What Do You Do? podcast
Chris Haywood | Winemaker | Astley Vineyard
What do you think of when you think about wine? It’s easy to think of movie cliches about snooty waiters and characters knowing the exact year of a perfect vintage. But what’s the reality like? Chris Haywood explains that wine is a drink, something that anyone can consume and appreciate, and the more people that are able to appreciate wine, the better.
Key Takeaways
- Winemaking is as much an art as it is a science, and whilst it follows a technical process – the duration that each of those processes take is down to the decisions of the winemaker.
- Being a winemaker requires patience, problem-solving skills and the willingness to adapt.
The Role of the Winemaker
The Winemaking Process
There are ambiguities in every discipline, but in winemaking, nature is responsible for the biggest ones. With weather being completely out of our control, every year is different, which means that every harvest is different. No two vintages are ever the same. How do you make plans when you don’t know what raw material you’re going to get? When customers are expecting consistency across vintages, how do you keep them coming back when it can’t be done?
Chris sees it as an opportunity to stand out from larger winemakers. This year’s wine could be the only time it could be available. Is there a better way to turn a production challenge into a customer benefit? After all, one of Astley Vineyard’s best wines was down to “a series of mistakes just handled well”.
The true skill of a winemaker is being able to navigate these complexities with a mixture of artistry and science, and a willingness to be flexible and adapt.
What do we do?
We founded the What Do You Do? podcast to hear from people like Chris, and pull back the curtain on something that not many people appreciate or understand.
Videos, like the one above, are a great way to explain complex processes in a way that your audience can understand – find out how we can do it here.
written by
Videographer and video producer with over 15 years experience in both B2B and B2C video marketing. He writes about everything he learned delivering over 1200 video projects across the engineering, education, charity and tech sectors.
