think, in this country to just be beholden to the grocery store shelf, right? We shop at the same store every week. That wine aisle is positioned very strategically in the store. You pass by and then you get into a rut, perhaps even buying the same bottles every single time that you're there. So classes like this are a great way to get people outside of that way of thinking. Stretch out a little bit, taste things that you might not otherwise taste. It's wine. At the end of the day, it's a pleasure. They all might not be your favorite selections at a tasting like this,, but it'll be someone else's, you know, and you'll turn someone else onto a wine. You might turn yourself onto something brand new in the process. Yeah, I can't recommend it highly enough. Just getting outside of that store, finding a little wine shop, finding someone who can help to guide you, you know, over the course of your journey into wine.

Yeah. And we happen to have a great little wine shop here just down the road from us. And it's amazing how much stuff they got in there. And it's fun to go in there and get their recommendations and get your recommendations as opposed to just going to the grocery store. Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

Support those local— Firefly here. Absolutely. Okay. Yeah. We're name-dropping them. Oh yeah. What a marvelous job they do. If anybody listening here makes their way up to Little Sister Bay, Wisconsin, in Door County, Firefly is this treasure of a wine shop. You wouldn't even know it's there. It's hidden away. And inside, my goodness, are just some of the most difficult-to-find wines, just a marvelous selection of large-format wines, the sorts of things that, again, are not in any grocery store. They're in your fine wine shops. They're in the great restaurants. When you go to a shop like that, it gives you the opportunity to, again, over time, develop a relationship with The people that own these stores, they own them for a reason. Wine is a passion to them. It's a pleasure to them. They want to help you experience things that are new to you and to find you things that you'll like, find you things that will challenge you. And it's a great way to get into tastings like this and to develop the connections that might help you execute one of these just at that high professional level that will hopefully impress the clients and take you across the finish line, as it were.

Excellent. All right. So another theme you had here was let's play too.

Yes. What was that about? We went from Beaujolais in France to the Piedmont in Italy to Santa Cruz Mountains, California. And all of these were white wines. The first one was sparkling, and then there were two whites to follow. And then we reversed. We did the same geography again, Beaujolais, Piedmont, and Santa Cruz Mountains, but red all the way around. So it was Let's Play Two. That's a Yogi Berra reference, I think, right? It's a baseball reference. Yeah, it was just a fun opportunity to say, look, here are two different sides of the same coin. In Beaujolais. We started out with, with a fun sparkling Beaujolais, which I don't think you see often, frankly. And then we tasted Arneis from Piedmont, which flies very under the radar. Lovely textured white wine from Piedmont. And then we tasted Domaine Eden's Chardonnay from Santa Cruz Mountains. Absolutely lovely. One of the original boutique wineries in California. And then it was actually back to these same 3 wineries. So we tasted beautiful Côte de Bruy from Nicole Chanrion in Beaujolais, a beautiful Barolo from Marcarini in Piedmont, and then lastly, lovely Cabernet from Domaine Eden. Let's play 2. It was just a lot of fun.

It was. All right. And a 3rd one we did here earlier this year was called Ciao, Old World.

What's that? And I think what is left unsaid here is hello, new world, because this was a chance to, again, perhaps get people out of the comfort zone. Maybe old world wine is not your comfort zone, and that would be a great tasting to host. But when you do this for a living, you're drinking a lot of wine all the time from France, from Italy, from Spain and elsewhere. So I thought it would be fun to highlight some just little out-of-the-way regions in the New World. We tasted wine from Swartland, South Africa, a lovely Chenin Blanc from Kloof Street. We tasted Semillon from Walla Valley up in Washington. Una Cozello, this wine called Halcyon Days, which I cannot exactly remember. I think that it was Nero d'Avola, I think. Don't hold me to it. Google it. I might be wrong. From the Riverlands in Australia. And then we got into California, Paso Robles. Patelanda Tablas, Ukko Valley. Just a delicious reserve Malbec from Kaikin. And then we finished in Sonoma, one of, I think, the US's most famous wineries, Ridge Vineyards. So that brought us full circle there. Goodbye old world, hello new. That was a lot of fun. And I think all of these are just fun examples. This is me not trying to think too deeply about it, but just to keep things exciting for, in this case, students. We were tasting different wines every single week, 4 weeks consecutively. And it just helps you to wrangle your thoughts and get people onto your wavelength. And then just, you take them on a journey. And again, it tends to start light and it tends to finish big. And that's okay. That's the right way to drink wine, I think.

