Experience the Unforgettable: Learn about the Bhutan Wine Co. and our upcoming once-in-a-lifetime Himalayan Harvest event.
Welcome back to the dVIN Roadmap series. This is Episode 07 and it’s all about Bhutan. We’ll be hearing from Michael Juergens and Ann Cross - the founders of the Bhutan Wine Co. themselves - and learning about the incredible work they’re doing to establish a sustainable wine industry in Bhutan.
In case you didn’t know: The Bhutan Wine Co. has granted Club dVIN members the exclusive right to participate in the kingdom’s inaugural grape harvest - set to take place in July/August 2024.
Listen up to find out how you can get in on this unforgettable wine adventure and make wine history in the Himalayas.
This information session was recorded back in January and is the perfect foundation to lead us into our upcoming June episodes, where we’ll be planning out our 2023 Steering Committee Trip, in preparation for the main 2024 event.
The Steering Committee Trip
We’re selecting a handful of qualified pros and hardcore enthusiasts to join us in Bhutan in July & August of 2023 to help break ground on the Ser Kem winery - the kingdom’s first ever winery. Split into two small groups, they will embark on the adventure of a lifetime packed with hiking, vineyard work and discovery. Their mission is to help map out the logistics of the kingdom’s inaugural harvest event in 2024.
Follow along to stay in the loop and learn more about the Bhutan Wine Company, Club dVIN, and what to expect leading up to the main Himalayan Harvest in the summer 2024.
This is going to be EPIC!
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Transcript:
Jana Kreilein: Hi guys, and welcome back to the Club dVIN Roadmap Series. This is Episode 07, and today is all about Bhutan.
You've probably heard us talk about it before, but in case you haven't, the Bhutan Wine Co. has given Club dVIN members the exclusive right to participate in the kingdom's first ever grape harvest. This is gonna be happening in July or August of 2024, depending of course on the readiness and ripeness of the grapes. And this is going to be the experience of a lifetime. So pay attention and don't miss your chance to participate.
This recording today is actually from back in January, and it's a conversation between dVIN founder Dave Garrett, and the founders of the Bhutan Wine Co., Michael Juergens and Ann Cross.
Michael and Ann share the mission to establish a sustainable wine industry in Bhutan, and they've harnessed the country's diverse climates and soils, and are working to cultivate exceptional quality grapes, and from them make extraordinary wines that reflect Bhutan's unique agricultural landscape. So get ready to uncover the captivating story of the Bhutan Wine Company and learn more about how you can get in on the action yourself.
Are you ready? Let's take it back to that January recording.
David Garret: Hi I'm Dave Garrett. I'm, one of the co-founders of Club dVIN. With us we've got, Michael and Ann but I’ll let them introduce themselves.
We're here today to talk about the inaugural harvest of the Bhutan Wine Company and Club dVIN's involvement in that project. Why don't we start by by letting, Michael and Ann, you guys wanna introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about the project while we're waiting for everybody to show up.
Ann Cross: Sure. I’m Ann Cross. I'm one of the co-founders of the Bhutan Wine Company and the CEO.
Micheal Juergens: And I'm really just the eye candy. No, I'm the one of the, one of the other co-founders of the Bhutan Wine Company and also, a big wine guy and one of the founding members of Club dVIN
So this is a great intersection of cool shit that we got going on here. Maybe what we can start with a little bit is just talk about why we're doing this in Bhutan. Yeah. Because I think that's in and of itself is a really interesting story. So for those of you who don't know, Bhutan is in the Himalayas and it's nestled between Nepal and Tibet.
And it's widely renowned for, they don't measure gross domestic product. They measure gross national happiness. And so there's a narrative that they're the happiest country on the planet, whether they are or they're not. It's important to them for their citizens to be happy. And that trumps how much money they make, which I think is a really cool way of living.
We first went to Bhutan back, I don't know, seven or eight years ago to run a marathon, in the Himalaya. And at the time, I did not realize I, you say to Himalayas and you visualize, Everest and K2 and stuff like that but that's actually not really what Bhutan is. Bhutan is this.
cornucopia of agriculture. and they are the only carbon negative country on the planet, and they are globally renowned for their sustainable agriculture and their harmony with the environment, which is in line with their philosophy of how they live. And I show up expecting snow covered peaks.
And what I see instead is these just beautiful terrorist valleys with amazing crops growing. And in my head, I'm sitting there thinking like I. [00:02:00] Oh man, I bet the wine here is spectacular. So I'm asking everybody like, I'm a wine geek, right? I'm there to run a race, but I'm asking everybody, where are the wineries?
Where are the wineries? And everyone's we don't know what you're talking about. And finally we ended up at this dinner with these government officials, and I say to the government officials, I go, Hey, where's the wineries? I'm not leaving this place until I try your wines. It's gotta be spectacular.
