Were you sent flowers this Valentine's Day? Maybe you ordered a present for your loved one via the Internet, or perhaps you had the ingredients for a special meal home delivered. Chances are that, even if you didn't, you have used - or will use - your computer for buying goods and services.
More than 230 wines from 45 wineries will be on offer at the annual generic Hungarian tasting next month. The off-trade is the most important sector for Hungary, selling 614,000 nine-litre cases in 2006. Although this figure was down 2.7% in volume on the previous 12 months, the two biggest UK importers of Hungarian wine - Bottle Green and Myliko - have both reported encouraging performances. Louise Hartley of Bottle Green said: Sales of total Hilltop wines are showing a strong increase on last year by almost 10% in volume.' The average bottle price is up slightly from 3.36 to 3.47 (AC Nielsen MAT to Dec 2006).
John Trevena grew up in Santiago, Chile. He came to London to study economics, and worked as an accountant before setting up a life pensions programme with three friends. In the early 1980s he decided to follow his passion for wine and set up his own wine wholesale business. After premises in Langham Street and St Martin's Lane in London, the business moved to Pimlico and developed a retail arm, now known as Vintage Cellars, which generates about 5% of the company's turnover. Exclusive agencies include: Via Carta Vieja and Viedos TerraNoble (Chile); Riversleigh Estate (New Zealand); Eagle's Cliff (South Africa); and Domaine de la Madonne (France).
For the wine auction market 2006 was a vintage year, with global sales of fine and rare wines fetching $241 million. This was a whopping 45% increase on 2005, thanks to the huge revenues from the US, which at over $167m were more than four times UK sales.
Louis-Fabrice Latour, a member of the seventh generation of Burgundy ngociant Maison Louis Latour, is also its head, having taken over from his father (who is still the chairman of the board) in 1999. A fluent, idiomatic English speaker, he has spent more than two years of his life, off and on, in England and prefers to conduct interviews completely in English. He studied political science in Paris and, as is the Maison Louis Latour policy, has travelled the world to understand its wine markets and wine trends. He has recently been re-elected to a second three-year term as president of Burgundy's ngociants.
Read more...There are those who will tell you that in wine terms Spain has gone up a gear since the turn of the century. I've been going to Spain on wine-related business since 1972 and my own opinion is that Spain has gone up several boxes-full of gears since the year 2000, and is still accelerating. There is so much movement, new investment and new thinking that the mind starts to spin. Soaring land prices and ever more costly planting rights don't seem to have had the slightest effect and there are ambitious new projects, even in the most expensive areas, such as Ribera del Duero and Rioja.
This year's Wines from Spain tasting celebrates the 25th anniversary of the creation of the generic body, and will feature 30 Spanish bodegas seeking UK representation, as well as 55 importers, with more than 2,000 wines available to taste.
Twenty-eight producers from Trentino in north-east Italy will travel to London to present their wines and grappas to the UK trade.
Where: The Institute of Directors, 116 Pall Mall, London SW1
When: Thursday 22 February 2007, 11am-4.30pm
Contact: The Austrian Wine Marketing Board, tel: 020 7411 3825
William and Janet Hutchings bought the Bell at Skenfrith in December 1999 and immediately closed it to embark on a major refurbishment programme, planning to reopen for Christmas 2000. In early December 2000 the River Monnow, which flows past the Bell, burst its banks and flooded the restaurant, so it did not open for business until March 2001.
Read more...Jeremy grew up on the Wirral, trying his first wine, a 1967 Chateau d'Yquem, when he was 11, and joining The Wine Society at the age of 14. After failing to complete an engineering degree, he began a career in wine at Oddbins in 1999. He left in 2002 to join an outside catering firm in Cheshire, moving a year later to the Establishment, a restaurant he helped open in Manchester, devising a list of 400 wines. However, he struggled to sell wines to the locals and the following year started at the London Carriage Works in Liverpool, spending just two months there before moving to the Galvin brothers' Bistrot de Luxe, at the start of 2006. Suppliers at Galvin include Le Cave de Pyrene, Vine Trail, Taittinger and Billecart-Salmon.
Read more...Inventory is ignorance! Now there's a mantra from supply-chain seminary, if there were such a place. It's actually just an abridged truism from the field of logistics: warehouses full of products represent a hedge against uncertainty. You stockpile because you don't have - or can't have - a comprehensive understanding of your suppliers or your customers. Indeed, most companies accept that as given.
Gin is currently one of the most active and interesting of all the spirit categories. Worldwide it sells over 50 million cases - right up in the international spirits market, making it a major force. But if we listen to the pundits, we could easily be convinced that gin's days are numbered, with all the signs indicating declining sales worldwide. There is no disputing that, in the past five years, the category has experienced a 6% fall in terms of volume; at the same time, the great gin renaissance shows no signs of slowing down. How can both these contradictory trends be true?
For more than five decades, Bardolino, as a region, has been tagged as one of the poor relations of Italian winemaking, famous only for making low-quality but pleasant easy-drinkers that non-involved consumers might choose to glug with their pasta or pizza.
As Tibor Kovcs of Htszl once said: Tokaji is world famous, but only in Hungary.' There's little doubt it has all the right ingredients - long history and tradition (Tokaj claims to be the oldest delimited wine region in the world), unique winemaking, memorable scenery and terroir. And it also has several passionate and charismatic evangelists for its wines, as well as a number of high-profile foreign investors. But the reality is that the wine industry in Tokaj as we see it today is only 15 years old and, like most teenagers, it has yet to fully make its mark on the world.
Is Uruguay poised to become a major New World player in the UK market? Well, no. Even though the UK has been an important market for Uruguay historically, production is so small compared to other New World suppliers that major' is not a word ever likely to be used in the same sentence as wines of Uruguay'.
Katie grew up on the east coast of Scotland. Her father ran hotels in Elgin and Fochabers, near Inverness, and insisted she do anything but catering. So Katie failed her Highers and went to work at the Golf View hotel in Nairn, which she describes as one long drinking party'. She worked in the bar, and in the kitchen on her days off because she wanted to learn and learn quickly'. She moved to Nunsmere Hall, near Chester, where she met Paul Kitching, then left for Hambleton Hall in 1992, working there for three years and driving up to see Paul on her days off. She helped set up Juniper with Kitching in 1995, before leaving to work for Nico Central in Manchester, returning to head the front-of-house and manage Juniper in 2001.
The Southern US Trade Association's
inaugural UK tasting will present wines from 10 wineries across Texas, North Carolina and Tennessee on 25 January. The event takes place at Strictly Hush in Mayfair from 11.30am to 3.30pm. The wine industry in these states is growing fast from increased domestic demand: in North Carolina, the number of wineries has doubled to 60 since 2003, while Texas is now the fifth-largest wine-producing state in the US. Contact Madeleine Waters (01225 832237; madeleine@watershedcommunications.com) to attend the tasting.
2006 was the driest year on record in many parts of Australia. Even though temperatures did not reach the history-making heights of 2005, new research published in November by the University of Melbourne and Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) forecast temperature increases of 0.3 to 1.7C in most Australian wine regions by 2030.