And I remember another one of the sessions that you did was you took the same grape, let's say it's a Cabernet grape from France and a Cabernet grape from Australia or Brazil or wherever it was. So you took the same grape but in two different regions around the world, and then talk to us about how you can take the same grape, but it could taste quite different depending on the local environment and the soil and all of that good stuff. So I thought that was another interesting—

I could do these all day too. I love it. Like, they're these point-counterpoint tastings I think are so much fun. So a great example might be Malbec, right? People tend to think of Malbec, uh, and associate it with Argentina, with Mendoza, and rightfully it has absolutely flourished there. But Malbec hails from Cahors in the southwest of France, and it is in entirely different animal there. A lot more astringency and grip, like unforgivingly dry, very interesting, very earthy. But in Argentina, by comparison, it's lifted in the mid-palate. It has so much more fruit. It's softer. And it's so fun to just highlight and compare and contrast these things and just let people know what a difference this geography makes. Geography, place in the world of wine, is everything, right? The country that you're in, it is, it's the T word.

I'm not even going to try and pronounce it.

It's the terroir. There you go.

Exactly.

I was going to take We're going a long way there. So terroir, it's this French concept of place, and it's more than just longitude and latitude. It's the slope of the vineyard, so its relationship to the sun, its temperature, its wind over the course of the year, its soil composition, its moisture. Hopefully not a lot of moisture, because I'm sure you've heard me say that grapes, they love to struggle, or at least the vines love to struggle, and they produce then fewer grapes at the end of the year. Grapes of much greater concentration. So it's all of these things all wrapped up into one. And then it's fun to put this on display for students or for colleagues or for whomever it might be that you're tasting with. And again, like, this I think will take your average wine drinker so far outside of their comfort zone. If they're used to grabbing a bottle of Kendall-Jackson from the grocery store, I'll take nothing away from Kendall-Jackson, but there are places farther afield that you can take them. And wine can get as fun and intellectual as you would like it to get. It's truly a pleasure.

So here in Door County, I think we are on about the same latitude as— is it Burgundy, France, or Bordeaux, France?

I think we're like real close on the 45th parallel right here. Right.

And we're trying to grow grapes here, which in no way, shape, or form are going to be anywhere comparable to what they're growing in France. So talking about that terroir.

Yeah.

If I can pronounce it correctly. You got it. Yeah. Same latitude, very different soil conditions here. Very different climate here, much colder here.

And it's not the temperature primarily here, right? It's the fact— so we are actually— I'm no expert. I confess to be no expert when it comes to Wisconsin wine, but we are in a little AVA, this little American Viticultural Area. So you can grow grapes here, but they have to be hybridized grapes or grapes that are native to the US. Vitis vinifera would be the rootstock, the vines on which all famous grapes that people would know are grown from Pinot Noir to Cabernet and all sorts of delicious and noble varietals. Locally here, they'll grow things like Marquètes, and honestly, my knowledge is going to get very thin of them straight away. But the difference is we just, because of our continental climate here, we get this deep freeze and the rootstock just can't survive. So that's it in a nutshell. Maybe global warming is going to do us some favors here. I'm not sure. It's changing the landscape for better and for worse already in Europe. This is also a fun digression, but you've got a lot of Champagne houses purchasing property in the south of England because they see the writing is on the wall. And these growing zones are marching ever northward.

