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Editor's note: As a person who has been dealing with wine, Song Ning has tasted the fun, from one person to a group of people. As the head creator of the vertical field of alcohol, when his new media account "Lao Song's slightly drunk 23 points" became popular, he said that he knew that he would be red, but he did not expect to turn purple.
This self-confidence stems from his accumulation, from leaving the system to go to a foreign country when he was young, to returning to China to choose Shenzhen to start a business, Song Ning, who has always been curious about the unknown and has the courage to try, has enriched and precipitated himself all the way, and gets along with life, wine tasting is actually the same as tasting life. This article is jointly presented by Southern Weekend X Thick Workshop, telling how Lao Song looks at "Thick" in the midfield of his life.
In a certain instant, Song Ning had a sense of time and time.
Although he has thick "Grandma Grey" hair and an equally gray beard. As a post-70s generation, the audience also likes to call Song Ning after the 70s "Old Song".
However, age has never been the main dimension of Old Song's thinking.
Since 2019, Lao Song has released videos on multiple online platforms such as Douyin, Station B, and Weibo to share knowledge and tasting of various wines and introduce fans to a stylish lifestyle. He also has the labels of temperament uncle, wine master, and slightly drunk godfather. Video new media, the road that young people are walking, he himself has also come out.
This feeling has nothing to do with his age. That was when Old Song was slightly drunk in the middle of the night, facing the sleepless lights of Shenzhen alone, standing in the long river of memory, a feeling of being suddenly hit by time.
1 There are no useless experiences in life
Time to go back to that intersection in 2019.
At that time, Old Song's friend made a vibrato number called "A Big Mouth of Shenzhen", and sometimes specially asked him to do food reviews. And whenever his video is released, the number of followers and likes is very high. Unable to resist the persuasion and encouragement of friends, Old Song finally decided to make his own video number.
At 9 p.m. on February 1, 2019, in front of the bar of his Western restaurant "Dublin 23", Lao Song filmed the first short video. He wears a denim jacket and faces the camera, talking about foreign wine pairings based on his past wine tasting experience.
The video response was good. Soon, he released more videos through the account "Old Song's slightly drunk 23 points", and the content was mainly about the drinking method, comparison and small tips of foreign wine. In these videos, Lao Song not only talks about foreign wine, but also shares the lifestyle related to this. In 25 days, he released a total of 20 videos.
A video raw material has to be filmed for an hour, and seven or eight can be shot a day. Old Song's original idea was to devote a week of planning a month to it, and to do the video shooting as a part-time job.
I didn't expect the video to get hotter and hotter. By February 27, his number of fans exceeded 1.2 million, ranking fourth in the list of new millions of fans on Douyin, and "Old Song" became a big Internet celebrity. As of August 29, 2021, his number of followers has exceeded 6 million, becoming the number one in the vertical field.
Time will make you encounter many accidents, but standing at the node of time, every present moment is the inevitability of the past.
In the familiar field of wine, the old Song has been precipitated for many years, enough to do it with ease. Since he was exposed to whisky in 1993 while in college, his work has been almost exclusively wine-related for the nearly three decades since.
In 1998, Lao Song went to the Netherlands to study logistics. In his spare time, he works as a waiter at a hotel in Rotterdam. Here he began to systematically learn about wine (especially wine). Later, with what he learned at work, Old Song worked as a bartender at the bar for a while. In the days of crossing the ocean, there are not many friends, except for studying is work. Due to his work, he became his close friend during this time. Old Song joked that at that time, every Friday, you had to drink a little, otherwise you would "die of emptiness and loneliness."
Lao Song's work at the hotel continued until 2006. That year, he returned to China, first as a catering director at a five-star hotel in Shenzhen, and then started his own business, opening a restaurant, making a bar, developing fruit tea, and so on. In the fast and slow time, he knew a lot of wine, and through wine, he also met a lot of people from all over the world.
Experience has created life, and the life of knowing wine for many years has made interesting and material become the biggest highlight of Lao Song's video. Many of the passages in the video come from people he is in contact with.
As the protagonist of the film, Lao Song is not a "vegetarian".
From 2011 to 2014, he often became a special guest of the Shenzhen Entertainment Life Channel "Chef to Your Home" as "Chef Song", no stranger to the camera, and his line ability and rhythm were also relatively good. In addition, unlike many people who just shoot with their mobile phones, in order to make the picture excellent, he has been using a dual-camera configuration since the first video. The soundtrack chooses music that is strongly associated with the content.
Various factors make his short video more like a dimensionality reduction blow than similar videos.
At the right time, in the right place, did the right thing, stood out in the highly competitive field, which made Lao Song both grateful and cherished. Opportunities are not easy to come by, seize them and focus on them, which is his consistent concept, and he also implements them in this way. For more than two years, he has maintained almost daily changes, participated in many activities every month, and turned himself into a "time management master".
Even so, he still did not expect his short video business to grow so fast. At the urging of time, Old Song had to adjust quickly. On the one hand, it is reality: how to monetize, how to do the team, how to do bigger; on the other hand, it is the ideal, thinking about how to stick to the original intention, how to output value, and how to convey meaning. Old Song will have entanglements, there will be introspection, sometimes it is his own initiative to explore, sometimes it is time to press the pause button for you.
2 There is some truth that it is necessary to taste the sweetness after the bitterness
In April 2021, Old Song fell seriously ill.
It was this experience that made him suddenly realize that he had reached the midfield of his life. At some point while lying on the hospital bed, he suddenly felt that he was old. He remembered the words of Haruki Murakami: "People do not grow old slowly, but they grow old in a flash", and he developed a heartfelt sense of identity.
