Celebrating 20 years of Chief Wine Officer with the leaders who built it

Todd: Hello, and welcome to a very special episode of CWO.digital.

This year is the 20th anniversary of the very first Chief Wine Officer event. It’s a huge milestone marking two decades of connection, countless corks popped, and a whole lot of hard work from everyone involved to make each evening a memorable one.

To honour the occasion, I thought I’d sit down with the management team to chat about the origins of the business, their favourite memories, and see what the future holds. If you’ve ever attended a CWO event yourself, then some of these names and voices may just be familiar to you. If you’ve never had the pleasure, let’s meet them now…

Welcome Chief Wine Officer, to CWO.digital!

David: My name is David Moore, and together with my wife Hayley, I’m the co-founder and now chairman of Chief Nation, the parent company behind Chief Wine Officer.

Richard: I’m Richard Porter. I’m one of the managing directors of Chief Nation and also Chief Wine Officer.

Craig: I’m Craig McCartney. I’m one of the managing directors here at Chief Nation and Chief Wine Officer.

Laura: And I’m Laura Porter, also one of the managing directors alongside Richard and Craig here at Chief Wine Officer.

Craig: When David started the company, he had a financial services background. What he created was this perfect balance of business content, networking, fine dining and of course our famous Chief Wine Officer wine tasting competition.

Richard: If you ever go out for dinner with Dave, he’ll always bring a game or some sort of thing that you’ve got to compete in. You love a game, don’t you?

David: I do love a party game, yes. In fact, before Chief Wine Officer, we were having wine tastings at home with a competitive element to them that our friends would attend.

Laura: The idea and the concept that David and Hayley created was there from day one. It’s as strong as it’s ever been.

There are additional things now that we can bring to a Chief Wine Officer event through added podcasts such as this, to extend the length of your event. We can offer additional support post-event to make sure the people that met on the evening are well-connected and that those follow-up meetings are happening. So there’s lots of event expertise around the event itself that we can help with.

Speaking for myself and everyone here, we love it. We all really believe in the product. We know it’s good, and we like getting feedback from our clients. Especially when doing an event for someone that first time and showing what you can do for them. It never gets old.

David: When we first started, it was an experiment. The first one went well, so we thought maybe we’d do two a year. We’re now doing over 150, getting on for nearly 200 a year. So it’s certainly bigger than we ever thought it would be.

Richard: It’s a significant milestone, 20 years. Full disclosure, this is my 19th year. I started just after the first one, I think. Every year I look at my LinkedIn profile reminding me of how long I’ve been here and it seems to clock up quite quickly.

David: I don’t think I could ever have said this will still be going just as successfully as it was back in those early days. What we offer is a unique ability to both generate the right audience for these events, but also the right environment that’s very conducive to creating business relationships.

Richard: The first event that I hosted myself was when we’d had some appetite to do events in the northwest. We had a little satellite team that worked out of our Manchester office for a few years. And we did a few events in the Midland Hotel, which is very iconic. It’s where Mr. Rolls met Mr. Royce, and has quite a deep history. The Lowry Hotel as well, which is the only five-star hotel in Manchester.

I remember hosting my first event up there and being quite nervous speaking in front of people, as you would be for the first time. But the Manchester crowd loved it. They had a great time.

David: It was interesting that it was your first event. It was our first one outside of London in the UK. We’d done New York by then, but it was certainly another experiment. Can we fill a room in the northwest? And we did fill it.

The buzz in the room was really good. The people really enjoyed it and the sponsors really enjoyed it. In a way, it was a precursor to, yeah, making our events a little bit more intimate. To make sure everybody gets the most out of it rather than feeling that it’s possibly a little bit anonymous.

Craig: Over the times where other businesses have struggled, like the financial crash, COVID, and Brexit —Chief Wine Officer seems to have grown in strength during those difficult times. People will always need to connect and build relationships for their businesses. So Chief Wine Officer is always going to be there. Even now in this time of AI, human relationships are more important than ever.

Laura: COVID was such a tough time for everyone around the world. For us personally, when the lockdown started, we had just entered into partnership with David and Hayley as co-owners. So we signed on the dotted line in March 2020, then we went out and celebrated. A week later we were closing the offices.

At the time, all of the events we did were in person. It was a very scary time for us. But as a business we got through it and we didn’t have to furlough any staff, which was obviously a great result. We were very quick to pivot to a digital product, which we had a little bit of experience with. What it really showed was that everyone had their role to play and everybody pulled together.

We went from doing about eighty events a year to doubling that. We even ended up hiring people during COVID. It was quite a year.

David: Luckily, we had already worked with a client named Cisco, and their partners, BT and Cable & Wireless, to build a remote version of Chief Wine Officer using their technologies which linked multiple cities across a dedicated cable.

Richard: It was impressive at the time, because I remember you’d go into a boardroom and there’d be half a table with a big screen at the end. On that screen would be people sitting at a table in another city. So you could link up two or three different boardrooms.