Maybe someday we will become a great growing region.

You never know. But it's an interesting topic, the way that wine relates to weather and what you can do where. No question.

Let's talk about the setup here. So you've also got a background in the restaurant industry. You were running some fine restaurants in New York City, I believe, maybe even in Chicago. So you know all about the restaurant scene. What are some different ways or venues that we could use to host an event like this? And I know some advisors actually use their own offices. If they have a nice boardroom, they might even do it in the boardroom. You of course can do it in a restaurant. What are your thoughts on the importance of selecting the venue?

I think it's all about your comfort zone and your level of comfort with regards to wine. If you feel as if you have the space either in your home, in a boardroom, in order to accommodate the hospitality, I think that would likely need to accompany an event like this, then I say more power to you. But I think that involves a good deal of prep work. It involves having the right stemware there. It likely involves having a team, or at least an expert of some sort on hand that can help to conduct the event for you. You could do it yourself, and I'm sure a business person who knows a lot about wine could, but maybe it takes you out of the moment. It can just be fun to fall into the conversation with colleagues or with clients and to feel perhaps as if you're all enjoying the same show together, even though you're the one who did the legwork and put the show together. So that would definitely be one way to do it. I think that hosting something like this in a restaurant makes great sense, even if there's a little private dining room off to the back, a table, you know, that seats 8 or that seats a larger party. Maybe there's a table upstairs somewhere, there's a little private room. Sometimes these aren't even advertised, honestly. A little private event space that you can tuck yourselves into where, you know, wine is the star, you know, of the evening. It gives you the opportunity to have some— to conduct your business and then to take advantage of the fact that all of these materials that you need, they're on site. That sommelier or that wine professional is on site. They likely have a team with them that can help to execute that wine service and just make you look like a rock star, hopefully throughout. Different ways to approach it. I don't think one is better than the other necessarily, but perhaps hosting it offsite with a professional's guidance, it might just be easier unless you have all of those little tools and that know-how on hand.

Yeah, and you briefly touched on this in terms of who should actually conduct this. So maybe the advisor themselves are somewhat of an expert in this area and they could do it. They might have a lot of fun doing that. Yeah, you mentioned a sommelier, maybe get someone like that. What are your thoughts on like where would you find someone like that? We also mentioned your local wine shop, maybe you talk to them and they could be a good resource.

Yeah, I think these are all the ways to do it. If you're going to be in a restaurant and it's a restaurant that's up to par, and it probably is if you're picking it because it's got great wine service, they likely have someone on their team who is is perfectly capable of executing this for you. And then they'll have someone else pouring with them if you are part of a larger group here. I can say, speaking from experience, it takes a long time for one person with one bottle to make their way around a table and to take care of wine service properly. So it works a lot better if you've got multiples there. So I'm sure that restaurant will be able to help you accomplish that and again come out the other side looking great. If you're to do this on your own, if your wine knowledge is ample, Again, I say go for it. You'll still probably need to have someone else there, either that you work with or are associated with, a friend or confidant, someone who can help you put this together. Maybe it's someone from a local restaurant who you were able to schedule to perhaps be on-site and help to execute this for you off-site. I do think there's something pretty cool about maybe having professionals come into your space to help accomplish this type of an event. Or again, like you had mentioned, Steve, going the route of developing that relationship with your local fine wine retailer They can be great resources, or they know the right people to make these sorts of events happen. Wine retailers, fine wine retailers, they are friends and associates with distributors and suppliers. These are the sorts of people that get wine to you from a great distance and might be able to connect you with the right person to come and accomplish an event like this. It could even be, on the rarest of occasions, if you can really connect your dots, could be someone from a particular winery. Winemakers come to town, especially to larger markets, or representatives from wineries come to town. How much fun would it be to have a winemaker from California or Oregon, someplace domestic or even someplace abroad at an event? I think that would be great fun. Imagine tasting Barolo and the winemaker just happens to be in town.

