We talk a lot about innovation in wine.
But if we’re honest, most of us were never really taught how to take risks.
We were taught how not to fail.

In this episode of Vino Visionaries, I sit down with Nick Karavidas, who is about to head into his 45th vintage.

With more than four decades in the industry, Nick has seen consumers change, channels evolve and direct-to-consumer become essential, but what really stayed with me from this conversation was our deep dive into failure.

A big part of our conversation is about fear.Not abstract fear, but the very normal, very human fear of getting it wrong.When I asked Nick about the word failure, we ended up somewhere deeper: how most of us were trained, from school onwards, to avoid mistakes at all costs.

At school we learn:Don’t make a mistake.Do as you’re told.Don’t cooperate.Work alone.There’s one right answer, and everything else is wrong.Then we land in the real world where:Consumers are changing faster than ever.There are many possible answers to any problem.The safest thing is no longer “do what we’ve always done”, but to try, test, iterate, and learn together.No wonder so many people in wine feel paralysed. We say we want innovation, but we’ve been conditioned our whole life to avoid the exact behaviour innovation requires: trying things, sharing ideas, testing, “failing”, adjusting.For me, this episode isn’t about pointing fingers at “the industry”.

It’s about recognising how we were all trained to think, and asking what it would look like to unlearn some of that together.If you feel that the old playbook doesn’t match today’s reality, I think this conversation will hit home.Join our community, subscribe to the podcast today.

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