The one I remember is linking London with Sao Paulo and Mexico City. The challenge we had then was in finding the same wines in each location so we could give people the same tasting experience.

So the wine they were drinking in Sao Paulo was slightly different to the one that we were drinking. The screen was such high quality that they could see the slightly different colour. Back then we just thought, wow, this is the way people are going to converse in the future.

And then all of a sudden COVID hit and now everybody is having meetings on their laptops no matter where they are in the world.

David: As Rich just said, we’d dealt with quite a lot of complexity trying to get wines across to Sao Paulo and New Mexico and London that were all the same. Now all we have to do is get a pack of wine to each attendee’s house; if they’re attending one of our CWO At Home events. So the level of complexity has come right down, but the level of availability has gone right up.

Brexit was another trigger that I remember. We had a young team, with quite a few European employees. They were a little bit low about it all. So we came into the office and told them that we may not be a European country, but we are still going to be a European company. That’s now what we’ve gone on to do as well, covering more and more countries with plans afoot keep expanding.

Laura: We are pretty global now. We operate in Europe mainly; UK, France, Netherlands, Nordics, and are looking to reintroduce DACH. But then also about half of our events are for a US audience. Quite often a digital product works really well in the US. But we are also doing a lot of dinners where traditionally it was only New York, San Francisco, LA. We are now seeing a lot more variation. This year we’ve done events in Atlanta, Dallas, Seattle, Chicago Austin, and Boston. We’d really love to continue growing into those newer cities for the US, because we’re getting a very good uptake when we bring Chief Wine Officer to a city for the first time. We see a lot of success in the Nordics, especially Copenhagen, Oslo, Stockholm and Helsinki.

Craig: With Chief Wine Officer, as long as there’s people doing business in a city, we could probably spin up an event there. We’ve been into Asia with Singapore. You can do a Chief Wine Officer anywhere in the world.

Richard: I think behind all of that is the team that run the events. We’ve got a great team working very, very hard. The enthusiasm they put into running an event is where the bulk of the work comes in. When you get a registration, they really do work very hard to nurture those registrations and build up a relationship with those people to make sure they walk through the door on the night. We get very good attendance rates to our events, above industry standard, which is a measure of success from our client’s perspective. That’s a great thing to brag about.

We’ve always said to each other that we hire people we want to sit next to at the dinner table. I think people genuinely enjoy working here and that shines through in our retention rates.

David: Yeah. It’s about building a team that can enjoy the experience, but also convey that enjoyment to the clients. One of the things that has helped us through the years is that whole environment, from what we sell through to how we deliver it.

Richard: One of the comments we get back from our clients is that we do the heavy lifting for them. I always like to say when I’m briefing our clients before an event, you can come along and just enjoy the evening. We will do everything for you so that you can really just come along and get to know the people we’ve brought for you, have some nice food and nice wine. So that when you contact the guests again and say, didn’t we have a great time? They’ll say, yeah, we did. Would you like to meet? That’s the idea.

Craig: My favourite memory was being in Copenhagen. We were hosting an event for around a hundred people for one of our clients there. Myself and Peter, who’s one of the masters of wine, got to co-host with Tim Peake, the British astronaut. We were giving him tasting tips and he was loving the champagne with us. And then he did this huge presentation on his life in space. It was pretty spectacular. Then you also get to see Tim Peake again as you arrive back in Heathrow. He’s doing the big wave welcoming you to the country. I was like, ‘that’s my boy!’

Laura: I remember when you sent a picture to Richard and I on WhatsApp of you and Tim Peake! If that had been now, I would’ve just presumed that was AI.

Richard: The best thing I’ve learned from a Chief Wine Officer event is how to sabre a bottle of champagne. I saw that done in New York and she taught me how to do it. It’s a very cool trick. Don’t do it in indoors though. It’s pretty dangerous…

David: At a New York event, we were opening the registration desk and there was a screening of a Wes Anderson film next door. Bill Murray turned up at our event desk, and we had to tell him that this wasn’t his event. He said, ‘well, it looks like it’s gonna be better than the one I’m attending.’ But the sour moment was that I wasn’t in the room and one of the team turned him away. I would never, ever have turned away Bill Murray!

Todd: I’d like to thank David, Richard, Craig, and Laura for taking the time to celebrate 20 years of Chief Wine Officer. And thanks to you for listening.

You can find more podcasts and articles at CWO.digital —and why not visit chiefwineofficer.com to view our upcoming events calendar or even find out how you can host an event of your own?

Here’s to a fabulous two decades of connection. I’ll leave you with these final words from Laura…

Laura (off-mic): I hope that we’re creating somewhere where I would’ve wanted to be an employee. That was one of our goals, and I kind of wanted to get that in and say thank you to the staff without it being cheesy.

Todd: I think you’ve gotten it in now….

Laura: Oh, okay!