#drinkport | “Port Wine in the Metaverse?”
In the premiere episode of season two of #drinkport, I catch up with Ruud Scholten, who lives just outside of Amsterdam.
He's a serial entrepreneur and founder of an exciting online Port wine platform that's designed to be the ultimate resource for Port wine enthusiasts. He's also the author of an upcoming book “The Portologist” featuring Port wine cocktail recipes.
We chat about parenthood, virtual reality, the perception of Port wine (is it really a drink favored among housewives in the Netherlands?), and more.
Read on for highlights from our conversation, edited for clarity:
Q: If you could invite anyone — living or dead — to a dinner party, who would you choose?
A: I would choose somebody who is still alive who I also have a good chance of meeting in person because he’s also Dutch, and he is one of the only Port wine and sherry wine experts in the Netherlands. His name is Jeroen Bronkhorst.
I think he's retired in the sense that he doesn't work in kitchens and gastronomy anymore but I'm pretty sure that having dinner with him is a pretty amazing experience. First of all his knowledge about Port wine is phenomenal and of course his gastronomical knowledge is maybe even better.
I would love to have dinner with him and pick his brain. I had a call with him once and he's so open to share his knowledge as well.
Q: Tell us more about your Port wine platform, Prtwine.com
A: I have about 17 years of e-commerce experience and I understood that it's very difficult to build an online store based purely on Port wines because it's such a small niche.
In 2013, we launched the first online store and it received good traction. We were at that point the only specialized web store for Port wine in Netherlands and Belgium. But after selling my shares in the company, I wanted to continue to do something in the Port wine industry — to be an ambassador and share my passion for Port with a new audience.
I started to think about how to reach a wide audience of possible wine lovers that could be interested in Port wines. I wanted to create an informative platform based solely on the brands that are currently out there and have been out there for many years.
Prtwine.com is purely an informative website where everybody can do their own research on the brands that they would love to try. You’ll find extensive information about the history and flavors of the wines, and it’s a free resource.
On top of that, I'm trying to find ways to help people find their way to the Douro Valley. So at some point, you will be able to book tours, and maybe even be able to purchase very exclusive wines just for the U.S. market from the site.
There are currently about 150 brands on the platform, and I have about 100 to go. So I think there will be 250-300 brands in total that will be listed in the directory and that would kind of like sum up all of the brands that have been created or are currently still active in the Douro.
Q: You mentioned that in the Netherlands, Port wine is primarily consumed among women, specifically housewives. Tell me more about Port’s perception where you are.
A: What we saw from our own website sales in 2013 up to 2016 (and I'm pretty sure the numbers are still the same), it was mainly men purchasing Port wine.
But for years, because housewives were buying fortified wines, the image of women drinking it stuck. It lives on and on, generation after generation, because our parents would say, ‘Port wine, sherry wine, yeah, that's for older housewives.’
So it's become a myth that Port wine is primarily consumed among housewives. It's completely untrue, and I have the numbers to prove it.
It’s a strong product for the male audience because they tend to spend more on older wines in general, especially red wines. Why is that? It's heavy. If you drink a single harvest or an old colheita or an old vintage, they are strong wines. They have a lot of body. They have a lot of in-depth character. They have a lot of alcohol, too. Women tend to prefer lighter wines.
Port wine is not just for housewives. It's a drink for everybody to enjoy.
Q: How do you foresee Port wine reaching younger generations?
A: So first of all, I think the Port wine cocktail industry could become more mainstream. You've probably heard about gin and tonics, right? It's a very mass accepted cocktail. Twenty years ago, however, it was a different story. No one drank gin. And all of a sudden it became trendy. I'm not saying that Port wine could have the same traction, but if it could have 10 % of this traction, it would be an amazing achievement.
But I think that that's definitely a way to reach a younger audience. And the thing is, it's not that the product needs to be sold. It's more that the people don't have any idea that these products actually exist.
So creating fairs, creating parties, doing marketing, creating a buzz around festivals for people just to try it out, to open their eyes on this product, is definitely a way to reach that younger audience, between 20 and 30 years old.
Q: Tell us about your upcoming book “The Portologist”
A: It's a book purely about Port wine cocktails. It’s never been done before. I'm a photographer, too, so I'm going to try to create my own content for this book.
I’m doing it through Kickstarter, so that would something that could be a nice liftoff on the U.S. market because Kickstarter is mainly focused on the U.S. It's also a new way, a different way of trying to reach a new audience.
Q: Where’s the opportunity for Port wine in the Metaverse?
A: There are many tourists from the U.S. coming to Porto — about 2 .8 to 3 million tourists every year. But not everybody books their trip to the Douro Valley. It's a one-and-a-half-hour drive, you can take a boat, you can take a train. So one of the things in the Metaverse that I envision is conducting these tours in Porto or the Douro so that people at home can experience it. They could visit these Quintas, take a boat trip, take a train ride, and experience Port wine without spending time and money to actually travel.
On the other hand, I've already tried this last week, Meta Quest 3 is out — it's the newest, latest Facebook goggles. And with the augmented layer with the cameras in front of your goggle, you can actually see the world with new layers. You can actually see your hands. You can take your wine glass in your hand. That offers an amazing amount of opportunities for wine tasting, cellar tours, museums, and so forth.
I know that the Port wine industry is niche compared to the rest of the world. But even though it’s niche, they can invest in these kinds of solutions to reach a younger audience that are more open to experience with technology. I
For example, with wine tasting, a lot of people do not really understand the wine tasting steps or the flavors because first of all, Port wines are the most complex wines in the world. They get amazingly high ratings from the wine critics, which why I love them of course, but it makes them very difficult to understand for a lot of people.
There's so much more if you go deeper into the wine, which you can discover and I want and I think that one way of giving people that experience that like a sommelier experience a pro experience But really understanding the flavors of the wines is by showing them the flavors whilst drinking
I think there are a lot of opportunities there to develop new innovative ways of reaching the audience that really want to be drinking wines and get them to love the wines even more, to build up a relationship that goes deeper than just sipping on a glass, but telling them the story.
Showing them for example what’s inside of a barrel by being able to put an augmented layer on top of the barrel to show them the process of how these barrels came to life... You can do all of that with AR/VR and that's an amazing opportunity I believe for the whole wine industry.
