Millennials.

For wine businesses, they’re a bit like the Holy Grail. Hard to pin down but oh, so appealing.

We all want to know how they’re behaving around wine and what they’re thinking. Next week, in Bordeaux, I’ve got a very unique chance to pick a whole bunch of their brains.

As in, 90 of them, many from wine families around the world, who are all enrolled in the MBA program at the INSEEC Wine & Spirits Institute.

This is the next generation of decision-makers at wine companies globally. They are already consumers, and they are already planning to be leaders within their organizations.

It’s my job to teach them about data, and the influence it can bear on their strategic decisions for the future.

Not only is this a chance to observe millennial thinking about wine; it’s also a chance to observe millennial thinking about data.

What’s the best way to go about this task?

We’ve created a data set, naturally. It’s a mix of actual and fictionalized records, and we’ll use it to kick the tires about concepts like operational data versus knowledge of the market, and structured versus unstructured data.

Most of all, we want to see how they approach the data set, how they analyze it, how they describe the insights they could derive from it, and which external sources they think can also be applicable.

I’m there to teach, but I’m also very much there to learn. Ultimately, we’ll be turning those learnings back into something useful for you.

If there’s anything you’re particularly curious to ask this group, by all means let me know. I’ve got my (long) list of questions. A few more certainly won’t hurt.

I’m looking forward to reporting back.

Have a great week and thank you, of course, for reading –