And they say We don't have it. And I get incensed. In part cuz I've probably been drinking a little bit. So I started lighting these guys up you guys are screwing up. You have this beautiful terroir. It's perfect. Like why are you're, you're not doing this. You're wasting what God gave you.
You need to start building a wine industry today. And they say why do you think that? And I go, here's 10 reasons. Diversity of soil, micro climates, beautiful crops, mi microplastic free water, really vibrant soil. You're growing the, they grow the best mandarin oranges in the world.
If you can grow the best mandarin, orange, can grow a gr. Actually, here's a funny story from the trip that we just went on with Valentino. We took everybody to walk across this one suspension bridge just cuz it's [00:03:00] cool. It's really high and it's about a quarter mile long. We're walking across the suspension bridge and there's this little ese kid sitting at the end of the bridge.
He's got this bucket full of stuff and he is Hey, you wanna buy something? And we're like, sure. So we buy 'em and it's this little fruit and we're eating it and all of us are saying, oh my God. This is the best thing I've ever I've ever tasted. Everyone's what is it we're asking the kid?
He's I don't know what you guys call it. Like we call it this. And I go, all right, whatever. And so then one of the other guys in our group comes over who's Bhutanese, and he goes, he's talking to the guy and B and he turns us. And he goes, that's a guava. You guys would call that a guava.
And then we all look at each other this is the best Guam I've ever had in my life. And I go, that's our business model right there. If you can grow the best guama that someone's ever had, you should be able to grow the best grape. So anyways, we start talking to the Bhutanese about them building this wine industry, and they're excited and they're interested and it aligns with their principles.
And so we continue the discussions and I end up writing a business plan for 'em. And this is how you would do it. Let us know when you're done. We want to come and drink the wine.[00:04:00] And eventually they get to the point where they're like, we're gonna do this. And I'm like, great. And they're like, we want to do it with you.
And I'm like, are you kidding? I get to be in charge of an entire wine industry for a country. Hell yeah. That's the coolest thing I've ever heard of in my life. and So we start building the wine industry and there's a lot of unknowns, right? This has never been done before. Like the last time a country built a wine industry where there weren't indigenous grapes was probably New Zealand in the 18 hundreds.
It's this's. Just this opportunity to find a country that has massive organic potential that doesn't already grow grapes is pretty rare. so we start messing around. We plant the first six vineyards, at a bunch of different altitudes, ranging from like 1500 feet up to 9,000 feet. And we plant, What do we plan initially?
10 different varietals. Nine, nine different varietals. Yeah. Yeah. Three reds or three whites. And six reds. Yep. And then we learned what we could from the first two or three seasons about how, which grapes were doing well and so on and so [00:05:00] forth. And then we started moving to the next phase, which was scaling.
and we recently planted an additional four vineyards, which are about, they're about 200 acres in total. of which we planted about half of 'em because we're still in the. Let's try some stuff and if the sangiovese doesn't work, let's switch it over to Shannon or whatever, as quickly as we can.
So We have, 10 vineyards, growing 17 different varietals and we are definitely learning which grapes grow better at the higher altitudes and which grapes go better at the lower altitudes. And one of the things that I'm most excited about, and this is really cool, is.
So Bhutan at the south side of the country, it's about 500 feet in elevation. At the north side of the country, it's about 27,000 feet in elevation, and the distance between those two points is about 300 miles. So the country basically just goes straight up. but within that, you get to play with pretty much every climate zone known to man.
And so we looked at the south and at the [00:06:00] 500 foot space or level, and it's jungles. And by jungle lions and tigers and elephants and monkeys and it's jungle and it gets like 5,000 millimeters of rain a year. So we we're like, ah, we probably can't make anything work there. Let's write it off. So we write it off.
Then we get the idea that says, Hey, it's so hot there that the vines would never grow dormant. Is it possible that we might be able to prune the plants in summer and let 'em wake up in September and grow over the winter cuz it's plenty hot and do a harvest in February. which would allow us to a, get two harvests a year, one in spring one and fall optimize our, our winemaking facilities.
And also in the south there is tons of land and it's all flat. and so we planted the first vineyard in the South in October, and I'll show you some pictures of it. It's growing like Jack and the Beanstalk down there. It's crazy how fertile and exciting the south is gonna be.
David Garret: I'm gonna pop in for just a second.
Thank you for the background. [00:07:00] I always love hearing that story. super great. The origin story. I I wanna talk for just a second about kind of club Devin's involvement with the project and where we're going. Michael and I have known each other for a little while.
I've been. Fascinated with this project since I first read about it, I don't know, three or four years ago. and and I've been following along and, talking to 'em for a while. And as soon as we started Club dVIN, one of the first thoughts I had was, wouldn't it be an amazing trip for our members to go and see the vineyards?
And as we were putting it together, Michael and I started talking and, he had always had a plan for, to do something really fun and interesting for the inaugural harvest, which is, coming up. And so what we have put together over the last year is that the big first Club dVIN trip.
