BACK TO SCHOOL: Project Teams Tackling a Beaujolais Case Study

Monday. Back to school and an extremely long day, starting with a school-sponsored coffee and croissants breakfast at 8:15.

Today we had our official start of classes, and we went right ahead and started with a lecture from 8:30 to 10:00, followed by an excellent presentation about the Beaujolais region, just north of Lyon.

Beaujolais has maintained its well-known status with its yearly sales of Beaujolais Nouveau, but even it has not been spared the downturn in wine consumption over the last few years. Despite excellent brand-name recognition and an extensive marketing and distribution network not only domestically but also internationally, Beaujolais producers remain concerned about overproduction of wine on a global scale and decreasing consumption of wine and what such trends portend for the near future.

We were asked to do two types of analysis: SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) and PEST (Political / Economic / Socio-Cultural / Technological). Again, these were not done to provide any sorts of concrete answers or solutions to the problems (at this stage, at least!) but rather to show us how useful these approaches might be to ordering the large amount of information that we were presented with and which we had in front of us.

Most of the time there is no problem getting information, either from the Internet or from other sources. But ordering it in a way that is useful for decision-making and putting it in a form which can be more easily understood is a necessary part of the analytical process, or at least that's the sense I got from the exercise we did together.

Tomorrow (Tuesday) we look more at the business of wine and even have a petite degustation at the end of classes, with wine tastings of certain Beaujolais varietals and even of the grapes themselves. On Wednesday, a Power Point presentation and a 5-page report are required ... that's going to be one hard deadline to keep ....!