Threshers are at it again with their 40% off coupon. Not quite the same deal - 40% off all wines excluding Champagne and sparkling. This ‘viral’ campaign won’t be as big as last time but will obviously help them shift some bottles. Runs from 22nd March - 1st April 2007. Get your Threshers 40% off wine voucher here.
Use the voucher and get yourselves a few bottles of this Saint Veran - unbelievable value!
Cheers
The Bottletalk team
UK vineyards produced their largest crop of grapes last year due to the warmer weather attributed to global warming. This produced record amounts of grapes for the British sparkling wines making a name for themselves worldwide.
Bumper crops were seen in Kent, Surrey, Sussex, Hampshire and Essex vineyards because 2006 was the hottest year on record.
The harvest broke the two million litre mark for the third time since records began in the late 1980s.
Having had a successful Wine Relief tasting night last Saturday, Virtual Wine are now running a Cross-Blog-Auction in conjunction with Hugh MacLeod and Tim Atkin.
Cartoonist and blogger Hugh MacLeod of gapingvoid.com and Stormhoek.com has drawn a special Wine Relief cartoon, and wine expert and journalist Tim Atkin has specially selected 12 bottles of wine from his cellar in aid of Wine Relief.
Visit Virtual Wine to place your bid and do your bit for this year’s Comic Relief drive.
A great review and instructional video of Bottletalk by Allen Stern over on CenterNetworks.
Thanks Allen!
Cheers,
Well I must say things have changed a lot since I attended university as we discovered last night when we attended Winy Nite with the grad students at the London School of Economics, where the special guest was the one and only Gary Vay-ner-chuk. Our thanks go to Edgar, Ben, Emily and all that take part in this regular event in their halls of residence for welcoming us in and providing some amazing food and wines.
Here’s a list of what we tasted and ate:
As this was following the day of workshops for Future of Web Apps London, also in attendance were Miss Rogue aka Tara Hunt and Chris Messina of Citizen Agency, who had hooked up with Gary and Erik from Wine Library TV at the conference. What I loved is the fact that Tara’s pres at the event had been all about building community online and how to relate to your members, and here was Gary appearing as a special guest at a student wine tasting night in London [a long way from his wine business in New Jersey] because they watch and love his video blog and invited him to come visit with them next time he was in London - a fantastic example of online community going offline.
Gary sharing his wisdom with Edgar, the organiser of Winy Nite, and other members:
Erik and Gary from Wine Library TV and Mark and Emma [me] of Bottletalk with Edgar the Winy Nite organiser:
We’ll definitely be seeing these folks again, and looking forward to seeing the Winy Nite guys on Bottletalk.
Cheers!
Having dug a bit deeper I’ve found further information on Wine Relief including a full PDF list of all the wines that are included. As a reminder, until 16 March some of the UK’s biggest wine retailers will donate 10% from the sale of these wines to the Comic Relief fund.
Also, Virtual Wine is running an online tasting event on 3 March featuring some of the Wine Relief wines. You can find out more information here, so we looking forward to seeing you there.
Cheers,
I know a lot of people buy wine by price and what the label looks like - I do. As of this week when entering a new wine on Bottletalk you can now add an image of the bottle or label yourself. Some of our users - thanks in particular to winescribbler, mogoot and toronaga to name but a few - have already uploaded some great photos of the wines they have tasted. For your wine image to appear on the wine page the dimensions of the image should be at least 150 pixels in height or width. You can also add images to wines you have already entered by going to the wine page and clicking the ‘Edit Wine details’ link. As a guide, try and use images that show the label as clearly as possible. Enjoy!
Between now and 16 March, most major wine retailers in the UK will donate 10% from selected wines to Wine Relief 2007, part of Comic Relief and Red Nose Day. With the exception of Oddbins and Asda, the likes of Tescos, Sainsburys, Sommerfield et all are offering a selection of wines whereby 10% goes to Wine Relief, details of the wines can be found in store.
Wine Relief has been running for several years raising a total of £2 million to help change lives in the UK and Africa, so consider these wines when shopping in the UK this month, and make sure to come tell us on Bottletalk whether they made you laugh or cry or even gave you a Red Nose 
Had a very pleasant surprise the other day. I was flicking through the latest Time Out London paying particular attention to their Food and Drink section when I noticed a nice little write up on Bottletalk.
“This smart new online forum for wine lovers allows anyone to rate and comment upon bottles they like or dislike. A centralised tagging and rating system aims to create a rolling up-to-the-minute database that can be browsed by score or keyword. Thus a search by ‘blackcurrant’ yields a list of bottles that have put quaffers in mind of that aroma and taste. It’s a nice idea, but will only work if enough people contribute to give the average scores any credibility. It’s open to abuse from people with vested interests. But scepticism aside, this is a slick, visually appealing website.”
Thanks! It is fantastic being recommended by such a well established London magazine and even better finding out by just browsing through the magazine over breakfast. We have had great write-ups online - UK TechCrunch and Spittoon to name a few - but reading something in print has a certain added excitement about it!
Jancis Robinson will be hosting a couple of wine tastings for world leaders, CEOs and Bono at Davos. For those of you unfamiliar with Davos it is a small town in Switzerland that also hosts the yearly World Economic Forum also known as Davos.
A couple of the wines that Jancis will be presenting are a 1975 Cheval and a 1952 Latour.
So, if Tony Blair, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch or Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page would like to give their experiences on these wines at Bottletalk please feel free.