Will be the inaugural harvest for the Bhutan Wine Company. and to that end, in, back in, was it September, or October.[00:08:00] we put together a scouting trip to go to Bhutan with, with Ann and Michael and a couple other people to see what was there to start putting together the, what the itinerary for a trip would be like.
to look and see what makes sense to, to create really an amazing experience for our members, but also a way for us to start building a harvest tradition in Bhutan. And super excited to do it. I, unfortunately couldn't make the trip, but but Valentina from our team went. Most of you, if you're a member of Club dVIN, you've talked to Valentina at one point or another, so you know her a little.
and so they went on the trip to figure out what a itinerary would look like, what the trip would look like, and to come back with with some ideas. So I'll leave it from there and maybe you guys could talk a little bit about that trip in, in September, October, what you've come back with and
then we can go from there.
Micheal Juergens: Yeah. Maybe let's talk a little bit about, COVID, because Bhutan was one of the bright shining stars of Covid globally. There's, there was a bunch of articles written about [00:09:00] how Bhutan, was relatively insulated and they were able to inoculate everybody very quickly. The way that they were able to do that is they completely shut the borders down from like March of 2021 to June of 2022, and then they opened it up and there was a three week quarantine, and then they finally released the quarantine at the end of September.
So we were one of the first groups to come in two weeks after the quarantine. And this is important because we had not been in the country for the 2021 season. Now Bhutan has ridiculously skilled agronomists. But they've never grown Vera before. And so left to their own devices. We're trying to tell 'em how to prune and stuff over what's happened, FaceTime and stuff.
And we weren't as successful as we thought. And so when we got there in October, part of the plan was to really look at having 2023 being that inaugural harvest. And when we got there, we looked at the vineyards who were all doing great. But they [00:10:00] had not been pruned in 2021 to, to really optimize, they had not been pruned in the summer of 2022 to really optimize for the 2023 harvest.
And so we looked at it and we said, you know what? It's gonna be better if we do it with a little bit more rigor, and push out the inaugural harvest to 2024. And the reason that we made that decision and we agonized over it a little bit, but. This is a big deal. This is a turning point for Bhutan.
And it's a turning point for the wine industry. Imagine if you had one of the first bottles ever produced in Australia, or one of the first bottles of wine ever produced in America. That would be in the Smithson. And so we were like, we could make wine in 2023, but can we really do it at the level of scale and respect that?
Something like this. Demands. And so we're we made the conclusion to push it out to 2024. And the idea behind it is really twofold. One, we're gonna make what we're calling First Barrel. So there'll be, 300 bottles of the first bottles [00:11:00] ever bottled in the Kingdom of Bhutan. And I'm sure the first 20 are gonna go to the royal family and the government and the museums and the archives.
And I'm probably gonna grab one of 'em and, an probably go, but we'll make some of those available. as kind of collectors editions. I absolutely can't wait to see what sort of token we're gonna mint about around that, cuz that's gonna be like a. A once in a lifetime sort of thing.
and then in addition, all of the bottles from that first harvest will have a special labeling. It is a bottle from the very first year, which is cool in and of itself. I'm sure we'll have a sep separate set of tokens for that. but we thought it would be great to.
Invite folks to come and participate in that process with us. And I think for 2024, what we're anticipating is that we'll do probably 10 weeks. We, our harvest kind of varies quite a bit because the elevations vary quite a bit from our vineyards. Some of 'em are at 9,000 feet or some are at a thousand feet.
We figure we'll start bringing people over in July and August and let folks, [00:12:00] spend a couple of days doing wine stuff in the vineyards, and then, a few days exploring, Bhutan and getting to do things like go to Tiger's, nest, climb tiger's, nest, go to the Buddha, do some of the other things that are important to do while you're there and have this multi.
Layered experience, which is gonna be wine focused, food focused, and Bhutan focused. one of the other things that we found that I wasn't as aware of until this last trip, and I've been to Bhutan a bunch of times, but I don't think it ever qu quite hit home is weather does matter in the summer.
And and so we, we definitely want to, Try to work around the monsoon season. And so that's gonna require a little bit of logistical efforts on our on our parts. And what I think it means to all the Davin community is that every week is probably gonna look slightly different. We may go to the east, earlier in the season and the west later in the season, depending on what the weather's doing.
but the main. Focus of the trip is going to be very similar Every week we'll bring over, 12 [00:13:00] people and they'll spend a few days working in the vineyards, getting dirty, getting sweaty, and then a few days doing some interesting bhu stuff. Can you, so
David Garret: Just to reiterate, the trip and it won't be a big trip where everybody goes at the same time.
And mostly it's just because we can't, we just, there just isn't the infrastructure to be able to handle that.
Micheal Juergens: That's correct.
David Garret: So what we've broken it down into is 10 weeks, starting in, we think it's probably mid-July. Yep. And running through the Yeah. Mid-July, running through the end of September or the end of October.
