Marathon & festival

(by peter)

How to run a wine marathon and Wine Festival Winchester were the topics of discussion when I popped into chat with Katie Martin at BBC Radio Solent.

The interview is available via this link to BBC iplayer for another week (it starts around 1:13:50 and ends at 1:27:45).

Katie quizzed me as to whether Susie and I were getting competitive about the marathon (a little bit, if we’re honest) and just how wine and marathons could work together (a very sensible question, if you ask me).

We’ll tell all after the run, which is now scarily close on 13^th September. I note from the official course guide that, while there is some mention of water, and no mention at all of useful things like toilets, there will be ample orchestras, wine tasting stations, ice cream, entrecotes, cheese – and oysters.

In the meantime, if anyone would like to support our charitable cause, we would be very grateful. Here’s the link to our JustGiving page. We’re running in memory of a wine hero of ours, Michael Cox, who died recently, and in aid of two charities that were close to his heart: The Vintners’ Foundation and The Benevolent. Michael’s wife Lynne is joining us in this madcap run while his identical twin David is our campaign manager. We have a valiant team of 12 in all, representing the teams of Chateaux Brane-Cantenac and Langoa Barton – to all of whom many thanks, as indeed to all of those who have supported us so far.

We also touched on Wine Festival Winchester, which is taking place 21-23 November in Winchester’s fine Guildhall.

We have a fantastic line-up of wine producers, retailers, suppliers and more, who will be providing hundreds of wine on free tasting for all visitors as well as local food. There’ll be music, prize draws, a free wine glass for everyone as well as exclusive discounts on brilliant wines to buy for festive drinking and gifts – the idea is you can have great fun while sorting out your Christmas shopping (Winchester’s famous Christmas market is also just round the corner).

We’ve also developed a user-friendly new system, called Follow Your Taste, to help people find wines they’ll like at the festival.

We’ll be revealing plans in more detail soon but essentially it’s a colour-coded system that breaks wine down into six broad categories. Each wine taste type comes with its own cheeky strapline and Farrow & Ball colour: ‘Are you a big smoothie?’ is for full-bodied reds, ‘Sweet tooth and sticky fingers’ is for sweet and fortifieds, ‘Let’s get fizzical’ for bubbles – and so on.

Bottles around the festival will have colour-coded neck tags so you can see immediately which wines might suit your personal taste. As I say, we’ll be revealing more about this in due course – but Katie certainly found it fun!

Tickets to the festival cost £25 (or £35 for the VIP night on 21^st November). However, a limited amount are available with a 20% early bird discount – just use the code WFWSP2014 when you check out on the website.