Welcome to the BKWine Brief nr 79, February 2010

You, us and The Brief

We do put in quite a lot of effort and time into making the Brief each month. Partially because it is interesting and fun to do it. But also since, as we are sure you have noticed, it is a marketing channel for our wine tours. But we really want the Brief to bring you both information and opinion. A reader recently said “What I like about your newsletter is just that - the attractive photos, the humorous touches and bits of lighter news, the personal opinion”. That’s the kind of thing that makes you happy. You’ve achieved at least a bit of what you want. Both information and giving you a feeling of what we think about what’s going on.

We hope that you get a bit of useful information from the Brief. Perhaps you read just a short snippet, perhaps you devour it from beginning to end (if you do, please let us know, we’ll give you a golden star in our report book!). We try and share what’s going on, what we see and hear about wine.

But we need your help! We would like to (need to) reach more wine enthusiasts – people who want to read about wine, gastronomy and travel (and perhaps one day come on a wine tour). Recommend it to your friends! To your wine club associates! To everyone at work! To family and cousins! Help us find more wine loving readers! After all, it’s good value for money, isn’t it? Here's where you sign up as new subscriber!

And if you have any suggestions how we’d make it even better do let us know!

Châteauneuf-du-Pape

Châteauneuf has been chosen as “wine village of the year” by the (very big) Swedish wine tasting club Munskänkarna (they have 20,000 members). That inspired us to make a selection of wine photos that could be used to illustrate wine tastings with Chateauneuf wine. This is, just like the BKWine Brief itself, an example of a ‘trade’ between us and our readers. The person talking about Chateauneuf gets a very good selection of illustrations and in return we get an opportunity to be “seen” by some more wine lovers. There’s a small tag line at the bottom of each image that mentions what we do. (The offer is only for non-profit, non-professional tasting tutors at the moment.) A ‘trade’ just like the BKWine Brief. Here’s the selection of the Chateauneuf photos: http://tinyurl.com/munsk-rhone. At the moment, this is only an offer open to the Munskänkarna society in Sweden, but perhaps it would be interesting for other too? Perhaps on other subjects than Châteauneuf too? What do you think?

Organic

We (i.e. Per, in this case) were recently at the big trade show Millésime Bio with organic wines. A very interesting wine fair, even if you have no particular penchant for organic wines. Plenty of interesting producers. You can read more on some of the winemakers we met further down in the Brief.

And the organic theme continues. It seems to be a strong trend at the moment (as we predicted in the last Brief). The next big event is France’s second biggest wine fair, Vinisud, where we will be doing a wine tasting on organic wines. It’s primarily for Scandinavian visitors but as a reader of the Brief you are of course welcome too. Read more about it below. In any case we will be back with some reporting from the wine show.

Competitions

A bit later this spring (if the spring will ever arrive!) there will be the Concours Mondial de Bruxelles. It is one of the world’s biggest wine competitions with wines from all over the world. It’s a gigantic organisation, not least since it is a “nomadic” competition since a few years back. In spite of its name the competition will be held in Palermo on Sicily this year. Some 250 judges will participate from many different countries, to judge the thousands and thousands of wines. Britt is what seems like a permanent member of the jury (without wanting to sound as if she’s been there since the beginning of time). This year, Per will also be in the jury, which means that two thirds of the Swedish contribution to the jury will be from BKWine (last time we looked at least). We will be reporting from this too.

But now, over to the Brief.

Britt & Per

PS: Recommend to your friends to read the Brief or forward it to them ! More on wine:

• Guest writers on BKWine.com
• Wine videos: BKWine TV
• Wine photography 

Read all of the new BKWine Brief here!