You always have good days and bad days in the wine and spirit business. Monday wasn't a great day, I spent almost all the day wrestling with .php code and trying to get a shopping cart to accept paypal credit card payments for a Wine Gifts Site on the side. webwinegifts.com is a further channel of S H Jones as we look to expand into the gift market - here people pay a single price for a bottle (or bottles) of wine, spirits or often Champagne delivered, often in gift packaging. It's an expensive way to buy - but it's probably the cheapest way to send gifts like this. And we're making sure we selling things cheaper than Majestic are - we can do it by operating on a low margin, but because it's gift all in pricing it doesn't affect our day to day pricing policies. Once the site is ticking over it would be nice to think it might take a bit of money - the trick will be getting customers in the first place.
What I was meant to be doing on Monday was going up to London to the 'Trinity' tasting - a trade tasting of three pretty smart importers including Raymond Reynolds who import some of hte best (and some of the most interesting) wines from Portugal. They have lost some agencies in the past, but always come up trumps with as good (if not better) replacements. Raymond and Danny know the scene better than anyone and when a new winery gets added to the Portfolio you can bet it's top quality.
We've got a Portuguese tasting tomorrow night in Leamington, and some of the wines we know and love, and others I had to look at my notes from a tasting earlier in the year - having left that tasting feeling underwhelmed I supprised because I was full of admiration for the wines and loved most of them from the little ones to the more expensive. Now we've bought some in do I buy a lot of the cheap bottles of a few of the pricey ones?
Yesterday was better, had a new supplier in tasting some Rums, Tequilas and Whisky and today I tasted through the Dalmore range - but more on that in the next few days.
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