Micheal Juergens: By September.
David Garret: End of September. Okay. And
Micheal Juergens: We'll know a little bit more, from this year because this year the vineyards are mature. They will be producing, probably not at quite what we had hoped just because of the pruning from last year. but that'll give us a really good sense of, hey, the use of Pong vineyard's really ready to go September 15th.
The Bajo Vineyard's gonna come on mine in mid-July, and that'll help us lay out what that schedule looks like.
David Garret: And the idea is we'll have 12 people for each [00:14:00] week. Yep. And, what we'd really like to be able to do is have an overlap for each group so that there's one night.
When the two groups can get together and have a big dinner. And, so you'll get to meet people from other groups as well. But the basic idea is that this is a small. very exclusive and obviously super intense week for, a very small group of people. Can you talk a little bit about what a weekly itinerary might look like?
Micheal Juergens: Yeah. When you get into Bhutan, you have to fly into the Parro airport. That's the only airport. And by the way, that's a fun airport to fly into. You. It's got its own Wikipedia entry. On how much fun it is to fly to the Parro Airport. But
Ann Cross: Parro is the second biggest city in Bhutan. The first being Thimphu, which is the Capitol, but the airport is located in parro, '
Micheal Juergens: And we have a, one of our smaller research vineyards is right by the Parro Airport.
So I, I imagine it'll look like you land in Parro. At around noon you go to, to check [00:15:00] out the first vineyard. We probably won't do much work in it. It'll probably just be a walkthrough, check it out, and then head into the Capitol city of Tim P which is where the things like the Golden Buddha are, hiking.
The Tigers Nest monastery is also a must do when you're in Bhutan, and that is also very near the Parro Airport. I anticipate that we will give people the opportunity to do that, either coming in or going out. and it depends a little bit on the flight schedules. they don't actually fly every day, so we're feted a little bit by that.
But it'll be coming to Parro, maybe hike Tiger's, nest and see the vineyard, or maybe you just see the vineyard and go into tempo. And then from there, either we go to our vineyards in the West. And come back to Tim Poo, or we go to our vineyards in the east and we come back to Tim Poo and then eventually make our way back to Parlin and head out.
So that's what it'll look like. They're, it's hard to predict, 18 months out. What the weather's gonna look like. we had in, in October, we had very good intentions of [00:16:00] landing in Parro and immediately going to the east weather, made that not a, not an option for us. So instead we called an audible, ran to the west instead.
Spent some time in the west and then came back and then flew to the east and then came back. And this is part of the charm of the trip is you're not necessarily gonna know exactly how it's gonna play out. We're gonna have to display a little bit of adaptability based on a country that doesn't have a lot of infrastructure and ands got some weather pressure in the summer.
But that's what makes it fun.
David Garret: This is a full contact winemaking, full contact wine. Exactly. Welcome to the N F L.
Micheal Juergens: Yeah, and the other thing we should talk about, Dave, is the idea of the steering committee. Cuz I think that's another great opportunity for the club dVIN community. I.
David Garret: Let's answer.
There's a couple of things that that I wanna talk about really quickly. First so a couple of the questions in the q and A are about varietals, vineyards, elevations. I think what we should do maybe between now and the next call, I'd like to work with you on a map. where we can actually put the vineyards on a map show which varietals are in which [00:17:00] vineyards, how big each vineyard is.
and do, we could maybe do a little interactive map where people can click around Sure. And see and really get some detailed information. Like when the vineyard was planted. What varietals are there? Exactly what that's gonna look like, and maybe even a couple sample itineraries.
And I think we could do that all very quickly with something that's clickable, build it in Figma, easy to look at. but that might give people a l a lot more information to answer some questions and just give people like a, a little sense of what that looks like.
One of the so I see some questions for that in the q and a. Just know that for the next call between now and the next call, so you know, in the next couple of weeks you'll get access to some sort of a map with more information and we'll be building on that. When we have more, as we get more information in, we'll just keep adding to that as like a central source of truth.
and just keep building, building on that. Does that make sense? It does.
Micheal Juergens: And and may be, but I do wanna address the stylistic question that it comes through. [00:18:00] Cause I think that's interesting. Yeah. And I'll share with everybody what our vision is here. Bhutan is special. It is a magical place.
That's a, it's a bucket list journey for many people and it, when you go there, you'll understand why. It's just this crazy, magical environment and the place just kind ofs with this really serene energy. But it's powerful. I an analogy I use is remember when you were a little kid and your grandma would give you like these giant hugs and it was like overwhelming, but you also felt safe and happy at the same time?
That's the way I feel about Bhutan when I land. There's just this powerful energy that just surrounds you. Our goal is to try to capture the essence of that in a bottle. We don't know exactly what that's gonna look like yet because we haven't harvested any grapes, but I can tell you what we're knocking.
