Following the successful lobbying of government to ditch the much-derided and unnecessary VI-1 forms for wine imports, trade voices are gearing up for another battle, this time concerning organic wines.
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Long a champion of The Cape, Daniel Grigg gives the lowdown on why the wines make commercial sense and what more needs to be done to communicate its vinous cornucopia.
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Are some Olympic sports more serious than others? To listen to purists, harrumphing about the inclusion of skateboarding, surfing and BMX freestyle in the Tokyo games, you’d conclude that there’s an established hierarchy. Those that take place on the track sit at the top, partly because of Olympic history perhaps, dating back to 776BC and Korobois’ triumph in the 190-metre stadion sprint. These are closely followed by field events, swimming and gymnastics, all of which are deemed to be “proper” disciplines. It’s no coincidence that Aussies love to mock Team GB’s prowess at “sitting down sports”.
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Imagine being a voter in Liverpool Walton or South Holland and The Deepings. In the first of these constituencies, the Labour Party received 86% of the ballot in the last general election; in the second, the Conservatives got 75%. Under our first-past-the-post system, the results are as predictable as the lunar cycle. Supporting any other party is a waste of graphite.
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Lisa Riley meets with Ross Carter, whose short tenure as CEO of The Drinks Trust so far has taken him through a turbulent and unprecedented time.
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For the second of our Building Back webinars in collaboration with Trade Hospitality App, Andrew Catchpole invited on-trade leaders to examine the growing issue of attracting and retaining talent.
Call it serendipity, call it fate, but there are times when events and conversations seem to align. You go for months without thinking about something and then it’s everywhere, filling your inbox and your brain. Spooky, possums, as Dame Edna Everage once put it.
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When the pandemic overwhelmed long-standing merchant Jascots, Freixenet Copestick spotted an opportunity to create the ideal symbiotic relationship. Lisa Riley reports.
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It’s when the first question about clone types crops up that I begin to despair; or a query as to the length of time the juice spent macerating on its own skins. Or – kill me now – the wine’s exact pH level.
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Pinot Noir has long had a place in UK winemaking, as part of the classic Champagne varieties and, to a lesser extent, still variants often from select vineyards or small parcels. Now, with an increasingly changing climate helping to ripen and tease out those darker fruits, it could be poised to strike out on its own, as Jacopo Mazzeo surmises.
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Four things I’m excited about in 2021…
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Bar 44 Group’s co-owner and self-confessed sherry nut Owen Morgan talks Andrew Catchpole through launching Manzanilla 44 with Bodegas Barón and generally advancing the cause.
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Michael Saunders takes a deep dive into the challenges facing the trade as Andrew Catchpole catches up with Bibendum’s CEO and chair of the WSTA
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A global framework used by other sectors like palm oil, mining, textiles and even golfing is needed to build best practice for the wine industry, some of the world’s leading experts in environmental management have said.
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Wine and Spirit Trade Association (WSTA) chief executive Miles Beale has said that the UK is likely to get ‘something or nothing’ in terms of a trade deal over the coming week, while insisting that a ‘deal is still better than no deal at all’.
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After enduring three months of local restrictions with little help, Sara Saunby, owner of Manchester hybrid Salut, says Whitehall’s belated decision to help the North is too little, too late
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What’s the point of tasting notes? Who are they actually for? Who reaps the benefit, for example, of reading that a wine has notes of “gentian, elderflower, seaweed, mussels, salt spray, chicken stock, sage, fennel, peach kernel, lemon, alkali and wet stone”, as David Schildknecht’s highly attuned nose detected in the 2004 Riesling Steinriesler of Nikolaihof Wachau?
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Bordeaux Uncovered, the trade training programme run by L’Ecole du Vin de Bordeaux, will be running a series of online tastings this year.
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With hospitality one of the hardest hit sectors in the wake of the pandemic, the head of the leading trade organisation has no end of crucial issues to deal with. Kate Nicholls talks strategy to Lisa Riley
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Pernod Ricard, Mentzendorff and Lucky Saint alum Hugh Jones upped sticks recently and headed to Baltic capital Riga where he found an emerging drinks industry with parallels to the UK's own.
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