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"bag in box" / "glass bottles" / "tetrapak". / "wine bottles" / Haughey March 31, 2012
READ MORECharles Haughey, the disgraced former Irish Taoiseach – prime minister – and good friend of Muammar Gaddafi, had quite expensive tastes. These included ownership of a holiday home on his own private island and a passion for good food and wine. At some point, his island getaway needed a little renovation and a team of […]
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UK Wine Tax Calculator app, showing pre-budget duty levels Today’s budget adds a further 11p to the tax burden carried by an average bottle of wine. Many – most? – retail prices will rise to accommodate the tax, but there will still doubtless be bottles on offer at 3-for£12 in which the wine content will […]
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Wine people keep themselves amused with all sorts of notions, most of which make little or no sense to outsiders. Latest among these I suspect is the #7wordwinereview championed by @vim and @BvdV on Twitter. Apparently some 200 of these have been posted (including one I was cajoled into offering and efforts from Brane Cantenac […]
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In any competition, there are the winners on the podium and the losers skulking in the shadows, muttering darkly about how they were robbed of a prize they believe was their due. In Bordeaux last week, most of the buzz was inevitably about the dozen-and-a-half chateaux that had just been beatified by Pope Robert I […]
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Wine is a natural product… So, obviously there’s no reason for anyone to need to print a list of ingredients on a label; after all, what are you going to put there apart from grapes and SO2. Then you take a look at contents such Diammonium phosphate (yeast nutrient), Bentonite and Pectinolytic Enzymes (fining agents), […]
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"London Wine Fair" / "Wine Fair" / DLR / Prowein / wine March 9, 2012
READ MOREI’m fascinated to see that among the most frequent comments (on Twitter, Facebook and in the replies in this blog) about the London Intl Wine Fair and Prowein are complaints about Excel being an inconvenient place to get to and about the cost of WiFi and unavailability of food in Dusseldorf. Get real! Excel is […]
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The anti alcohol lobby still has a few (old) tricks up its sleeve…
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No-one who wandered the halls at this week’s Prowein fair and remembers last year’s London International Wine Fair (LIWF) can have failed to have noticed the difference between these two events. For anyone who has been to neither, just imagine the contrast between New York and Norwich or Lille and you will have a pretty […]
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We all tend to look for confirmation of beliefs we cherish. Keen fans of organic food leap upon every scrap of anecdotal evidence of the growth in organic grocery sales, even if the hard data reveals that the number of people buying green foods and drinks is actually dropping. The same applies to the members […]
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No-one is indispensable, as Andre Villas-Boas the manager of Chelsea football team discovered this week, after a series of lost games led to his dismissal by the team’s owner, Roman Abramovich. Underperforming wine regions and indeed entire countries can suffer a similar fate, and coincidentally, Portugal is facing a similar removal from the scene – […]