We're not gonna oak the shit out of it. We're not gonna use a bunch of interventionist winemaking techniques to make a stylistic wine that, that we wanna try to compete with the Napa cab. I could give a shit about any of that stuff. Our goal is express [00:19:00] Bhutan in a bottle. and I, and I. Hope that it's unique and I feel like it will be unique and distinctive, but I don't know exactly what it's gonna look like.
The other thing that I can tell you that we're not gonna do is we're not gonna do natural winemaking. one because science is real and so we kinda wanna make drinkable wine. But more importantly, there are so Bhutan, like I mentioned, is the only carbon negative country on the planet, and they are on track to become the first a hundred percent organic country in the world, where everything in theory would be organic, all crops, all verticals.
the downside of that is that there's monsoon pressure in the summer. And so that, that's gonna put some mildew pressure on the vines. And if we're dogmatic about, take natural wine, making a sign, but even if we're dogmatic about organic farming, that could put us in a situation where the grapes may not be as good as they could have been if we had been mildly interventionist, particularly in the vineyard.
So I think our plan is to be organic ish in the vineyard, and then, in the winery when we actually [00:20:00] make the wine to be as non-interventionist as possible, from a manipulation perspective and try to really capture what that looks like.
David Garret: Do you think that some vineyards might be, Organic and some might be less so depending on where they are, what the elevation is, what the individual
microclimate is.
Micheal Juergens: Yep. And that, matter of fact, we have, one of our current vineyards is a hundred percent organic right now today, and we are trying to keep it a hundred percent organic so we can learn what techniques work and what don't. and yeah, over time I would love to get there. I don't know if we'll ever get there, just given the fact that.
You gotta harvest in the summer when it's raining and you gotta keep mildew from killing the graves. The good news is there are not a lot of. The traditional pests and diseases that we see in other places. There's no altra, there's no Pierce's disease, there's no esca there's, unless we bring it in with us there, there's, yeah, there's nothing there.
Which gives us the opportunity also to grow on own rooted vines, [00:21:00] which I think is really cool. It really hearkens back to the essence of, true vene. R the science is a little bit. I think inconclusive on the use of root stocks other than guarding against vrap, which I don't need to guard.
David Garret: So do you have, is there a percentage of the vines that are already planted that are unrooted? Is it a hundred percent?
Micheal Juergens: No. Everything that we planted already was imported. We plant the first round of vineyards we imported from California. The second round we imported from France. We now have about six nurseries in the country where we are propagating vines with the intent of moving towards own rooted vines.
Now, who knows, right? This hasn't been done before. So we may plant own rooted vines and find that there's, I don't know, a bhutanese caterpillar that loves ve nephro rootstock, and we have to go back to graft. But that's the vision is to try to get as close to this, harmony with the environment as possible without being dogmatic or stupid about it.
David Garret: Cool. There's a question about costs, and I know we don't have it definitive yet, but can we talk in general about,[00:22:00] accommodations. a little bit about what's included and a little bit about general costs.
Micheal Juergens: Yep. So there's some variability here in the sense that the Bhutanese currency is called the nru, and it's pegged to the rupi and it bounces around a little bit.
So that's a, that's, a consideration. We have inflation that is running around right now. And then the third piece of this is Bhutan. Closely controls who can come into the country. and one of the ways that they do that is they charge a tourist tax every day to be in the country.
And they just doubled that. It was like a hundred bucks, now it's 200 bucks. but I would guess that the cost for the trip was, would be between 12 and 15 grand. And that would include travel and country, lodging, food, wine, all of that stuff. with the intent that there's, there are some pretty nice hotels in Ho in Bhutan.
We'll probably stay in a couple of those and then some nights we're gonna be [00:23:00] staying out. In the middle of nowhere where the hotels are not as nice. and we even talked maybe about with one of the vineyards, the Golo vineyard in particular, actually setting up some clamping pods on site and letting people stay in the vineyard, which would be really cool if we can pull it off.
We're gonna need to clear some land down by the river to make that happen. But
David Garret: that's and so those costs are all inclusive once you arrive. So it doesn't include travel to parro, or does it, it doesn't include travel. But once you arrive in Parro, that includes everything. Correct. And especially it includes we plan on bringing a bunch of grape wine.
We've got a really good budget for bringing in, wine from all over the world and doing some really interesting tastings with local cuisine. we've talked about bringing, like working with a bunch of local chefs. And as you were saying, like some of the best produce, some of the best food in the world.
and for really for the first time tasting world class wine with local Bhutanese cuisine. So this is, these will be a, there will be a lot of firsts there. Yeah. And I think imagine a [00:24:00] good portion of that 12 to 15 grand is gonna be in pretty excellent wine.
Micheal Juergens: Yeah. The other thing that we.
