Armed with arguably one of the best wine palates in the UK wine trade, and certainly the most capable and skilled individual in talking about wine to the masses, Joe Wadsack, now the regular wine expert on ITV’s This Morning, shares his year so far, what he has been up to during the summer – and his rather surprising love for Miley Cyrus….
Before the summer break, Hallgarten, Druitt and Novum’s chief wine buyer Steve Daniel held an intimate, selective wine tasting for six journalists. Rather than show the entire range of wines Daniel cherry-picked 41 wines that he felt showed the diversity and depth of the HDN range.
There’s no sitting on the fence when it comes to respected wine marketer, commentator, and former advertising executive, Reka Haros. If you are up for the ride she lays it out in no uncertain times why, in her view, wine communications suck. Why we as an industry continue to be obsessed about wine as a product and how it is made whenever we try and market it – and not how it can engage and matter to consumers when they try and buy it.
The Buyer was one year old in May and now, while we’re on holiday, it is time to reflect on what an awesome first year it was. We tasted many thousands of wines and met many talented, generous and frankly delightful winemakers. So if you are by the pool or wish you were, settle back and look at this pictorial trip down memory lane as we bring you our favourite winemaker pictures of the year.
If you’re looking for something ‘winey’ to read on your summer holidays then you won’t do better than getting hold of a copy of ‘I’ve Bought It, So I’ll Drink It’ by leading writers in their own right, but also the double act behind the successful Sediment wine blog, Charles Jennings and Paul Keers. Here, in the first of a couple of extracts from the book, we re-reproduce their take on trying to buy a bottle of wine from a “posh wine merchant”.
Most UK wine suppliers and distributors spend the majority of their time based in Britain from where they can co-ordinate shipping wine from all over the world. But for Giles Cooke MW things are a bit different as he spends a fair bit of it overseas actually helping to make the wine that Alliance Wine then ships and sells here. Here’s how his year has been so far…
Roger Jones goes on a quest to find out what is really driving South Africa’s Old Vine Project? Is it a marketing ploy to enter the UK premium wine scene? Or are wines from Old Vines generally better and more interesting than wines that are made from younger vines? And if that is the case… Why is that and How are the wines different?
The wine industry is a tough one for those suffering from mental health issues – it features long and irregular hours, average wages and…. lots of alcohol. In his typically honest manner, Mike Turner talks frankly about his own mental health condition and how a change in perspective has helped him live with it – primarily by being open and talking to people about it.
We continue our summer-long look at the opportunities for developing rosé sales, in partnership with Castel Frères, by talking to individual merchants and on-trade distributors about what trends they are seeing within the rosé category and what restaurants are looking for. First up is Matthew Hennings, managing director, of the family wholesale business, Hennings Wine Merchants.
Any journalist worth their salt needs to be highly inquisitive, and good at reading between the lines to see the truth. US wine writer and commentator, Cathy Huyghe, has taken that to the ultimate level by setting up her own wine data analytics business, Enolytics, that hopes to help companies use, visualise and act on the Big Data they have in their business to make better decisions about the kinds of wines their customers and consumers are buying and want to buy.
