Harriet Tindal MW, Director at Tindal Wine Merchants, on natural wine, sustainability, and wine innovation

Todd: Hello and welcome to CWO.digital, where this season we’re combining our love for all things disruptive with our love for the greatest drink of all. We’re talking about innovation in wine.

Today’s guest is the incomparable Harriet Tindal, Master of Wine and Director of Wine at Tindal Wine Merchants based in Ireland; and also serving as a wine expert for more than a few of our Chief Wine Officer events.

Harriet’s work sees her consistently encouraging innovative practices that ensure the long-term wellbeing of vineyards and the broader environment. Her forward-thinking approach is indicative of her commitment to leaving an enduring positive impact on the wine industry, and I can hardly think of anyone better suited to discuss innovation in wine.

And so Harriet, welcome to CWO.digital! Thank you so much for joining me on the show today. Let’s get started by getting to know you a bit better. Could you explain how you came to choose the career that you have?

Harriet: Well Todd, I’m from a family of wine lovers. My father was a butcher a long, long time ago, but he always had some bottles behind the counter. And I think his weekend activities tended to be opening decent bottles of wine with a serious slab of meat.

So my memories are of smelling cold meat and fine wine. I love that smell still to this today. At our Sunday lunches at home, we were always opening different bottles, tasting, talking, and we all really love the provenance of food and drink. I think they go hand in hand.

Then I went off to university and had a lot of fun. I think I enjoyed drinking cheap wines and buckfast quite a lot! I actually pulled out of university because I enjoyed it too much, but sadly not the course. The social life was more fun and I got married very young. Then I realized I really wanted to get into something, and wine was the natural progression because I was still into food and I loved cooking.

I realised I had a little bit of a head for the different styles… And my father was of course trying to persuade me that it was a good idea. So yeah, that was where it began.

Todd: You obviously chose to become a Master of Wine and ultimately the director of Tindal Wine Merchants. What’s been the most important lesson you’ve learned along that road?

Harriet: That I don’t know everything. When I started to think about studying for the Master of Wine it was quite a big decision. That was the beginning of a whole journey of learning. People say that when you are studying to be a Master of Wine, you go in with a decent enough ego, then you come out having been knocked back a few times. We are never going to know everything there is to know. And there’s so much going on around the world. It’s so diverse. There are so many different varieties and different regions and different people doing different things that we’re never going to completely understand all the wines of the world.

So I think just being humble is a big part of what I do now… With climate change and everything, it is a changing market and there’s nothing certain. I’m enjoying every day in my job and what I do, and hoping that, you know, it’ll continue for a couple of generations. Wine has been with us since, like 6,000BC. So, you know, let’s keep it going for a little bit longer, hey?

Todd: I’ll drink to that! On the subject of all that uncertainty, are there any common wine falsehoods that you keep hearing time and time again?

Harriet: I think a classic was about two years ago, Cameron Diaz—who I think is a great actress—started to make wine. She said, “I could never make organic wine because they don’t even wash the grapes before they ferment them.”

So one of the classic misinterpretations that people have about wine is the fact that it’s a very industrially produced product. Yes, a lot of the supermarket wines are reeling out a few million bottles a year to sit on your shelves. They will be more mass-produced and they will have huge stainless-steel tanks. But some of them are just made in a wooden vat that’s open.

In Barolo, for example, Fabio has open vats in this amazing room, and it’s the most beautiful winery I’ve ever been to. There are no flies. It’s not dirty. His wines are some of the purest Barolos produced, and, and he just does it the traditional way. People don’t realize that it is a natural process.

Todd: There’s such a rainbow of ways that people enjoy wine, from the really high-end collectors, right down to the people like yourself when you were at university, just enjoying wine for the fun of it…

Do you feel like the way people are enjoying wine is changing? Is there a shift in how the industry is having to serve customers?

Harriet: Yeah, it’s very difficult at the moment. I spend my life trying to separate wine from alcohol. Because wine throughout the ages has actually been proven to have elements that are good for you.

I have to admit, hands up, I went to ChatGPT to outline why wine is good for you. ChatGPT is on my side today… Wine contains polyphenols, resveratrol, and flavonoids which are really good for your heart. It gives you improved longevity. So when you see old ladies trotting around Italy and Spain and the Mediterranean, they have a glass of wine at lunch.

Resveratrol is exceptionally useful to protect brain cells from damage. Gut health again, if the wine has been produced in quite a natural way it has some good bacteria in it that can go into your body and help your body break down the alcohols, which I find fascinating.

And then there’s stress reduction. We all know a glass of wine can reduce stress, so thank you ChatGPT for helping me with my wine/health argument, because we are seeing a huge reduction in people drinking nowadays.

And rightly so! We want to live a long life and we want to be healthy. And the governments are telling us that alcohol is very bad for us and it is. But you know… everything in moderation.

Todd: Even moderation itself (sometimes)… It’s interesting that you mention ChatGPT. It really does seem like AI is touching every industry under the sun.

It sounds like it’s been really useful to you there in terms of finding that information about health benefits. Is it also something that can help people make better choices with regarding the wine they choose?

Harriet: I think it’ll give people more educated information than if you go searching on Google, because then you’re going to get someone’s opinion. I do like the fact that ChatGPT tends to balance out what’s out there and give a more measured answer.

