Raising a glass to the wine MBA
Source: CNN
(CNN) — Wine is not only one of life’s more refined and varied pleasures, it’s also increasingly big business, with more than 23 billion liters of the stuff consumed each year.
And where better to learn about the global wine trade than in Bordeaux?
The area around the south-western French city is the most famous wine-producing region in the world, celebrated not only for its renowned, eponymous variety but also Médoc, Saint-Émilion and others.
Early next year, a sixth annual crop of students will enter Bordeaux Business School to begin the one-year Wine MBA, learning about all aspects of the increasingly competitive and globalized trade.
The bulk of students who take the course are already in the wine industry, mostly in management or marketing, with only a handful from the actual production side, explains Isabelle Dartigues, director of the Wine MBA.
“The objective for many of them is to change position, to acquire a larger knowledge of the wine industry worldwide,” she says.
“Most of the time, even if they work on foreign markets, they don’t have the overall knowledge of the global market, what the trends are going to be, what other markets do to succeed.
“That’s what the Wine MBA was created for: it’s to give a larger view of what’s going on in this very interesting market, from a global perspective.”
New market challenges
On average, around a third of the 15- to 20-strong annual intake of students is American, a reflection of both the massive importance of the U.S. market and the popularity of MBAs among U.S. executives.
They spend 400 hours in formal tuition, all of which is specifically geared towards the wine industry, everything from management and wine legislation, to all-important strategies of marketing.
It is taught part-time, requiring students to take a total of 10 weeks out of work during the nine-month academic year.
As the Wine MBA’s web site tell prospective students, the global wine industry “is in the midst of an unprecedented and far-reaching period of change.”
France, and notably the Bordeaux region, was long the undisputed center of the wine world, the fame of names such as Château Lafite-Rothschild meaning marketing could be a mere afterthought for many producers.
However, the rapid growth in recent decades of emergent wine exporters such as Australia, the United States and, more recently, Argentina and Chile, has placed severe pressure on France and other European nations.
The French wine industry has woken up to the challenge but only after some time, Dartigues explains, adding that even now, some Bordeaux wine producers she visits do not know what an MBA is.
“Typically, the Bordeaux wine industry is very traditional, resistant to any change,” says Dartigues.
“When I was studying the creation of the program in the wine industry, typically people would tell me: ‘What’s the use of it? We don’t need it — we already know how to market out products.’
“But now it’s changing, because they realize, especially in Bordeaux that maybe they could take some lessons from the Australians or the Chileans on how they market their products, how they analyze consumer consumption trends, etc.
“There is a change, but it’s slow and probably the French — and the Bordeaux — wine industry is still quite traditional.”
Bordeaux in particular has lost market share in part because its innumerable small estates have been less able to market and distribute their products in bulk, unlike, for example, the far more consolidated Australian industry.
“We have too many appellations, we have too many chateaus, which work independently in great competition,” says Dartigues, while noting: “This is now changing.”
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