From the second you taste that first sip of alcohol, whether it be a frothy pint during freshers week or a glass of wine at a family dinner, a lifelong balancing act has begun.
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Hugh Jones fell into the drinks industry 14 years ago while trying to become a rock star and never left, learning his trade at Majestic Wine, Pernod Ricard, and Mentzendorff. After a locked-down winter teaching strangers how to make cocktails over Zoom, he is now sales manager at Colwith Farm Distillery.
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If Bordeaux declares another 'vintage of the century' in 2021, then eyes will undoubtedly roll.
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Sam Hellyer, head of wine and spirits at Chiswick Auctions, counts 10 years at Oddbins as part of a varied résumé where he headed up the Fine Wine branch in Oxford.
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As if 2020 wasn’t bad enough, France faced a drought so bad that water restrictions were put in place. Nowhere was the lack of water felt more keenly than in Burgundy, where irrigation is illegal.
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With 30-40% of people made homeless this year estimated to be former hospitality workers, the situation has become dire for many. Hugh Jones, who also lost his job this year as a result of the pandemic, investigates the depth of the problem, and how the trade can help.
From an almost complete unknown beyond the Americas, raicilla is now making inroads overseas, including markets such as the UK. David Furer reports on the new kid on the spirits block.
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Pernod Ricard, Mentzendorff and Lucky Saint alum Hugh Jones upped sticks recently and headed to Baltic capital Riga where he found an emerging drinks industry with parallels to the UK's own.
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Wine is an odd consumable. It’s a drug, it isn’t legally required to list ingredients, and it’s often described with vague, ambiguous terms. In the wake of the natural wine movement and the age of ‘wellness’, it was just a matter of time until a brand tried to hoodwink us. Quickest to the mark were Cameron Diaz and Katherine Power with ‘clean wine’, Avaline.
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South Africa’s wine sector has rightly been the focus of much attention over the past weeks as export markets are urged to support its producers by encouraging consumers to buy their wines.
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Aristotle would have been great on a Zoom call. And he’d have spent the last few months bickering his wine merchant for old wooden cases too.
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The aviation sector has long been one of the global economy's most vital employers. It's not simply the millions of personnel contracted by airlines; the International Air Transport Association (IATA) observes that the industry is at the core of a value chain that supports some 65.5 million jobs worldwide.
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Rising temperatures coupled with sensitive Pinot Noir spell change for the Burgundian hierarchy, as James Lawrence reports.
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Rowena Curlewis, CEO of drinks design specialist Denomination, on why legacy brands are enjoying a new lease of life.
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Meredith O’Shaughnessy, creative strategist at Meredith Collective
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Neil Anderson sizes up new research on what the Y & Z generations want from a tin of vino
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What attracted me to wine journalism nine years ago was that the stories were about the wine and the people, not cocaine-fuelled celebrity mishaps or sexual exploits involving a reverse osmosis machine. The beauty of wine was that, by and large, there was no 'news.'
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Head sommelier and consultant Agustín Trapero dips into one of Spain’s most promising new DOPs.
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It is both baffling and refreshing that there can still be wine regions, in not exactly remote corners of the world, that remain mostly unknown both to consumers and to the vast majority of wine professionals. Mention the Finger Lakes to a random friend and you might simply get an inquisitive frown. And yet the upstate-New York region is home to a very interesting wine landscape that has been undergoing a vibrant process of transformation. Still, while having become a ‘darling’ among New York sommeliers, the Finger Lakes still fly under the radar.
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Advertising spend in the wine sector is a fraction of that for beer, so brand and packaging identity have to work especially hard to influence consumer decision-making, says Rowena Curlewis, CEO of drinks design specialist Denomination
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