Q&A: Joe Wadsack

This year Joe Wadsack was named the IWSC Wine Communicator of the Year for a second time. Here, we find out how the former trainee fighter pilot got into wine, and why dessert wines and their drinkers are like “two pandas in a cage”.

Joe Wadsack

How did you catch the wine bug?

I grew up in a pub restaurant with my parents and my brother. I loved real ale, and the whole buzz of a successful pub and restaurant. Wine seemed to be a natural progression – a step up in complexity and subtlety. Having decided to leave the Royal Air Force in 1991, where I was training to be a fighter pilot, I found the idea of doing something so soulful, different and opposite highly intoxicating.

Learning another language (French), and living in another country and culture was a far cry from studying material sciences and engineering at Salford, or pure chemistry at Manchester. It certainly felt different to learning about bombs and guns. It wasn’t just a departure, it was a new beginning.

You recently teamed up with chef Tom Kerridge to host the BBC’s Food and Drink – how did you find the experience?

The whole experience was a pleasure, albeit a hard-working one. The hours are unsociable, the work is poorly paid, and the environment is tiring and uncomfortable. However every night Tom would leave the studio around midnight, drive to one of his sites and check on his staff, before going home, then get up for a swim before being back in the studio for 7am. I live six miles from the studio and I felt so exhausted.

I would often find the same taxi driver downstairs asleep, ready to take me back to studio the next day, but Tom was usually already in the studio after his 100-mile round trip each morning. There’s a man wedded to his cause. He is a great cook, a doting husband, and the nicest, most patient, polite and kind chef I’ve ever worked with on TV, with the possible exception of my dear friend Paul Rankin.

How can the trade improve the way it talks to consumers about wine?

That’s easy. Don’t patronise them. Don’t ‘educate’ them. Give as many reasons as you can to make them want to know, and they will find out for themselves. My best friend Nick Dymoke-Marr made me read a book once called The Cluetrain Manifesto. It was a profound re-evaluation of the way corporations should look at their customers through social media and how web communities were going to be the decision makers of the future.

With the youth of today having grown up with web 2.0, they are much more marketing-aware than we ever were. Teenagers watch compilations of advertisements for fun. They judge everything. So, always assume that your audience is at least as clever as you, and don’t lie to them. Ever.

Are there any regions or styles that we should be re-evaluating at the moment?

Sherry and Port wines and dessert wines. Sherry and Port because they take time to make, and if we don’t support them now, the companies that make them will suffer years down the line, when everybody eventually decides that they were wrong. Dessert wines because they WILL come back into fashion. Everybody loves them, or claims to, but they don’t get off their arses and buy them. Dessert wines and their drinkers are like two pandas in a cage – they need a shove in the right direction.

Any other projects we should know about?

Let’s just say that I will be in charge of camera and content from now on. Also, you will be seeing a lot more wine blends from me, from places that you least expect.