The Cambridge Wine Blogger Is Dead. Long Live The Cambridge Wine Blogger

A platform alteration

I decided it was time to switch platforms, so this version of The Cambridge Wine Blogger is ending.

New reviews will appear on Medium.

You can find a link to my new blog here: Tom Lewis – Medium

Please check it out.

You can also keep up to date with my wine-related content elsewhere:

Bluesky: Tom Lewis (@tomlewiscambridge.bsky.social) — Bluesky

Twitter: Tom Lewis (@CambWineBlogger) / Twitter

Facebook: Tom Lewis | Facebook

Reviews on this site will stay up, but my intention is not to publish any more reviews here.

So long and thanks for all the fish.

Lessons From A Wine Start-up - Copper Crew Wines

The Co-Founder of a wine start-up gives his insights into launching a wine business

If you ever want to start your own business in wine, then the two things you should do before anything else are read a book about it and speak to someone who has been through it.

Richard Horwell's book 'How to develop and launch a drink brand’ was published on 21st March.

Here, Copper Crew co-founder Oli Purnell talks about his experience of starting up a canned wine business and considers the advice Richard gives in his book.

Will there be a boom in canned wine?

The reality is is yes, there is good growth in this sector but it is coming from a low base.

The most explosive growth within drinks is found in RTDs (ready-to-drink formats) in the UK. Hard Seltzers are over-hyped and there has been significant stock shedding from big producers however the growth still remains rapid.

A lot of thinking in this space from conversations I've had with producers is you've got to just get out there and gain market share then worry about making money.

Convenience is a significant factor in the growth behind canned wine, but we've found the number one  driver to be portion control. Therefore, canned wine has a perhaps unexpected resonance with older age demographics (50-80). Many of these consumers are actually more opened minded than people (younger age demographics) just getting into wine.

Is it difficult to launch a wine business? What do you need to know?

There are many, many issues as a start-up in this space. Here are the big ones from our experience:

- Cashflow in alcohol is a tricky balance and is often the critical thing in keeping the lights on. I think any book on setting up a drinks business must go through the fundamentals of accounting for duty and invoice financing

- Finding suppliers is also really difficult. Simply put, a lot of people don't want to put their wine in cans. Many talk a big sustainability game but when you try and suggest using cans will help them meet sustainability goals they simply aren't interested.

This also applies on the production side; when we looked around the UK in 2019 to set up canning here we were shocked by the cowboy nature of the industry. The quality of contract canning operations generally remains really poor. This is a problem because a canner might go from filling kombucha to filling wine in their next run. There will almost certainly be fermentation pick up on this and that will destroy literally pallets of wine

On a related note, the technicalities of canning wine are very difficult and require an expert. We have a winemaker as part of our business to address this so we have the technical expertise in house - without it you will face significant quality issues on the line

What about sparkling wines in cans?

This is not something we have done, and personally I think it's a big growth opportunity. However the quality issues are amplified further when dealing with sparkling. Getting this right is very difficult

What about competition from bigger players?

This is absolutely an issue. A key advantage bigger players have is not simply marketing spend but also wine costs. Big competitors will be able to get wine at a price which is simply impossible for a start-up to achieve. Many consumers are tight when it comes to spending on wine and because of the impact of duty on overall bottle price, this difference in the ability to buy cheaper wine at the start makes a big difference

What about admin and regulation?

The AWRS (Alcohol Wholesaler Registration Scheme) is a big faff and means you can't hit the ground running. A more general point on alcohol being so tightly regulated is that you can't use guerrilla marketing tactics which are such a clear and proven path in FMCG

And money?

You need a lot of money to keep the lights on, especially because of the duty point made above. Another relevant thing here is the price of literally everything across the supply chain is going up so making the unit economics work is tricky at the moment

Exporting?

This has been made incredibly difficult as a result of Brexit and is seriously time consuming. Being able to export relatively quickly (1-2yrs) was an important aspect of our business plan because of the strong growth of canned wine amongst the Nordics. To get this overline would pretty much require one of us (there are 2 of us who run the business in the UK) to work full time on the export. Losing relatively easy market access to export is a big barrier

It's a chicken-and-egg problem - one of the most common things we face is:

-  retailers: "we think canned wine is a great segment and consumers are warming to it"

- us: "great, would you like to move forward with an order"

- retailer: "no not yet we want to see how the market plays out". 

We believe that without good wine coming out in cans and good availability, the market won't happen (ie consumers won't be interested). Retailers waiting around for the market to 'happen' risks it not happening.

Low-quality offerings flooding the market; if canned wine becomes associated with low-quality wine which is basically functional rather than pleasant, it risks the category being tainted

What about flavoured wines?

I agree there's good potential here but consumers are incredibly brand sensitive in alcohol and I think this is especially the case in something like flavoured wines.

Success in this category I would have thought will come from an existing well known brand doing something innovative.

