Wine PR Faye Cardwell has launched a series of online wine dinners that bring households directly in touch with select Italian Wine producers. The Quaranvino events provide entertainment for wine lovers during social-distancing, commercial support for distributors and brand awareness for wineries during the COVID 19 crisis in a unique format.
Munich 5th April.
Quaranvino online dinner events began on Saturday 28th with Sud Tirolian winemaker Klaus Lentsch and will include 6 dinner events with wine-producers across Italy featuring Medici Ermete, Librandi, Garofoli, Nicolis and Donnafugata.
The events focus on ensuring a collective experience with attendees signing up to receive a fixed selection of wines to be able to participate in the events. The guests are also then encouraged to prepare suggested dishes, are given themes for each evening and are actively encouraged to interact with each other and the winemaker. As creator, Faye Cardwell said, “There are three essential elements for consumer events and these are wine, food and friends. The internet gives us the opportunity to bring these all together but with a much wider geographical reach”. As participants sign up for a series of events, a group dynamic develops meaning that they then feel more comfortable and willing to ask questions within the group which brings a completely different aspect to traditional online events.”
The dinners focus on one producer but also those wines in a broader context to give an educational aspect to the events. Alessandro Medici of Medici Ermete, host of the second Quaranvino appointment, said “Quaranvino is a creative, fun and informative idea. Spending an evening connected with people in many different countries was extremely satisfying. Quaranvino is a unique format which shows that the passion and love for good wine and food knows no boundaries. It was also a fantastic opportunity to talk about Lambrusco, its history, and our region, Emilia-Romagna. Ihope that Quaranvino can become a frequent occurrence”.
As wineries and distributors suffer from the closure of the horeca industry, both are seeing a significant increase in demand for wines from online sales and consumers that are curious to learn more about what differentiates one from another. As Klaus Lentsch of Tenuta Klaus Lentsch said, “This format can help us get more contact with the end client, the people who actually drink the wine”.
Participants for this first round of Quaranvino include wine lovers in Germany, France, Belgium, UK and Italy with requests arriving from farther afield. “We may be in a period of social distancing but initiatives like Quaranvino are actually bringing us closer together,” said Faye Cardwell, creator of the events.
A second round of Quaranvino will open in May featuring wineries already distributed in Germany.