Island Life Magazine Ltd April/May 2007 | Page 91

FOOD & DRINK - life Springtime in the wine trade February and March are probably the busiest time for me in the wine trade. It is this time of year that I have the hard task of attending 2 to 3 wine tastings a week for vineyards and wineries from all over the world. A tough job I know, but hey, someone has to do it !! We taste literally hundreds of different wines with a firm view on business and marketing, and not personal taste. It is inevitable however that sooner or later, I find wines that I think are just to die for, whatever the price point, and many of these wines will hit our shelves. With the new products in mind, I start to put our new wine list together for the coming season. This gets harder and harder each year, as we are faced with many new products, making our listing bigger and bigger each year. There are only so many wines we can hold in our warehouse. Fortunately there are some wines that fall by the wayside, and these will be dropped, keeping our product range in the 400’s and not towards infinity. With the listing set, we then start to produce the data cards on the wines from our tasting notes taken earlier. I hope that you find these useful when selecting your wines. Our aim is to get the wines tried, tested, retested, written up, shipped, imported and on our shelves for April and May of each year. Now is the time to visit us and see the new products for the year, what is in vogue and hopefully from my point of view, the kind of wines you really love. We have found many new products from Europe and the new world that we think will be great for your summer events, BBQ’s and just plain enjoyment. For myself, I am looking forward to enjoying this years new wines, meeting with people to taste and talk about them, and finally, a long hot summer! By Tim Flint Eurovines Sponsored by - www.holidays2remember.co.uk 91