We’re now at a crossroads in the UK. I don’t mean economically or politically. I will leave others to comment on that. Having worked previously for a wholesaler and now as a distributor, it’s the changing wholesale drinks market I want to discuss.
Read more...
You’ll not find many in the spirits industry praising the rise from the grave of the humble RTD – and to those who are disparaging of ready to drink products, I say, get over yourself.
Read more...
A good friend turned 80 recently. To celebrate, he invited a few of us round for dinner and opened a bottle of 1942 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti Grands Échézeaux. I don’t often get the chance to try bottles like that. Thoughts of the German occupation goose-stepped through my head as we pulled the surprisingly small cork. The wine was glorious: fragile, sweet, gamey and appropriately autumnal.
Read more...
Half of UK pub and restaurant goers are happy to pay a deposit to book a table, and even more (55%) are in favour of paying no-show fees if they don’t turn up, new research from Zonal and CGA has revealed.
Read more...
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?
Read more...
As I sat down to write this piece my phone rang. It was Nick, a winemaker and one of my oldest friends. We have been close since the early 1990s when he gambled his career on joining my incipient wine business. Its subsequent success was in no small part down to him.
Read more...
Over breakfast in a lovely B&B in Corbridge, an ideal overnight stop before the last leg of our cycling trip along Hadrian’s Wall, the conversation turned to alcohol consumption in Scotland. One of our group, Paul, a qualified doctor and psychiatrist, was expounding the virtues of Minimum Unit Pricing as a weapon to fight the scourge of alcohol abuse amongst the Scottish poor.
Read more...
