Building a wine brand around travel involved starting with finding a name that evokes distant destinations, the unknown, and new cultures for Anna and me. The name also had to hold meaning for each of us and leave room for imagination. Of course, the name had to be easy to pronounce in multiple languages, short enough to be easily remembered, and unique enough to catch attention.
Starting with the construction of the word JALAN (pronounced dʒalan: all letters are pronounced), it immediately appealed to us for several reasons. It is easily pronounced in all languages, it is short, and most importantly, it is memorable due to its symmetrical structure around the letter L, with the two A’s, being open and vocal, imparting a significant dynamism to the word. On one side, it resonates powerfully due to the emphasis on A and extends through the length of N, much like a wine—striking in its attack and long-lasting in its finish.
While the composition of the word is essential, the primary goal was to find a name that held real meaning for us. It had to be something we could embrace, representing our life project, integrating into our daily lives and work. We needed a name that was truly us and embodied the spirit we wanted to convey through our brand.
Jalan is a word from Indonesia. Indonesia, with its 18,000 islands, just the idea itself is dreamy. This country holds a special flavor for each of us. It was one of my first backpacking trips at the beginning of my career when I escaped the winery for a few weeks off, later returning for surf vacations before it became a work destination (yes!!!!), with Maison Lavau finding an importer there, requiring commercial support for hotels and restaurants in Bali and Jakarta. Anna, on her end, spent several weeks there at the end of her semester studying in Australia, discovering this country of a thousand facets where she got into surfing and yoga.
In Indonesian, Jalan means “the path” or “the road.” The Indonesian language, simple and fun in its operation, provides variations: for example, jalan-jalan corresponds to the verb “to walk” or the noun “hiking”; berjalan-jalan means “to go for a walk” or “to take a stroll” as well as “to go on a trip.” Obviously, the meaning that resonated with us is that of “the path.” The path always carries the particular flavor of discovery, the unknown, and often adventure—values that are part of our daily lives, motivating us to move forward and dream.
There is an obviousness in the notion of a path; often, that’s where the interest lies. Life is a path where the destination isn’t necessarily the most appealing place. A world tour is a path, where the destination being the same place as the departure isn’t of great interest. So Jalan will be a path, our life path of course, but also a path of discovering wines and vineyards. This path will start from our beautiful region, the Southern Rhône Valley, to explore French appellations and eventually, in the near future, those of Europe. And then, since Indonesia is such a distant destination, on this path, we might also discover wines from the West Coast of America, the altiplano of Chile, the Andean foothills of Argentina, or the maritime plains of the Cape in the far south of Africa. These long-haul stopovers are enticing, and the wines waiting to be discovered there are endless.
Let’s not forget that wine only truly lives through the cultures and the people who carry it. Therefore, this path will be a path of encounters. We will meet people who live for and through their wines, the culture of each country, or even each region, the diversity of stories, techniques, and grape varieties. It will be an enriching and exciting path with a multitude of stories to tell you.
I am writing these few lines to shed light on the choice of the word Jalan from the terrace of a café in Budapest, where we are finishing our two-week brand presentation journey that took us from Hong Kong to Krakow, Warsaw to Bucharest, ending in Hungary. Jalan is a path…
Will you walk it with us?