It’s part of the Henley Literary Festival … I’ve done it before, when I’d actually written a book, but this time I’ll be going on about a whole new kind of book … one that might even be a ‘World-First’!
For this is a book where most of the words have been replaced by actual wine … the actual stuff itself. It’s a liquid book. You drink the pages. Each ‘page’ is a sachet that contains a good serving of wine. Amazingly, it’s only just been published and we’ve already sold a good few hundred copies … which has made me very happy; I’ve always believed that my wines spoke better about themselves than I could.
So, of course, our act – the wines and me – will be a live wine tasting of several wines from the book … the wines doing most of it, me just doing the back-up story of each and fielding questions from the audience. We are only selling alternate rows in the auditorium … so our sommelier types can safely hand out the glasses.
These are wines which really do have to speak for themselves because they are all about twice as expensive as the wines we mostly sell … and none of them have famous names. They just have to taste great … or else!
But it helps that all the wines in the book are from wine producers who offer substantial reductions to customers who like one or more of the wines enough to ‘partner’ with its vineyard and take an annual case … for savings of up to £100 a case … permanently.
These are the wines that have the biggest following … come along and taste why. Four wines on the night, six in the ‘book’.