Just happens to be in town.

Just happens to be in town. It's a little bit more legwork, but it can happen. You just have to ask and start the conversation. So I think all of these are great ideas, but it just, it's a relationship game. I'm sure your business is just the same.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We're very much into service and hospitality. In your background, as I mentioned, you've been in high-end restaurants in New York City. What are some of your best ideas here in terms of how to deliver an event that has a high level of service, a high level of hospitality? I think Danny Meyer's famous for putting hospitality into the service and making a big difference between service versus hospitality. What were some of your thoughts here on having a high-service, high-hospitality event?

Yeah, and he wrote the book, right? He wrote the book.

Yep, setting the table.

Setting the table. I had the chance to meet him once upon a time. We didn't talk about the book, but he was in one of the restaurants where I worked. You hit on it entirely. There's a difference between service and hospitality, right? He would say that service is just getting it right. You go to a restaurant and you have this base level of expectations. It comes out on time, you get what you asked for, all of that. The bill arrives when you need it. Hospitality is taking things to that next level. It's anticipatory, it's warm, it's inviting. So yeah, I could definitely see how you can separate the two concepts. Hospitality creates guests for life. It creates maybe a little bit of groundswell, the sorts of people that are going to tell their friends about you. That's certainly what you're hoping for when you're the manager of a restaurant, the owner of a restaurant, that, that this layer of service will create such an impression that not only will they be back, but their friends will be back.

Yeah. And I think about it as service, as you say, it's what you do, but hospitality is how you do it. It's how you make them feel in the way that you do it. Yeah, very much. And so you could, as you say, like, I deliver the food on time and I greet you, you get your seat when you're supposed to get your seat, I do everything mechanically correct, your food is warm when I bring it out. But if I'm just cold and doing all of that, it's not going to be a great experience. But if I'm warm, if I'm engaging, if I'm anticipatory like you mentioned, now I'm going to feel much better about how you're actually delivering this. And so I think that is a key thing. So in your experiences running some of these high-end restaurants, can you think of any examples of how you were delivering hospitality in those restaurants, or just your experience in having been to fine restaurants, how they made you feel?

So I'll defer to one of my restaurant mentors. I was the general manager at a restaurant called Blackbird in Chicago. It was in the West Loop, and there was a gentleman, Donny Medea, who was one of the partners of the restaurants. And Donny would just— he wouldn't be there necessarily at the start of a service, but he might walk in the middle of the flow on a Saturday night, and it was as if he had been there all night. He would be walking through the door on some snowy Chicago night, still brushing snow off of his own shoulders, and see someone in front of him, see perhaps a lady with a coat on, and he would just seamlessly take that coat from her, show that party to the table, pull that table out, pull that chair out. Before he saw to himself, he saw to someone else. That sort of encapsulates hospitality to me. It is just, it's everything that the guests need. It's bending over for warmth, but almost never letting them know that you're bending over while you do it. It's just trying to make it seem effortless. But again, you're anticipating their needs. You're just doing those little things to bring warmth to the occasion. If we're to bring it back to our topic of a wine tasting like this, it might mean, again, having someone there to help direct traffic, if you will, to keep your tasting on topic, to engage with guests, to be entertaining. Again, a sommelier, some sort of a wine professional that can just help to bring some of that warmth to the occasion. And then at the same time, you might have perhaps one or two other people that are just there to make sure that waters are never empty, that those glasses are refilled when they need to be, that food is expedited from the kitchen on time, looking great. Just those little details. Again, it's a fine line between service and hospitality, but I think having that professional there can just help you lift things to that next level and just make for a rock star occasion.

And I know the events that I've been at with you, we've had anywhere from roughly maybe 18 people to as many as 35 or probably close to 40 people.

Yeah, yeah, 40 or even better. I think we've— I think we fit 50 into one of the dining rooms that you and I have been in together. So it presents its own challenge.

