Born Digital Wine Awards Summit
Why does the wine world need to change? Because it’s stuck in stasis, resistant to change, working on a cycle of pay-to-play and fixated on how to get more people to drink wine. The industry might need a reset.
What does that actually mean? Are we just pushing people to booze — sell more, drink more — or do we want to induct people into a wine culture? And how would that wine culture look like?
All these topics were raised at the latest Born Digital Wine Awards Summit, which brought together 16 winners, judges and organizers into one room. They were asked to question some of their most deeply held assumptions and beliefs, the purpose of which was not to come up with answers, but to uncover what wasn’t being asked.
Since we barely scratched the surface of these questions, we decided to publish some of our thoughts, and invite the rest of the wine world to participate. This will take place through a series of articles on Medium where we will be posting the 12 questions and considerations we came away with during this all too brief summit.
BDWA Summit: The “Why”
Our goal in creating the Summit was to bring some of the wine sector’s sharpest and most creative minds together at the same event for the purpose of identifying new directions in which the wine sector can move forward through the 21st century.
This was not an event to solve problems, but to offer questions for the industry to debate, discuss and hopefully act upon. We do not know the answers to everything, and we might even be wrong in our assumptions. Therefore, we decided to question our beliefs, discuss different perspectives and share the 12 questions around four topics that we believe we should be asking the industry.
Stay tuned to our channel, we are looking forward to hearing what you think.
About the Summit
This content is a result of the #BDWASummit which took place on May 30th to June 1st 2019 in Liege, Belgium. The event’s purpose was to unite winners and judges from the annual BDWAs to discuss the future of the wine industry through the lens of “Truthfulness”.
Participants Included: Damien Wilson (Judge), Elizabeth Smith (Judge, Winner Tourism Content 2017), Felicity Carter (Judge), Helena Nicklin (Judge, Winner Best Video 2017), Jonathan Lipsmeyer (Judge, Winner Best Investigative Writing 2017), Paul Mabray (Judge), Al Robertson (2nd Place, Best Visual Storytelling 2018), Alice Feiring (Winner Best Food & Wine Content 2018), Ilkka Siren (Winner Best Tourism Content 2018), Marcelo Copello (Winner Sustainability Award 2018), Meg Maker (Winner Best Editorial 2018), Rebecca Hopkins (Runner-up Vinventions’ Innovation Award), Faye Cardwell (BDWA), Ryan Opaz (Founder, BDWA, DWCC and Catavino), Reka Haros (Project leader on behalf of Vinventions), Mel Cressman (Vinventions), Caroline Thomas and Vanessa Sferrazza (Vinventions)
Photo by Jonathan Cosens — JCP on Unsplash