He realized that in the past two or three years, he had to be busy until after 2 a.m. to go to bed, and he had to get up before 7 a.m. to send his children to school, sleeping less than five hours a day. The morning time is relatively free, the afternoon is a variety of meetings, or to discuss the selection of wine, or to discuss the script, shooting, and the team's current problems, etc., in the evening, to meet a variety of people, negotiate business, taste different wines, the busiest time to stay up late until "two days without sleep."
"Involuntariness" often becomes the usual reason for comforting oneself.
In January this year, during the "New Year Goods Festival" before the Spring Festival, the team hoped that they could do more live broadcasts, but knowing that he had a family, it was not too embarrassed to "force" him. Although he himself is eager to spend more time with his family, as the head of the team, he must consider the interests of employees. Eventually, throughout The month, in addition to making short videos, he did nearly 20 live streams, each for at least four hours.
When he returned home in the early hours of the morning, the cerebral cortex was still extremely active, and he could not sleep until three or four o'clock. The next morning, he had to get up to shoot diversion videos and some commercials, and send his kids to school. At that time, he gritted his teeth and did not accept defeat, but the continuous work of seventeen or eight hours a day this month had an impact on the consumption of his body to this day.
This sudden illness forced him to adjust his body and gave him enough time and space to think.
Therefore, he re-examined the word "slightly drunk" in his account, and felt that the balance and wisdom between them was a proper attitude to life.
Wine tasting, when everyone is young, they like a slightly sweeter, sour taste, only as they grow older and have a certain experience, they will like to be bitter, astringent, and spicy, because it will bring you more sweetness. Sweet stuff, very comfortable to the mouth, but it has no more aftertaste.
"The state of being slightly drunk is actually a degree of grasp, an attitude towards life. Wine is an introduction, and what is more to share is an attitude to life. Old Song shared these insights in the video. Time brought him, and he returned it to the world in his own way.
And he himself is better managing his time. For example, adjust the length and frequency of live broadcasts, reduce unnecessary social interactions, and better balance work and life. Sometimes feeling too stressed, he would go to the gym to do aerobic exercise, use sweating to regulate stress, and manage his body. Sometimes he chooses to stay in the kitchen, wash the dishes slowly, cut the vegetables carefully with one knife and one knife, try to slow down the rhythm and cook well, and finally watch the children finish eating the dishes, which is particularly satisfied and relieved.
3 Time brings value
On the Internet platform, the life cycle of the product is very short, most of the Internet celebrities sell a cute, laugh, fire for a while, less than a year, or even half a year will disappear. Old Song has made short videos for the third year, and live broadcasting has been done for more than a year, it is still very hot, and fans are still increasing.
As a leader of the China Liquor Industry Association put it, "Internet celebrities must become experts, and experts must become Internet celebrities." Lao Song believes that thanks to his rich work and tasting experience in the wine field in the past 20 years, as well as meeting a large number of people in the industry, he has been able to break through from an Internet celebrity to a liquor KOL.
But that's still not enough. As he shot more videos, he kept outputting outwards, and he felt that his internal power gain was limited. Therefore, he must continue to learn, precipitate, and make his professional knowledge richer and thicker. Just like when evaluating liquor, he will take the team to the distillery, from the history and culture of the wine, to the cellar, workshop, craftsmanship, one by one to study thoroughly, so that he can become an expert.
Interestingly, although 90% of what Lao Song shared was about foreign liquor, he gave 100% of his approval to traditional Chinese liquor because there are roses of time hidden here.
In terms of wine-making technology, the concept of Chinese is that "wine is the fragrance of aging", which is the change brought about by time. The wine is very strong when it is first baked, and it will become soft with the passage of time, but this does not mean that it has no personality, but it is more restrained and more internal, which is mellow. Mellow old wine, and then in proportion to the new wine, the formation of new value brought by time.
In the brewing environment, especially the sauce-flavored wine, there is an old saying called "the thousand-year-old wine cellar is rotten, and the wine aroma is still cellared.". Old Song said that there are several old wine cellars in China that have a history of more than six hundred years, the cellar mud inside is a living fossil, the wine of six hundred years ago, in the long years is still in continuous production, the lees is not used up and thrown away, it is recycled, leave a part and add a new, and then leave a part. So why this wine is delicious, because it is brought by time.
No matter how good the current technology and the current technology are, how fast they can be, but they can't bring the taste of the cellar aroma, the inheritance and culture of the wine, and the poetry and inspiration of the wine. Time has buried the aroma of the cellar in the cellar of history, and every bit of it is genuine. This is something that only time can give to the world.
Old Song is 47 years old this year, and for him, the so-called value of time refers to the past, to the present, to the future. In the past, all kinds of things are the foreshadowing of karma; the present payment is to share and spread the value that time brings to him, and it is better to enjoy it alone than to enjoy it; the road ahead is still the same, and it needs long-term persistence and focus, only by sinking down, knowing how to resist temptation, and focusing on what is made with the heart, it is right.
He often said, "It's good that I can explain this thing about wine, and the wine is already broad and profound." Looking back on the years accompanied by wine, the moment that most touched Lao Song was not a grand and far-reaching theme. But once, when he was in the bar, he heard a young man who did not know him say a sentence when raising a glass: "Good wine is not greedy, slightly drunk is better than drunk, old Song said, let's touch it." Old Song was very happy to hear it, and those who tasted wine with their hearts will eventually enjoy the sweetness of time.