I went to Vinisud with, amongst other things, the aim of getting to the bottom of sulphur allergy in wine. Several friends, customers, family members have complained of this, so I went to find out.
My destination was Christophe Bousquet at Ch. Pech Redon because his ’Les Cades’ Cuvee which we ship is produced from organically grown grapes [...]

Why the delay in posting Day 2? Well, when you spend the day at Vinisud in the sick bay with delirium and then lose your digital camera’s cable as I did, then it takes a while to catch up again. Anyway a photo of the sick bay is probably not that interesting.
So I lost a [...]

After a busy day tasting what do you do in the evening? Taste more wine! This time it’s back at Diane’s Chateau d’Or et de Gueules where we are staying. She has all of her French regional distributors coming round to taste the latest vintages and to share the biggest Paella I’ve ever seen. The [...]

The white wine tasting was as I should have expected; mainly ordinary wines, some good, few exceptional. But I have shortlisted a couple to see tomorrow;
Domaine Ste Rose is a name I have had in the back of my mind for some time, so when fellow Gerrards Cross resident, Mark Bingham, said he had once played [...]

Vinisud Day 1
Here we go! After the traditional queue of traffic through the roadworks especially timed to coincide with thousands of Wine Trade professionals descending on Montpellier, and scraping the mud off my shoes from the quagmire that is the carpark I had a quick run through six consecutive vintages of Bolida from Ch d’Or [...]

 
Vinisud Day Minus1
 
Back to Montpellier where I came four years ago and discovered Forca Real and Tour Trencavel, but time for a bit of sightseeing before the Fair. Here we are at the Pont Du Gard which is a “must visit” if ever you come here, and out of season like today is perfect because [...]

We had a very busy sales period over Christmas, and as a result, now in the relative calm of January we are having to increase our storage capacity. This means making more storage space upwards as we can’t expand outwards. So here’s Charles doing a spot of angle grinding as we install some pallet racking [...]

Well, we’ve been to check what’s happened since we spotted the obvious contenders for “half price” Champagne. Who had the most bare-faced cheek this year? (so far);
Adsa - Pierre Darcys £23.98, and Francois Rozay £23.98. The Pierre Darcys is down 60% to £10.00
Waitrose - Bredon £20.99 Down 33% to £14.00
Tesco - G.H.Martel & Co £26.97, [...]

We are about to enter the Christmas promotional period in the supermarkets so I have been round to see if I can spot the Champagnes intended to be “half-priced”; you know - bring in a product, pretend it’s on sale at a high price for a month, then surprise, surprise, it’s at a massive discount for [...]

As I was sitting down to my first glass of the evening just now (Les Cimels Blanc, as it happens -great wine. If you like Gavi di Gavi try this) to watch Eggheads (6p.m. start)  I realised that three years ago when we had just started up the business I was sitting down to watch Countdown [...]