Are likely to do is for the folks who are interested. We'll probably create some add-on opportunities where it would be, not part of a, the curated trip with everybody else, but if you wanted to stay there for two weeks instead of one, we could coordinate and let people go tracking on some of the tracks through the Himalaya Mountains or the second highest golf course in the world is in, is right outside of Bhutan, and we have the opportunity to go play that.
If you wanna go hit balls at 10,000 feet and see how far you can. How many yards you could put on your drive. So there's other things that, that we might allow as potential add-ons as well.
David Garret: We're also going to do some kind of interesting things around this trip. So sometime between now and sometime probably right around a year out, so in June or July, we're gonna tokenize all of the seats for this trip.
So 12 seats per week. For 10 weeks, we'll have 120 tokens. that will [00:25:00] be. It's basically an N F T that you'll be able to mint. That will be an RSVP for once, for a seat on that, on a particular given week. You'll be able to mint those in advance. It'll be basically the, for the cost of a deposit, but the concept will be if each of our members will, have the ability to buy, to buy one and then another one if we sell out or if we if we have some leftover.
With the idea being that you might be able to, to purchase one and then resell one when we get closer to the date. So there's gonna be some opportunities to, some small defi opportunities for this trip. And we're still working on exactly what the costs are gonna be.
it's still a little bit too far out for us to know, but you can imagine it's gonna be between that, 12,000 and $15,000 per person for the eight day trip.
The other kinda thing that's really interesting is when your RSVP token is redeemed for the trip, it will turn into an allocation token. and this is actually really important.[00:26:00]
So these allocation tokens are going to provide the holder with, at the very least, the ability to buy six bottles a year for some number of years that we will, that we'll decide closer in, but really it's the only way. It's to guarantee an allocation from this vineyard. So all of the people that come to this inaugural harvest event are harvest experience, will have, automatically have an allocation for the first.
Some number of vintages, from the winery. So we're really excited about that part as well. And now I'll let you talk about the steering committee. Sorry, I just wanted
Micheal Juergens: No. I think that's great that, we need to work out exactly what the allocation means. I think I could see it being something like maybe you just get bottles from the first harvest as part of that trip, but then in future years you have the option to purchase.
A certain amount, we'll see there's some legal requirements in there as well around shipping. Yeah. The good news is, I know the guy who wrote the regulations for the Bhutanese wine industry, pretty well, matter of fact, it was me. So the shipping out of Bhutan is less of an issue [00:27:00] as the shipping into wherever it is people happen to live.
So we gotta, we are about those kinds of things too. But all that can be you guys
David Garret: wanna, by time that wine's ready, we're gonna have, our logistics systems will be set pretty well set up. So I feel pretty confident that we're gonna be able to get wine to people pretty easily.
Micheal Juergens: Can I show some, I do wanna talk about the string committee, but maybe I'll show some Bhutan pictures really quick, if that's cool.
David Garret: Yeah, that'd be great.
Oh, and let me just say while you're starting that, I have opened up the q and a. We've got some, questions going right now, but if you have questions, please feel free to, to put 'em in the q and a. Please feel free, or if you want to, if you'd, if it's easier free to to put it in the chat, that's great.
Or if you'd like to raise your hand and we can, we can, call you up and, on the stage and you can ask questions there. But, we that we really want to make sure that. All of the, at least all of the questions that we can answer right now, we do answer. So please feel free to post any questions to the q and a.
Micheal Juergens: So this first picture that we're looking at, I talked a little bit about this the South Vineyard, which is actually in a town called Guo, we might [00:28:00] be able to do. multiple, spring Harvest. So this is the first vines that we planted in Gfu, to determine whether or not it would be feasible.
They look pretty good, right? These vines are three, they're three weeks old. In this boat, we planted cuttings after three weeks. This is what it looked like in Gfo. Wow, we've planted in October. I already have full bunches of grapes in the first season. Going through brazen in Guo, like GU food to me is extraordinarily exciting from a wine perspective.
And it wasn't on our radar screen until just like this last year, so we had this idea about the spring harvest. So very cool. This is our Penna vineyard. This is in the, on the west side of the country. It's about 15 acres right now that it's planted and we're probably gonna scale it to about 25 acres once we figure out. What works well over here, you can see the clouds in the background. That's this sort of sun and [00:29:00] clouds is pretty common in Bhutan.
it's it's beautiful blue skies and then clouds will come in and then they'll, the window blow 'em out and it's a pretty dynamic weather environment. Here's our crew. you can you can see Valentina crouch down there in the front. we climbed to Tiger's Nest, which. you can see on the backside of the hill here, up there, a little white spot.
That's the Tigers nest monastery. I've climbed this a bunch of times. I've never climbed it in the rain before this last October. And, it's not as much fun in the rain.
Ann Cross: Yeah. Unfortunately
the weather wasn't so great but the gang that was doing it for the first time totally, were warriors and persevered all the way to the top and.
When you have the opportunity to go, you'll understand why. But it's, it is a trek. It is not, it's not a simple kind of jaunt through the meadows. It's definitely a little bit of a hike.
