El?onore Escape & Boy Brullemans – Founders of – Wines and Love

“Don’t be afraid to fail and don’t let obstacles stop you. You can overcome them!”

Meet El?onore Escape & Boy Brullemans

A boy, a girl, a globe, an SLR, a camera, two backpacks, many vineyards, much love…

We are El?onore and Boy a young French-Dutch couple living in Paris. Both inspired by the culture of wine since a long time, each from different angles, we decided to quit our Parisian life of “Working people” and to dedicate our time to our N?1 passion: Wine. We have met each other on the work floor at the beginning of 2012, and we quickly knew that we were meant to be and to work together.

We have chosen to undertake a World Wine Tour during six months which has started on the 5th of December with one month in New South Wales – Australia and will last until the end of May. During the next five months, we will stop in New-Zealand, Chile, Argentina, Mexico and the United States (California / Oregon).

Under the motto “serious without taking ourselves too seriously,” we travel around the globe to let you experience our vino-journey and to share our travel stories.

The first goal of our project is to make all available information about wine more accessible, to reveal the diversity of wine cultures throughout the world and last but not least to show that we can discuss in a relaxed and uncomplexed way about wine. We are noticing that many people are shy to speak about wine and their preferences because they consider not capable. However, anyone can judge what he likes or not.

Our second objective is to help wineries, everywhere around the world, creating fresh communication material by immersing into their daily life during four-to-five days.

The idea is simple: We visit a winery, follow their everyday life and translate all our experiences in 3-4 trilingual articles (English / French / Dutch), a photo-reportage, and 1:30 min lasting video – teaser of the winery, vineyards and cellar door (partially filmed with our drone). At the end of each stay, we provide them for free for their proper communication, and we share them also on our blog and social media channels.

In exchange, we only ask a Couchsurfing accommodation where we can roll out our sleeping bags and if possible a small place at the dinner table. So, it is a win-win situation for the winemaker (fresh communication including video & photo material) as well as for us (we will have the chance to learn more about the wine region and a winery in particular).

Eleonore loves to smell the grapes, to walk around in the vineyards in the late afternoons, to see reddened hands of the winemakers, to observe Boy harvesting (and even Boy who do
not harvest).

Boy admires blended wines, winepresses, the ambiance inside the wine cellar, the harvest spirit, Eleonore guessing the flavors of wine (and even Eleonore who do not
guess).

You will understand that Wines & Love is the story of a happy couple that ? Cheers ? !

Email:?boy@winesandlove.com
Web:?http://www.winesandlove.com
Facebook:?http://www.facebook.com/winesandlove
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/winesandlove
Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/winesandlove

How long have you been an Entrepreneur?

6 months

Did you leave a job to become an Entrepreneur?

Yes

What is the name of your current project / company?

Wines and Love

Please describe for us in 1 sentence your current project.

Wines and Love – Boy & Girl vinyl trotting the globe

Where did the idea of your current project come from?

Wines and Love is the fruit of a long period of reflection, observation, investigation. Several life-events convinced us in starting this entrepreneurial project together:

MBA – Thesis – Winemakers & Digital Marketing

The subject choice is crucial and must be driven by a large interest and passion. Therefore, we discussed many times regarding the subject together before coming up with the final subject. We decided to combine 2 of our passions: Wine & Storytelling: How can each winemaker benefit from online marketing tools and increase visibility to attract more customers whatever the size of its winery. This thesis finally became our common thesis, and we co-authored all chapters together. By doing research and interviewing winemakers throughout the world, we discovered all different issues winemakers currently have with the usage of online marketing tools to grow their visibility and sales (Lack of time / Expensive marketing agencies/sale of non-adapted services/etc.). This is One of the main reasons for starting this project and to provide them the services they exactly need.

The world of wine and its elite status

We noticed that many of our friends were choosing their wines based on advice from their family or relatives without knowing the wineries themselves. Moreover, many of them feel uncomfortable to speak about wine in public because they are afraid to lack knowledge in comparison to their friends.

We are convinced that anyone can talk about wine and can determine what they like or not. Wine is an emotional and living product.
The taste of wine heavily depends on the moment of tasting, the emotional state of each person as well as on his preferences (color/grape variety). Through our project, we want to show to people that they can speak about wine without being afraid to make mistakes. We are aiming to break with the Elite image and create a new relax way of experiencing wine.

Future generations

They are consuming content in an entirely different way than the older generations because they have grown up with the internet and mobile phones. The millennials and Generation Y are the perfect target group for a storytelling experience as they are interested to know who is behind the bottle: Who is the winemaker / what is his vision /How does he make his wines / Where does he make his wines / etc. We believe that winemakers need to adapt their strategy to convince the new generations to buy their wines!

Through our documentaries, we want to show our community the entire winemaking process before a bottle ends up on your dinner table. Storytelling will be the key to success for a winemaker!

Why do you do what you do?

The desire to start a business together is a dream that we have since we are together. As mentioned earlier, we knew that we were meant to be and to work together.Our skills and competencies are complementary, so we are forming an excellent team! We were only waiting for the perfect moment to start this adventure!
We want to transform our joint passions into our everyday work because we believe that is crucial to be happy and feel a sense of fulfillment in your life.

What’s the one thing you wish you could go back and tell your younger self?

We would exactly do the same thing because we waited for the perfect moment to start our entrepreneurial project and were able to organize every aspect of our trip on time. For the moment, we don’t have any regrets!

What’s the most important piece of advice would you give to someone just starting?

Don’t be afraid to fail and don’t let obstacles stop you. You can overcome them!

What is the hardest thing you have had to do regarding your business?

– Raising money through crowdfunding in a very short period in order to realize our world wine tour

What does your typical day look like?

We are always standing up early (5am-6am) to benefit from the morning light for our photos and videos. Normally, we are out in the vineyards until 10-11am, but this depends on the size of the winery. We use our afternoons either to start creating our documentaries (photo/video/editorial) or we realize the indoor chapter of our winery visit (winery/cellar door). If needed, we return to the vineyards to benefit from the late afternoon light for our videos and photos.

On the nights we continue to work on all other aspects of our project!

If you were to start again, and could change one thing, what would it be?

We would have preferred to realize a winery visit before starting our world wine tour because this would have allowed us to detect several issues on beforehand and to train ourselves in using all our gear. However, we didn’t’ have enough time to organize a winery visit in France.

What is the most important thing in life?

We believe that happiness in work and a feeling of fulfillment are the most important things in work. You should try to transform your passion into your everyday work and don’t become a slave to your company! Try to create a healthy balance between work and spare time.

What is one problem you encountered as an entrepreneur, and how did you overcome it?

In the beginning, we were not used to use all our new gear such as our video camera, drone, and post-production software (Final Cut Pro / Photoshop / Lightroom). We spent a lot of time in familiarizing ourselves by watching tutorials and reading articles regarding the usage of our gear. Perfection drives us, and we love to learn more and more. The training period has cost us some nights, but your are really happy when seeing your hard work paying off!

Tell us something unique about yourself.

Our love is our strength even though it is not always easy on a daily basis. We are able to work together in a couple and to maintain a professional working environment