It does, yeah. And I think for advisors, that's probably too many. And so what are your thoughts on what might be an ideal number of people, if you want to have an intimate setting with wealthy folks that appreciate fine wine and have had all kinds of wonderful high hospitality experiences throughout their lifetime, what would be like a good number where they could get an experience that they're really going to be raving about?

So these numbers are completely arbitrary, but the entire time I think that we've been thinking about this together, I've always imagined a table of 8 or 12 or 16. I think you get much larger than that and it becomes perhaps an entirely different affair. It might be dictated by the venue in which you choose to host it. That restaurant's private dining room might only seat a particular number of guests and there you go, there's your ceiling. I would tend to think that less is more here. You want enough that the conversation starts rolling at the table. These events are fun, right? They're business but they're fun at the same time and they do take on a life of their own. Wine 3, 4, 5. Like I joked in the beginning, these things, they tend to slow down a little bit because everybody, they're sipping a little bit, they're enjoying themselves. You're learning stuff along the way. I think that you need a group that's large enough that you can accomplish that. You can let the group take on a life of its own. Right.

And that there's enough energy in the room.

Yeah, exactly. Perhaps it gets so large that it could become maybe impersonal and you feel like you're just not able to connect with that person down the table, say. So I like the idea of one table, you're all crowded around it, and I'm just thinking back to private dining rooms in my restaurant past and again, like 8 to 16, somewhere around there, maybe as small as 6. 4 gets pretty intimate. There's maybe a little bit of room for dead space or dead air perhaps in that sort of an event, unless you've got a host that is just rocking and rolling and keeping it moving for you.

Yeah. And I think the acoustics is going to be really important as well. And what I mean by that is we go to some restaurants and it is so loud in there that you just cannot hear the person next to you talking.. And so I think it's important that whatever the size of the room or the size of your group, that you make sure that people can hear each other, that it's not obnoxiously loud in there, and that whoever is speaking and leading the wine tasting, that everyone can hear them pretty easily without a lot of issues.

Yeah, I think so as well. I guess I'll just say also that at the same time, you don't want it to be so quiet that you can hear that pin drop, right? People love the engagement that we eat out for a reason. We eat out because It's delicious and it's an experience. But these days we can replicate a lot of that at home actually. And you head out there for the conversation and the feeling of being a part of something maybe bigger than—

But I think you were wired with a microphone in some of our events because it was such a big room.

Exactly. When I was speaking to 50, I was because I would speak. Gosh, it was a big room and we did it a couple of years without and I would be like hoarse by the end of it because invariably the oldest student is right at the very back of the room and they're asking you to "Speak up and speak up." So I would imagine that is not the best way to conduct business and to feel as if you are all on the same page and all a part of the same sort of an event. At the same time, I think if you are going to be in a private dining room, it might be nice, or in a boardroom as you had mentioned, it might be nice to make sure that there's a little music.

Yeah, exactly. A little mood music in the background.

Just to again set the tone. So it's an experience, but it doesn't necessarily need to be white gloves and again, pins dropping here.

It's got to be fun. Okay, you mentioned music. That's a good one. So, all right, what kind of background music should we have? Should we be playing some jazz music? What's like the best style of music to go with a high-end wine tasting?

Since we're speaking to financial advisors here, I will just say, read the room, people here. Know exactly who it is that you're going to be sitting down with. Do your homework. I tend to think that jazz is a little on the stodgy side for events like this. Okay, are we talking hip-hop or no reggae? We've got to find our way into of the spectrum somewhere.

Soft rock from the '70s, or maybe a little—

again, read your room, because maybe it is jazz. Maybe it's a jazz affair, especially if it's gonna be like some beautiful burgundy tasting. I think you go to a lot of city restaurants these days and there is something like— there's a little indie rock, or there's something that is— that just feels like it's of the moment and that is perhaps a little bit more vital. I think that's the place I want to go with the music. I don't want it to be loud. I don't want it to take away from the conversation, but I would love for it to just to be a part of the events and to let people know that they're at something that's vital and important and not necessarily old and stodgy or full of hip-hop either.