The other day I had to do a team training in the office and I didn’t have that much time to plan it—But I knew what I wanted to do. I asked ChatGPT how they would do it, and it gave me a whole structure in 30 seconds and brought up some really interesting points that I wouldn’t have thought of.

So I think it’s going to make us more efficient at our jobs. And that gives us more time for creativity. The problem with the wine trade is that everyone has a lot of hats to wear; a lot of jobs they have to do. Time is of the essence. So if something like ChatGPT can give us more time, then we can be more creative and see new marketing structures that might work for the younger generation.

Todd: You’ve already mentioned climate change in passing… We would be remiss not to dive into that further. How is the wine industry adapting to the fight against climate change?

Harriet: The famous sentence that everyone uses is that viticulture is at the front lines of climate change. Grapes are so particular to the weather patterns that are occurring. You can lose an entire vintage because of humidity or something like that.

Bordeaux 2024, for example; and Burgundy 2024, saw huge amounts of humidity in the air. I know one producer who lost 80% of his crop in 2024 because of rot amongst the grapes. So you have to get rid of all those grapes and you then end up with just a handful of production to work with. But it’s not just the viticulturists who have to change, it’s also the grapes which seem to be evolving and changing the way they grow to, to deal with the weather.

I think it was either 2020 or 2022 in Bordeaux; both quite warm years and dry years. Merlot is a grape variety that is known for loving the heat. It ripens faster than Cabernet Sauvignon and it’s ready before Cabernet Sauvignon. Everyone presumed that the right bank in Bordeaux would have lesser wines in the warmer year with the dry drought and heat, because the Merlot would have gotten really, really high levels of sugar and lower acid, and the wines would be flabby and wouldn’t be as good as the Cabernets.

The opposite actually showed. Cabernet really struggled with the drought and Merlot seemed to reach deep, dig deep and, manage itself better, and slowed its ripening and held onto the acidity.

You ask the producers, how are these wines showing such good levels of acidity? And the producers actually don’t know. It’s a bit of an anomaly. The only thing we can see is that the vine is managing itself, altering the way it grows in keeping with climate change. Nature is amazing. You know, we can try and ruin the planet, but nature will try its best to survive.

Todd: Nature’s the original innovator, is it not? Absolutely fascinating. As things continue to change; not just in terms of the climate, but also this continued shift in tastes, new technology, bringing back old traditions, etc… How do you think your job will be different 10 years from now?

Harriet: I think the cost of alcohol will have increased. People will certainly be drinking less. But that could mean that smaller producers who are producing wine in a more sustainable way will be receiving the accolades they deserve. When you look at the cost of wine at the lower levels, what the majority spend on a bottle is not enough. I actually think if the cost of wine increases and it’s not down to taxes, that would be a good thing for the producers and for us in the long term. Because the wine will be produced in a more caring, more careful way, with better grapes.

I hope there’ll still be the diversity of wine, because some production regions are getting very, very hot and very, very dry. In some of the bigger regions in Spain, you can’t walk outside in the middle of summer. Even in Bordeaux, it’s very, very hot. So I think the wine map is moving. We’ve just taken on a producer from England, from the South Downs. It’s hard enough in Ireland to sell an English wine! Luckily the producer is an Irish wine maker and he is producing extraordinarily excellent wines—sparkling and still, in the ranks of champagne, which is more expensive and more sought after.

So if the UK is doing that now, in 10 years’ time I would expect to see a huge amount of these sort of less well-known regions producing wines that are much more at the forefront of what we’re buying and what’s on our shelves.

Todd: Last of all, what, what can you tell us about your work with Tindal Wine Merchants? Where can people find you online, and how can you help them drink better wine?

Harriet: We are based in Ireland and we sell we wholesale to the trade, importing from all over the world. I’m the main wine buyer and my code of practice is to deal with people who are as passionate as we are, so our wines are generally from smaller producers. We have some larger wineries we work with, as every company does. But they also tend to be family companies, which is nice. We have a little offshoot, which is Searsons Wines; a shop in Monkstown that can be found online at searsons.com.

And I have another hat, which is a wine broking business; Tankersley Wine Broker, which can also be found online. This very much is dealing with fine wine that we ship internationally at lower margins, with the proof tag sitting on the bottle proving provenance of the wine. It is a really interesting sector and something I spend quite a lot of time with, thanks to my travels in Bordeaux and Burgundy.

I’m on Instagram as well, and occasionally put up some very random pig-related posts, because during lockdown we gathered a few pigs together and I have pigs rambling around in my woods in Wicklow. They are absolutely delicious. They have nothing added but time. They don’t get any antibiotics, obviously. They get wormed once. The taste of the meat is amazing. So where I come from with my provenance in wine, I also come from with my provenance for food. Now I’m very choosy about the meat I eat.

Todd: Thank you very much. I hope our listeners certainly check out your pig-based content, but also all of your different wine hats as well!

Before we say goodbye, if you could leave them with one final piece of advice, what would you say to our listeners?

Harriet: I think what I’d say; and it’s how I live my life, is to drink well. I drink a diverse range of wines that really fill me with joy, but I drink less because the wines I drink wouldn’t be the cheapest off the shelf. At a higher level, you get much more diversity and interest in a wine, and you can learn more.

Wine can be an adventure throughout your life. We need to respect it.

Todd: Thank you so much, Harriet. It’s been amazing to have you on the show.