Micheal Juergens: All right so this, This is pen. You took the photos so you would know. All right. Yeah, so this is another view of the vineyard that we were just looking at, just from a different angle. this is Thes Boom [00:30:00] Vineyard.
this vineyard is right outside the capital city of Tempo. This is the vineyard that is the most. mature, and is doing the best. It's also the highest, so this particular vineyard's at about 9,000 feet in elevation, which is pretty high. And, we're still dialing in what varietals are gonna work well there, but right now Sn Blanc seems to be crushing it there.
Cab Franc is right up there as a close second. Wow. That's our, so the guy on the left there in the yellow shirt, that's Russell Moss. He's a our Viti Culturalist. He was a professor at Cornell of viticulture till about. Three months ago when he moved over to take the job as a GM of a winery in the Hudson Valley.
On the right side, you'll see Francois Ray. Now he's our kind of vineyard manager and winemaker in country. He lives full-time in Bhutan. He came from, COEs. If you're familiar with Coran, as many of you I'm sure are, made wine for them for a number of years and then. Took on a job in Myanmar helping build Myanmar's [00:31:00] first winery.
So he's got a lot of experience in, in, working in these sort of startup kind of conditions where, there's not as much infrastructure. So we were really fortunate to get Fran Law on the team and living in Bhutan full-time. There's is this bajo?
Ann Cross: This is, no, this is gok. This is one of our, this is our biggest vineyard currently in the
East.
Micheal Juergens: Oh, you're right. That is Goler. Yep. and so you can see, Francois is pointing at something. the guy on the right is, the vineyard manager for that particular vineyard. then there's me, and then there's our C O O.
named Karma. He's full-time on the project in Bhutan. he was the UN ambassador for Bhutan. and then he retired from government life because he wanted to do the wine project full-time. He's been another great, asset for us in terms of navigating roadblocks with the government. The government's been highly collaborative with us, and it's primarily due to, to karma's connections.
here's all of us digging around a bush in that same vineyard, the Golo vineyard in the west. Here's a kind of a [00:32:00] backing up picture of it. You can just get a sense of the climate in the tewa. You can see on the backside of this valley, a whole bunch of terraces. That's where they're growing rice.
And so we're terracing the left side of the valley, hopefully with grapes. So just to give you some sense, and I love the idea of making a more interactive map. I literally threw those pictures into PowerPoint five minutes before this call. We didn't necessarily pick and choose what were the most dynamic images, but I'd love to do that with you, David, on the map thing.
I think that'd be cool. Yeah, we'll put
David Garret: together a really we'll start a resource center that has photos, videos, information about the vineyards. We'll do it in an interactive map and and then we'll just keep adding information to it as we go. So I'm really looking forward to putting that together.
We're. This is fantastic. Really cool,
Ann Cross: and we send pictures of the vineyards,
but the there's so many amazing other kind of cultural, beautiful spots that will obviously be a part of the experience.
Micheal Juergens: Sure. [00:33:00] So two, two quick things and then maybe we'll take some q and a one is I do wanna touch on this idea of the steering committee.
we know that obviously a number of the members of the Davin community are experts in wine. And we want all the help that we can get in helping us figure out this project. It's very dynamic. We're learning daily as we go along and pivoting and making adjustments.
And so we came up with this concept of the steering committee. We're gonna limit it to 20 people. and the, if you're on the steering committee, you will do a, another scouting trip. This summer, not in 2024, this summer to go over and evaluate the vineyards. Make sure we're ready for the inaugural first harvest in 2024.
give every, give us the opportunity to benefit from everybody else's wisdom. And then, and give the folks on the steering committee the the experience of a lifetime. That'll be tokenized as well. And it'll come with an allocation of wine. We are being selective of who we'd like to join us on that.
And so we're gonna put out an application form if you are interested in being on the steering committee. we'll have a form that you can [00:34:00] fill out and send in that talks about, why you wanna do it and what your experience with wine is. That's a really great opportunity. For all of you.
And the second thing that I'll bring up is with respect to the financing of this project, we, Ann and I financed the phase one ourselves. for phase two. This has been going on for six years. For phase two, we released a series a, funding round in tranches. And so the series A round was of 2 million bucks.
We filled. The first tranche of a million in 2019, we filled the second tranche of 500,000. In 2021, we had hoped to not have to release the third tranche, but now as we're delaying. First harvest an additional year, we are gonna need some additional capital. So we are releasing the third tranche of 500 grand.
If anyone wants to consider, coming in on that, feel free to reach out to us and we can chat about the specifics and send you all the information on that. So I'll just throw that out there as an option for folks as well. All right, let's take great some
questions.
David Garret: So a [00:35:00] lot of them we've answered.
what I will say is you, what you can expect over the course of the next few weeks from us is access to this resource center with maps, vineyard maps, a lot more detail on the individual vineyards, elevation, varietals, so on and so forth. and then lots of photos and videos.
