Wasted Opportunity

Something very strange happened to me recently and I thought I would report on it in the hope that it gets back to the people responsible and that they have a rethink. I am fully aware of my modest position in the world of wine, so none of this is about me thinking – ‘don’t they know who I am!’

Although I would point out that Quentin Sadler’s Wine Page is number 7 in the Top 10 UK Wine Blogs!

I have just returned from holiday in Portugal which is a country whose wines I hold in pretty high regard. The fact that the delights of Portuguese wines passes most UK wine consumers by is a great shame and deprives them of much pleasure and great value for money. I will write about some of the wines I experienced soon.

However I wanted to record a particular incident as I think it says much about attitudes that can be found all over Europe, but it seems to be especially prevalent in Iberia.

I do not often mix wine trips and holiday as for me they are two very different things. However, I was visiting a new bit Portugal and as I have a particular fondness and interest for sparkling wine I was keen to visit the Quinta dos Loridos which was not too far away and produces what some claim to be the country’s best sparkling wines.

To that end I sent them an email explaining who I was and that I would like to visit the winery and taste their wines with a view to reporting about them on my own blog and the highly respected Iberian wine website Catavino.com. – I was therefore rather taken aback by the reply:

Thank you for contacting us.

Our cellars are under renovations so at the moment we are not making any visits there. The only visitable place is Buddha Eden Garden. However we do have wine tastings, below are the information about them.

All wine tastings have to be schedule one or two days before. Wine tastings are made from Monday to Friday between 10a.m. and 4.30p.m. (except between 1p.m. and 2p.m.). They have a cost of 3€ per person and wine. If you chose to taste 2 wines we offer the taste of the Moscatel 99 for 6€ a person. We can add cashew and almonds for 1€ extra or cheese and crackers for 3€ extra.

Best Regards

Now, obviously the renovations were unfortunate and nothing could be done about that, but here I am a member of the Circle of Wine Writers and FIGEV, the European equivalent, and I was just fobbed off with an unwelcoming standard reply. I wrote back, explaining again, but received no answer at all.

Being somewhat stubborn I hoped it was all a misunderstanding and once in Portugal I went there anyway and it was an interesting, if frustrating, experience. The winery and estate is clearly marked with roadsigns and is very beautiful. They have made a great deal of effort to make the estate a destination for tourists with their beautifully done Buddha Eden Garden resembling some of the things you find in American theme parks – there was even a little train to take the visitors around and an attractive café.

However I am a wine writer, not a garden man – even if they are really well done – and this is a wine estate. As entry to the Buddha Garden is free I assume it is a way to get people in to the winery and more importantly the winery shop. The shop was good, it was very big and offered a large range and had the feel of a winery shop in the new world. However there were no wines on tasting – either for free or in return for money. As a consequence the whole place felt dull and sleepy.

When I presented my card and explained who I was and that I wanted to taste their sparkling wines I was informed in a very offhand manner that all tastings should be booked in advance and they could not help me. Now what struck me about that was that surely their wines should be the focus, they should be proud of what they produce and want visitors to taste them and buy them. If they had been giving tastings, whether free or for a small charge, then the place could have been buzzing. As it was the place was deadly quiet and the few customers I saw left empty handed. Handled in the right way every visitor would have bought something.

I am absolutely certain too that most visitors to the region would be unable or unwilling to arrange a tasting in advance – who wants to be tied down like that when on holiday? Obviously the professional visit that I had been asking for needed to be arranged in advance, although actually many of my best winery visits have been organised on the spur of the moment.

The beautiful Quinta dos Loridos

It seems such a shame when I think about all the winery shops in South Africa, New York State, Virginia or California that I have seen, all eager for you to try and to buy, all proud of their products and wanting to spread the word about their wines to as wide an audience as possible. Quinta dos Loridos was so promising, they had a lovely building and a car park full of people, but completely wasted their efforts as far as I could see. The whole thing, emails and visit was very irritating and although I wanted a proper trade visit and to be treated with a little respect as a bona fide wine professional, I would have been equally irritated if I was a normal tourist turning up at a well signposted winery only to be told that I could not taste any wines, but was welcome to buy them.

The bustling and award winning tasting room and shop at Heron Hill Winey in New York's Finger Lakes region - photo courtesy of Heron Hill

It seems to me that they have wasted all their efforts to make it a place that people visit if visitors are leaving empty handed, as they were. I understand that very small family wineries might find visits hard to cope with, but this place is part of a big company. I urge them and other wineries in Iberia that I have come across to visit some of the bustling, lively and attractive winery shops around the world  – like the award winning tasting room at Heron Hill Winery in New York’s Finger Lakes in the photo above – and to see that they are wasting a terrific showcase for their wines.

Hell, they could even employ me as a consultant to help turn that shop into a lively and inviting place…

Thank You

In my younger days I was an actor and so I like applause. I was extremely gratified therefore to discover that Quentin Sadler’s Wine Page was appreciated enough to be ranked number 7 in the Top 10 UK Wine Blogs by Cision.

I have put a picture of the list below and the page can be found here.

Thank you for your continued support, it means a lot that so many of you find my musings interesting.

I am currently in Portugal, experiencing a wide range of fabulous wines and will report back on them and other topics in a week or so.

Wine and Spicy Food

I spent last week-end leading tutored tastings at the West Dean Chilli Fiesta. This is a terrific event that happens every August in the middle of the South Downs just north of Chichester and it celebrates all things spicy – mainly the chilli itself, but also everything connected with it. There are stalls with chilli sauces, chilli dips, chilli plants, paintings of chillis, models of chillis, shirts emblazoned with chillis, pots, pans and chilli ice-cream. There is a plethora of spicy foods to enjoy; Mexican, Jamaican, Indian, Singaporean, Indonesian, Thai and American all washed down by the products in the delightfully English beer tent and made even more fun by the variety of live Latin American music, including salsa and Mariachi.

chill-i out room at West Dean Chilli Fiesta

As far as wine is concerned though it was just me and my colleagues. My job was to lead 6 tutored tastings a day about the wines of Viña Errazuriz who are one of Chile’s top producers – you see what we did there with Chilli/Chile? I covered quite a few topics, different regions of Chile, winemaking styles, I even compared different Syrahs from around the world with one from Viña Errazuriz.

My money where my mouth is – creating a wine range

It is quite a long time since I sold wine for a living, but I am well aware that I am often critical of how others retail wine – especially the supermarkets. With that in mind together with some nostalgic thoughts for the shop managing days of my youth, I was thrilled to be asked to create a wine range for a brand new wine shop. It is one thing to say how it ought to be, to rant and criticise, but quite another to do it yourself.

Of course as soon as I was asked to take this on all my clear-cut certainties went out of the window and I started worrying if I was doing it right and I had to keep reminding myself that the wine was not all for me, it must have wines that other people will enjoy too. If that means stocking Pinot Grigio, then so be it, but let’s make it one that is not totally bland!

My aim was to create a wine range that had something for everyone, offered good quality, great value for money and was exciting into the bargain. Of course what constitutes exciting can vary enormously, some wines are exciting by merely being whacky and unusual, some by being really great examples of what they are and some just by being amazing value.

We opened last week and I spent most of Saturday there talking to customers about the wine range and selling some too, which was a very satisfying feeling. It is early days, but from the reactions I was receiving it looks as though the good people of Stoke Newington liked the range that I put together – I must own up to being quite proud of it myself.