While walking around Bordeaux, I passed by the window of a recently opened wine store, “La Maison Gabin”. I was utterly amazed to see in the window empty bottles of Château d’Yquem, Château Haut-Brion and Château Margaux, three names among the most famous of Classified growths and among the most expensive in the world, next to (full) bottles of a new brand, Nayandei, whose prices reach the incredible amount of… 10 euros.
Nayandai is a brand launched by young people in the Languedoc area, in the South West of France. The tagline of Nayandai is: “creator of wines”. What did they create? A bubbly wine called “Bubbles”, dry bubly wine and “Nolita Fraise”, a sweet strawberry bubbly drink with a low alcohol content (6,5°). They also have a “Bubbles Pinc” (sic!), a pink, white and red wine. Nothing earthshaking.
What is earthshaking is how poor their site is. It’s only in French – a widely spoken language as everybody knows. There is no information on the company, who founded it, who created the wines – no story of any kind. We can guess the wines are targeting young people and their sweet tooth. It happens that recent studies showed that young people love to know the story behind a wine. They don’t mind drinking wines designed to their (supposed) tastes but they want to hear a story. Unfortunately, the “creators” of Nayandai didn’t do their homework and ignored this important fact.
I suppose young people are behind Nayandai, people from the Millennium generation, almost born with Internet: why didn’t they talk to their peers the language they share – an old-fashioned story said with the 21st Century tools?