Wine Bar Exterior View

A long time ago, on my return from New Zealand, I thought that the Wine Bar was in a wonderful position to give people information about wines and decided to go though our list and rewrite it in a clearer format. This would be more of a tome that contained a paragraph on each wine with a label by the side and maybe a few pieces of information and quotes we had picked up along the way.

Although the list was universally admired there were a few problems with it. First of all, the effort involved in creating something like that meant that by the time it was done it was out of date. Either a price had changed or the wine on the list had become unavailable to us. To move a wine into the list changed the page numbers and so on.

The other problem was that it made the casual wine customer overpowered and the more knowledgeable person frustrated to look though all the pages to find a wine they fancied when a simple list would have sufficed.

The second addition was much more ambitious in its look, Andrew was becoming a better photographer and into new typefaces and layouts. Labels were replaced by bottle shots and more effort was spent describing areas and building background information. Although it was never finished because of the problems above, it was the precursor to the look of the current list now seen in the Wine Bar. The big information list has since been put on the back burner.

In the mean time we have opened the Wine Shop. Again, from my travels on the great New Zealand / America trip I had gained a great love for exploring wine shops, more so than wine bars. They are usually Aladdin’s caves which show off the proprietors love for certain areas or a love of completist collecting. The best wine shops were the ones in wineries - less products more information, or the shops in a particular wine growing area where they just sold local products and were experts in what they stocked. I saw lots of things I loved and lots of things to admire. So when the local off-licence closed we jumped at the opportunity to open our own.

Again, information was what I wanted to focus on. The place I wanted to emulate the most was a restaurant with a wine shop in it at the House of Blues Hotel in Chicago, sadly gone now to make way for a night club. It introduced me to some great ideas, like the wine flight - a small glass of 3-5 wines that would be connected by a theme to show off the differences e.g. four Cabernets from around the world or three different white Burgundies. They came on a mat filled with all the sommelier’s own musings on the wines. I tried this in the Wine Bar a few years back for about four or five months. Also, the wines in their shop each had a label with a passage about the wine on it making a lovely browsing educational experience. You could take the label away with you as a reminder of what you had bought and as something you could bring back in next time to make sure you got the order right. The label idea was developed at Gales but due to the amazing custom made wine furniture in the shop it became an impossibility.

So, having felt I had lost my way a little and having spent some time away from the bar on my own due to my broken foot, I have decided to get back in there and start these ideas from scratch. The idea is to build up a bigger on-line presence with a twitter with up to the minute wine deals as they happen, a facebook fan page, have our website updated daily with an outline of any specials which will be on in the day or night and this, my wine blog.

This blog is where I will talk about each of the wines we stock, background information, a little bit about what I think it tastes like and which other wines to compare it against. I will tag all of them with region, grape and such like. This in turn will be made into the label system in the wine shop over time and then into a book in which I will do all the things in the original list, except it won’t be a list, just a collection of information and stories about wines, spirits, liqueurs and libation producing areas we have stocked in the past and present. It will go in the hotel rooms for interested guests and on the end of the bar and shop counter for all those who would like to know a little bit more.

This will also be the place where I will talk about any wine trips and tastings I go on.

Maybe this is more ambitious than the things I have failed at in the past but a slow gradual build up of work that you can all watch means that everyone, not just myself, can keep on my back. Hopefully the journey in this blog will be just as interesting as the the goal, maybe even long after the job is finished.

All your comments will always be welcome.

Pip Gale.