It might be too early to have Christmas songs playing in the office but it is not too early to start thinking about filling the cellar – ok, the wine rack – for Christmas. First up in ours is this one, currently on offer on Tesco.com at £6/bottle.
Here’s the label. Sadly, we’re not yet geared up for a scratch n’ sniff label, but we’re working on it. Perhaps that’s one for the free label offer here.
Now, where did we put that NTWIC Xmas CD?
Proud parent moment again. This time, it’s a new craft beer range from our US partners, Cornerstone…
Worth the pain and sleepless nights…
Last weekend saw the fifth and final Tesco Wine Fair. Over the last few months we’ve poured wines for over 8,000 customers in Brighton, Bristol, Manchester, Edinburgh and London. The best bit is hearing what people really think about the wines they try, why they choose the wines they do and when they drink them. The answer is there’s no one size fits all, no simple formula for making a wine that sells. Horses for courses. Different strokes. Run out of metaphors. Makes our job far more interesting.
Here’s Sally at the London fair, having a little sit down. Well, she is preggers.
The award-winning Tesco Finest Navarra Rose made its first TV appearance on Saturday Kitchen this weekend. Emma loved it, and that works for us…
Oh look! The recently-launched-in-Majestic Aspen Estate wines made it onto Jane MacQuitty’s best buys list on Saturday! *happy face*
So last night, Sally and I headed down to Lymington’s brilliant independent wine merchant, The Solent Cellar, to run a tasting of Chilean wines from the Vina Casablanca range for some of their best customers. It was a small but perfectly formed gathering, giving us an opportunity to talk to everyone about what they think about Chilean wines. With support material from Wines of Chile (the little booklets were ace, we do love a wine map) and a really smart line up of wines from the Vina Casablanca Reserve, Cefiro and single estate Nimbus range, the room was soon rocking to the sound of chat, laughter and clinking glasses. Most of the people there had drunk plenty of Chilean wine in their time, but hadn’t tasted some of the grapes before (Gewurztraminer, Carmenere) and most didn’t realise there were so many different regions to choose from.
It was a great night, thanks to Simon & Heather for letting us take over the shop and hosting such a thoroughly enjoyable evening. Heather, your food matches were fab.
This isn’t me or Sally, obviously. This is Andreas, the winemaker.
Well, there’s a thing. We knew it was a good rosé, made by one of our producer partners Principe de Viana. Tesco knew it was a good rosé, so good in fact they put it into the Finest* range. But the cherry on top of the icing on the cake came on Tuesday night, when this wine won the International Wine Challenge 2011 Great Value Champion Rosé. Far be it from us to boast – after all we didn’t actually make the wine – but this is BLOODY FANTASTIC NEWS. Tesco went on to win the IWC Own Label award for their overall range. We’ll drink to that. Click here for full results.
Our Prosecco partner, Follador, sponsored the Senior Open Championship at Walton Heath recently. American Russ Cochran stormed to victory beating some very big names to finish 12 under par.
England’s Barry Lane was Europe’s highest finisher at eight under par.
Apparently, the Prosecco served at the 19th was delicious.
Anthony from Follador is in the red. Half of Robin is in the blue. Whatever you do, don’t ask me to take your holiday photos.
We’ve signed up to the government’s Responsibility Deal. Signing up was easy. Putting it into practice will take a bit more time and effort but it is the right thing to do. We are already using suggested alcohol guidelines on our wine back labels, but there is more that we can do such as develop better lower alcohol wines and help promote a sensible drinking message to wine drinkers, especially the younger generation.
Harpers have launched their Responsibility OK campaign and we’re supporting it. If we don’t, the writing’s on the wall.