I'm glad I asked that because I might have just defaulted to jazz.

Not a bad decision. So please, if you're listening to this, take no offense to my musical tastes here. Play all the jazz you want to taste. If that's what the room needs to hear, play the jazz. Absolutely. But feel free to liven it up.

Okay. So we've been talking about an in-person wine tasting event. Now, I know that some advisors have actually done virtual events. And I think there's companies out there where they will actually send you small bottles of wine, like tasting bottles. They send that to you in advance. You get on a Zoom call, maybe even get a little cheese tray or something, and then you'll have someone walk you through a virtual wine tasting. Now, that's not going to be as good as an in-person event, but do you have any thoughts on how you might actually perform something like that?

What I can say to that is that I, I've seen it executed very professionally. They came of age during the pandemic, right? These types of tools, we're all intimately familiar with them now. Even me working locally here in Wisconsin, it saves me gas money heading to Milwaukee or Madison for company meetings. Sometimes we'll conduct them via Zoom. I've seen it done two ways. One is where you might be dealing with clients, perhaps in this case, that are all distance. You're all in your respective rooms, but you still need something to tie it together and make it more memorable than every other forgettable Zoom call that we've all been a part of. So bringing in that wine professional via Zoom, and as you said, having wine delivered to each of these rooms, each of these clients in advance, so everyone is looking at the same kit of wines. There are services that will take care of this for you. I cannot tell you the names of them, but I've seen it done where they'll— it'll be little packets, it'll be 187 portions of wine, that's a quarter of a bottle, and it might be a walkthrough, 5 or 6 different wines, perhaps from all one winery, and then you'll pipe in, again, a professional who will walk you through those wines one at a time. And it's an opportunity for you and everyone else who is participating to enjoy on your own, but you feel very much as if you're being led by a professional. I will say that the tasting that I was involved in, it was with Ridge Vineyards, you know, a couple of the, the higher-ups from Ridge, and they were walking us through an entire vintage release. It was so much fun. So these services, they exist. There are professionals who are willing to participate in these sorts of things. I'm sure it's all about making the call, doing the legwork, doing your homework. The other way that I've seen this done well is everyone gathered together in the same room. So again, let's imagine 8 of us surrounding a table. You have all of the bottles on hand already. I participated in this just fantastic Barolo tasting. Barolo, beautiful wine from Piedmont. And this tasting was conducted by a wine professional from Venice, by a couple of winemakers that they had on the Zoom call as well. So it was like a Zoom call that a few of us were watching on a screen together. There were about a dozen of us gathered in a room. We just made it a lot of fun. There was a whole bunch of food around the table. We were eating a lot of charcuterie, tasting our way through these different bottles of Barolo. So much fun, but it didn't feel like we had a personal connection with the person who was leading the event. It just allowed us to all engage with one another, and there was at least someone there to continue the conversation for us and to walk us from wine to wine. So. There are different ways that you can do it. I still love the touch, especially these days of pandemic fatigue, maybe, and Zoom fatigue, of just getting all in the room together and allowing it all to take place with that wine professional, with whomever might be leading it for you, right there at the table. But there are certainly ways that it can be done from a distance if distance is an impediment to otherwise accomplishing it.

And how would you go about inviting people to an event like this? Would you recommend a high-quality formal invitation that you send in the mail? Would you recommend the advisor just give a phone call and invite them to this? Or what would be a proper way to invite someone to attend an event like this in person?

Now I'm going to sound old-fashioned, but I really like stationery. Okay, so I think I do like the idea of an invitation arriving in the mail. But again, I think it's probably one of those, hey, let's read the room, let's know who it is that we're going to be talking to and how might they appreciate being spoken to. I don't mean that to be a non-answer, but perhaps it just harkens back to my ideas of hospitality, right? Hospitality, it just means having an understanding of what that person's needs might be and then making sure that you communicate with them as need be.