We'll make something really cool for you to access. The other thing that we'll send out in the next month is, an application to be on the steering committee. it'll be a relatively short application, but what we want to do is see who's interested and make some determinations based on criteria like, expertise in wine, ability to help us get the word out.
There's a few other things, and Michael, if you wanna. If you have some other criteria that you wanna talk about now, great. But we'll have a, an application form that we'll send out, again, in the next month or so, that you'll get. and then really over the course of the next six to nine months, we'll have a lot more information.
We'll keep adding information to the [00:36:00] resource center, and then after the steering committee trip, That's when we'll have the kind of final outline for what the calendar looks like for 2024. We'll have the token sale and, and you'll be able to, really sign up, make your reservation and lock in, seat on the 2024 inaugural Bhutan Wine Company
Harvest.
Micheal Juergens: Yeah, and I think for the steering committee, At some level, it's a bit of a dry run for 2024, right? We'll take, instead of taking 10 grapes, we're gonna take two, and do something very similar from an itinerary perspective. More importantly, I think about this as falls, it's one thing to grow great grapes, but then we gotta turn it into great wine and then we gotta sell the great wine.
And so I think it's for the steering committee, we're looking for people who can help. Accomplish those things, whether it could be, cuz you're an influencer and you can help get the word out. About Bhutan. There's a lot of interest on Bhutan already. I think I gave over 50 interviews in 2022 in seven different countries about the [00:37:00] project cuz it's Bhutan, it's interesting, it hasn't been done in, 150 years but nevertheless, get the word out.
It could be because you have expertise in, in viticulture and you can help us think through things like, our gors vineyard currently is V S P, but we're thinking about going to high pros and cons. and we're gonna maybe start experimenting a little bit with that. it could be from a sales and marketing perspective, we've got, we've got a bottle that we've gotta design.
We've got a label that we've got a design. I will tell the naming story though, cuz the naming story is spectacular. So we were thinking about what do we call the brand. and in Bhutan it's traditional. When a baby's born, you take the baby to the local monastery and they're special monks whose job is to name shit.
And they'll name the kid and they give the kid a first name and a last name, which is maddening because you've, everyone has different last names. You have no idea who's related to one another by their names. And so we had this idea, we're like, Hey, we got these monks we're collaborating with the monasteries.
They're blessing our vineyards and helping us, grow the [00:38:00] grapes. Why don't we have them name our baby? And so we go to the master name or monk and we're like, Hey, name our baby. And he goes, no problem. We got this. So about six weeks later, they come back and they go, all right, the name of your winery is Sarah Ke.
And we go, My All right, what does that mean? And they go no. It's great. Listen to this. When you go to a Buddhist monastery, it's considered customary to bring an offering to the gods. An offering could be money. It could be food, or it could be alcohol. And if the offering is alcohol, it is called cch.
And it is the alcohol of the gods. And we think that your winery should be named that. And we're like, that's fucking awesome. We're totally doing that. but I need to figure out a good way of telling that story on the label. Those of you who have insights on the sales and marketing of wine, you could be on the steering committee and help us figure out the best way to, to tell that story cuz it's a really cool story.
David Garret: Let's drink a lot of great wine and come up with a really good narrative for that. I love the nectar of the gods. I think that's that's how I've looked at this project for a long time, so that's why all of our, our membership tokens are the different gods of wine.
So I love that. I think it's really great.
Micheal Juergens: I think it's awesome. Yeah. It's a really cool story. other questions from the crew? Let's see.
David Garret: I think we've I think we've hit 'em all. And we are over time. So what I want to do is say, I think, why don't we, why don't we close for today? I'm gonna post the video and, and then imagine that we'll have several more of these. the next one will be after we post the resource center and after we put the application for the steering committee out.
So maybe a month or six weeks from now. But you can imagine pretty regular conversations between now and the date of the first trip. So lots to do, really looking for feedback from everybody. Please take a, take a minute, digest what we've talked about today, and just know that this is a work in progress.
Any feedback that you have, any kind of ideas that you have, we're really open to hearing it. So please give you, everyone has my email address. Feel free to just write me directly. and I'll start collecting questions, collecting feedback, collecting [00:40:00] suggestions, and and we can address them all as we go through this process together.
But we're all really excited and and thank you, Michael and Ann for taking the time to. To go through this today we're, this is gonna be, this is gonna be fantastic.
Micheal Juergens: Ah, we're so excited. We're so pumped. This is seven or eight years of hard work on our part. We're finally starting to see, the fruits of our labors, literally.
So looking forward to it. That's great.
David Garret: Thank you very much. Take care.
Micheal Juergens: Thanks, cheer guys. Bye-Bye.
🍷Club dVIN Livestream: A Himalayan Harvest with the Bhutan Wine Co. & Club dVIN🇧🇹