How did you start?
I was a management trainee at the Coconut Grove, then went on to manage the Hampton Court Brasserie, Sweeney Todd's in Northampton and The Golden Pheasant in Oxford. And then I managed a caravan park in the Lake District.
Fine wine merchant Mayfair Cellars has gone into administration after a scam whereby top Bordeaux and Burgundy was allegedly sold to other London wine merchants.
Last month, a press release arrived at Harpers Towers declaring that the recruitment process was under way to find a UK director for Wines of Argentina's London office. This will be a challenging appointment,' it said. They're not wrong.
Read more...Simon Farr, one of the founders of London-based distributor Bibendum, is returning to work for the company full time after five years as non-executive deputy chairman.
Farr, who co-founded the company with Chris Collins in 1982, will take up the role of head of wine strategy, as well as taking responsibility for the host of joint ventures Bibendum has set up in recent years - such as the Argento Wine Company, Boisset and Lion Nathan. He was buying director at Bibendum until he stepped down in 2000.
His decision to return to a full-time role at Bibendum comes just weeks after high-profile joint managing director Dan Jago unexpectedly left the company. Bibendum also recently hired a new chief operating officer, Jeremy Young, recruited from DHL.
Last week Bibendum featured in the Sunday Times' 'Top 100 Best Small Companies to Work For' list for the third time.
Generally speaking, you should be wary of anyone who begins a sentence with In the old days'. Usually, they'll be talking about bygone eras when the bobby on the beat would give unruly youngsters a swift clip around the ear, or when footballers were real men, kicking a laced leather ball around a mudbath, cheered on by flat-cap-wearing hordes of working-class folk.
What made you open this style bar?
It was something the next generation of the family wanted. When the Antouns first came to London, after 25 years of running restaurants in Paris, they chose Hobart Place for the classical style of Lebanese dining. Then the Mango Tree took over next door; there was an empty space between that and Noura, so they thought, Why not something new?' For us, Volt means electricity, energy!
Guilty or not guilty. Happily, that is neither the question nor the answer for the Grand Jury Europen (GJE). As it sips, swirls and spits its way through the evidence presented by more than 150 anonymous vinous witnesses, it may well consider cases of assault, breach of contract, deception, extortion, fraud, negligence, price-rigging and treason, as well as mitigating circumstances such as crimes passionnels and diminished responsibility. But its decisions will not be rendered in a stark one- or two-word verdict. Rather, they will take the form of a summary, with charts and graphs and scores out of 100. As such, some will find them harder to accept than others.
The Argento Wine Company (AWC) has appointed Amelia Nolan as its general manager.
A graduate of the University of Adelaide and Roseworthy College, Nolan joins Argento from Constellation Europe, where she worked in marketing and sales for the Cellar Door division. She has also been brand manager for Hardy's.
AWC MD Dan Jago said: I am delighted that we have got someone of such a high calibre on board - this is just what the Argentine category needs. With Amelia's leading brand experience and international outlook, we are very positive about Argento's future.'
The picture emerging from Britain's high streets is of a mixed Christmas and New Year. While some companies are reporting better-than-expected like-for-like sales compared with 2004, others have issued profits warnings, and there are fears that business in the first few days of the New Year have been very slow. Majestic Wine, however, did better than most by increasing its like-for-like sales by 5.2% in the nine weeks from 1 November to 2 January.
Oeneo - the French-owned closure company formerly known as Sabat - has opened a plant capable of mass-producing Diam, the world's only taint-free' cork-based closure.
Paul Hobbs, the consultant winemaker best known for developing Argentinian Malbec for the likes of Nicolas Catena, has warned that Argentina is in danger of concentrating too much of its effort on the Malbec grape variety.
When Warren Adamson was starting as an apprentice in worsted spinning at Feltex Yarns in New Zealand, Fernando Ferr was graduating from the Universidad Catlica Argentina with a business administration degree.
Read more...While demand has been stronger than some traders expected in the UK, Europe and the Far East, it has been feeble in the US: the weakness of the dollar, the high prices paid for the 2003s, and the less-than-enthusiastic reports of influential reviewers such as Robert Parker and Wine Spectator have shrunk the market there. Some US shippers have even been declining their allocations of first growths.
Read more...Wines of Argentina Annual Trade Tasting
Date: Tuesday 20 September 2005
Venue: Nursery Pavilion, Lord's Cricket Ground, London NW8
Time: 10am-5.30pm
The Wines of Argentina Annual Trade Tasting will take place on Tuesday 20 September at the Nursery Pavilion, Lord's Cricket Ground. Approximately 70 producers have registered to participate, and a separate, themed tasting will look at Malbec and More', for which exhibitors have been asked to submit wines that retail at 5.99 and above. For further information, please contact Tina Coady: call or fax 01480 384 806, or e-mail t.coady@ntlworld.com
On a balmy evening last March, at the tail end of the Chilean summer, a group of local vineyard workers from the Colchagua Valley gathered on the terrace of Franois and Jacques Lurton's house in Lolol to enact a song-and-dance dramatisation of the local grape harvest. Soulful and entertaining, this involved a slightly gawky but winsome teenager in a fetching cowboy hat plucking' the grapes from a busty matriarch, doing double duty as a vine', as she sang about the trials and tribulations of the harvest, as well as the challenges facing the itinerant grape pickers.
Read more...How did you end up running a hotel in the middle of Devon?
Read more...Chic Knightsbridge restaurant Zuma has added two bottles of the rare 1961 vintage Cheval Blanc to its wine list, following demand from customers who have seen it featured in the film Sideways, in which two friends take a road trip through California wine country.
Read more...Argentina is looking to grab at least 6% of the total wine market by 2020, according to Roberto Luca, president of Wines of Argentina (WoA).
Read more...The last of the Bordeaux estates have released their prices for the 2004 en primeur campaign, two months after its start.
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Robin Fedden, travelling in Syria and Lebanon at the end of the Second World War, offers this advice to thirsty travellers in his travel book Syria and Lebanon: Quite good wine is made in certain parts of the Lebanon, particularly in the Bk'aa [sic] Valley, in the neighbourhood of Chtaura. It is relatively cheap. On the other hand, most of the wine in the out-of-the-way villages is hardly recognisable as such, and is best avoided.'
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