That's the best advice I can give there. Ryan, what have we not talked about yet? What haven't I asked you that you really want to get out here?

I would just say, Steve, to at the end of the day, make sure this is a lot of fun, right? Wine is a serious topic, And it can be as serious as you want to make it. It's fun to fold that serious side in with a bit of levity with some of these themes that we've talked about. Just make it up and have a good time. That's frankly what I've done with some of these wine classes that you've been a part of in the past. It's just all about trying to frame an event in such a way that it serves the people who are going to be participating. But you have to make sure it's fun for you and engaging for you at the same time. The angle might be like, hey, let's all get educated together. This isn't something I know a lot about. Necessarily, but I know enough to know that I want to know more, and I think you might like to know more with me. So let's all do this together. Let's make it an event. It might be an opportunity for someone leading an event like this to say, hey, I know a lot about wine. We're having this event in my boardroom. I've got beautiful Riedel stemware lining the wall here, and I've taken the time to bring in a couple of wine professionals that can help me put an event like this together. So I love that idea as well. It's just a chance for you to frankly show off the goods. If you've got them. But at the end of the day, it's just about creating a moment, leaving people feeling at once disarmed, more connected to you and to the topic at hand. It gives you a great environment in which to, I'm sure, conduct some business perhaps beforehand, and then leave people with that hospitality feeling, that feeling like, my goodness, I just want to come back, right? I want to come back to this restaurant. I want to talk to this guy again. They knew what they were talking about.

I think it's a lot of fun. Yeah, and I'm a big fan of creating and delivering client events, but also creating client communities. And so many folks out there, as we've been talking about, they love wine. You probably have a lot of clients that like wine. Yeah. And to segment those folks and create events for them that might be around wine, maybe once a quarter you do an event like this and you bring in some different people or people from different wineries or different regions around the country. Yeah, I think you could have a lot of fun with this, a lot of different directions that you could go. And just getting people together, I think, is so important in this age of artificial intelligence and technology where it's so easy to just hide behind a screen. But we're humans and we crave community, we crave connection with other people. And so doing an event like this, a lot of fun and can show that you care about your clients well beyond just how much money they have, beyond just accounts and amounts.

So yeah, indeed, it's about breaking bread, right? It's about having that moment together. That moment of connectivity and it creates a groundswell. And I'm sure the clients talk, right? So it's an opportunity for them to get excited together.

And absolutely, yeah. And this is a kind of event where you will be able to have people attend that are not clients. They're going to want to attend an event like this if they're a fan of wine and fine wines. They're going to want to come to an event like this. So I think it'd be a lot easier for your existing clients to bring a friend to something like this rather than just another chicken dinner dog and pony kind of show thing.

Yeah, absolutely. I tend not to show up for PowerPoint presentations, but I do show up for wine tastings.

That's right. That's right.

Me too.

I'll drink to that. And I think our glasses are about empty here. Yep. So that must mean it's time to end the show.

This has been so much fun. I appreciate the opportunity, and I hope that something here gets a listener excited about putting together an event like this on their own. And yeah, I appreciate you giving me the chance to come on and talk with everyone.

Yeah, Ryan, if folks wanted to connect with you or ask you any additional questions, is there a way for them to connect with you?

Sure. Yeah. So I work for wine distributor here in the state of Wisconsin called Left Bank. So if someone wanted to look me up, it's actually via email would be the easiest.

So ryan.hill@leftbankwine.com, and it's Ryan with an I. R-I-A-N. Yep. Yep.

Excellent.

All right. Well, Ryan, this has been great. I appreciate you being on the show today. Thanks so much, Steve. All right. That's all for today. Make sure you like and share this podcast through your favorite social platforms. And for more great podcasts, visit us at barons.com/podcast.

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