Exploration, in most cases doesn’t involve leaving one’s own country. For all intents and purposes, the major benefit of travel and exploration is to broaden one’s perspective and gain a sense of what’s out there, so as to not take one’s own current situation for granted. So whether you’re going to a wine tasting night of an unfamiliar region, a photo exhibit showcasing an little known part of the world, a concert from an out of town artist or asking your parents about a part of their lives before you were born – it doesn’t matter, because they all take on some form of exploration without travel. Benrik takes advantage of this rather self-evident nugget in This Book Will Change Your Life, which often makes simple suggestions like driving a new way to work every day, changing what you eat for breakfast or reading a magazine that isn’t targeted at you – and he’s right, his book will really change your life by virtue of the fact that it encourages change.

Explorers often have a place in our history and culture, because the truly great explorers reveal places that we would never have thought of going to. Pieter Hugo is a prime example of such – and it is his series of photographs of a Nigerian gang that used wild hyenas and a monkey on a chain as their means of extracting money from people that made me feel that my own realm of experience pales in comparison. My own exploits in shark-diving, bunjy-jumping and sky-diving all seem to pale in comparison to Mr. Hugo’s.

Pieter Hugo’s work takes one out of their own realm of experience, which is something that wine quite often fails to do. It’s true that a lot of people are happy to use their wine to get a little buzz on, to take off the edge from work and ultimately as a relatively inexpensive and comparatively mild over the counter sedative. For millennials, that won’t really cut it. The image of wine, in my research amongst many people from the younger set – is one that is tired. Understandably wineries don’t have the type of budgets to create above the line advertising like Heineken, Bacardi and Kahlua do – all which serves to position their brands as exciting and desirable. But there is a certain lack of imagination amongst wineries. In my time doing sales I was being sent from dinner party to dinner party – where a couple of loyal, steady drinking enthusiasts would arrive in black tie for a 3 course meal and some pleasant chat. The trouble with these sorts of exercises is that these wine clubs enjoy the same service from wineries on a monthly basis and it rarely gets out into the semi-convinced public.

Wineries spend very little money on experiential and direct marketing – and in many instances will fork out $15,000 to Beverage Media for a black and white advertisement to run for a year in first 50 pages of the publication that advertises 3 case deals, and at the same time will turn their nose up to viral campaigns or a concept for an experiential concept that could get their brand a lot more coverage in much quicker time quite a lot less. It would seem that they ignore the fact that with today’s consumers, if your brand doesn’t catch their attention – they’re not going to look for it, and it’s as good as dead.

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