The Copper Crew Wines

I have been very impressed with the wines from Copper Crew which have won plaudits from across the the press:

The White and Rosé: The Cambridge Wine Blogger: The Copper Crew - Canned Wine

The Red: The Cambridge Wine Blogger: Copper Crew - The Red

The Special Edition Sauvignon: The Cambridge Wine Blogger: Copper Crew Limited Edition Sauvignon Blanc 2020

How to Develop and Launch a Drink Brand

'How to develop and launch a drink brand’, the new book by Food and Beverage expert Richard Horwell is published on 21st March. 

The book is a definitive guide to launching a drink in the UK; a step-by-step guide covering everything from the idea to getting on the shelf in retailers. It will show you all the pitfalls and all the shortcuts. 

Since the pandemic there has been a huge increase in interest in food and drink, even the most unlikely brands have received considerable inward investment! Employees working from home and lining up at the supermarket have realised this is the industry they want to be in.

Our awareness and interest in health and wellness has grown and so has the Wellness and Functional Drinks sector. All this has led to a flood of new drink brands hoping to launch into this market, and swathe of entrepreneurs deciding this is the business they want to focus on. In short, it seems everyone wants to know how to create and launch a drink brand.

‘How to develop and launch a drink brand’ is there to answer the most common questions and help budding drink entrepreneurs get off on the right foot.

Drawing on over 30 years’ experience in the industry and having been behind the launch of over 130 brands, Richard Horwell shares his insights into the industry and what aspiring entrepreneurs need to know before they start spending any money on creating a new drink brand.

The book covers:

- Market Research

- Recipe Development

- Branding

- Packaging and Production

- Marketing to Buyers

- Export.

If you are thinking of getting into the Food & Drink Industry, you need to read this book.

It all seems so simple when you see drinks on the shelf or the ‘rise to fame’ of brands such as Red Bull. But it isn’t. Successful brands have years of hard work behind them before they appear on your radar and behind this there has been a lot of money and heartache. This book is the inside guide to what you need to do and know, if you are to have any chance of success in this very competitive world.

“I have been in FMCG for most of my life, having lived and worked in the UK, USA, Australia and the Middle East, I have had successful brands of my own that have sold, and also seen the downfall, of many great brands. I wrote this book to help budding entrepreneurs understand the journey they are about to embark on; knowledge is power, and the advice here will give you the best chance of success.” said the book’s author Richard Horwell.

Case Study: Launching a Canned Wine Brand and The Copper Crew

There has been a boom in canned wines, say Richard, with convenience being the driving factor.

But for a start-up there are a lot of issues you need to consider. Firstly you will be competing against big players with well-known brand names and very deep pockets. Secondly, to sell alcohol in the UK you need to be AWRS registered with HMRC and they don’t take this lightly, they look for well-funded businesses that have the infrastructure to be successful. Ultimately, it all comes down to money, so you need a lot more of it to launch a canned wine than you would in most other categories 

My feeling is that the trend will be flavoured wines. More flavoured wines will start to appear in cans as adaptations of Aperol Spritz or Kir Royal. There will also be more wine-based ready to drink cocktails in a can rather than just an unknown wine in a can.

The Copper Crew first launched their business in early 2020 - just as the country went into lockdown. 

A management consultant, academic and winemaker team, they had originally planned to build a word-of-mouth buzz and generate sales from attending outdoor events, such as concerts and festivals.

Forced to switch to an online-only model, they won awards and gained positive reviews from Jancis Robinson, Joe Wadsack and Ruth Spivey.

Their range was launched with a a white and rosé initially with the strapline: Not for the cellar. For everywhere else. A red and a special edition Sauvignon Blanc then followed to round out the offering.

Founder Oli says:

There is good growth in this sector but it is coming from a low base. The most explosive growth within drinks is found in RTDs in the UK; hard Seltzers are over-hyped and there has been significant stock shedding from big producers. However, the growth still remains rapid.

A lot of thinking in this space from conversations I've had with producers is you've got to just get out there and gain market share then worry about making money.

Convenience is a significant factor in the growth behind canned wine, but we've found the number 1 driver to be portion control. Therefore, canned wine has a perhaps unexpected resonance with older age demographics (50-80). Many of these consumers are actually more opened minded than people (younger age demographics) just getting into wine.

On a practical front, there many, many issues we faced as a start-up in this space and the biggest has been cashflow. In our business it's a tricky balance and is often the critical thing is simply keeping the lights on.

I think any book on setting up a drinks business must go through the fundamentals of accounting for duty and invoice financing

Book details

The book is available from Amazon and all good bookshops, plus direct from the Brand Relations website www.brandrelations.co.uk

The Author

Richard Horwell is the owner of Brand Relations, a specialist food and drink marketing and branding company based in London.

Over the last 14 years, Brand Relations has been behind the launch and development of over 130 brands in the UK. Richard has also built up and sold companies of his own in the Food and Beverage sector. He has over 30 years’ experience in marketing FMCG brands around the world, having lived and worked in the UK, USA, Australia and the Middle East.

// 

How Do You Feel About This Picture?

A picture I got tagged in on Twitter

How do you feel about a picture of a scantily-clad young woman reaching for a bottle of wine, being shared on Twitter?

I won't reproduce it here for reasons that I hope will become obvious, but she is wearing a revealing backless, sleeveless strappy dress with a very short skirt and is shot from a rear 3/4 angle, reaching for a high shelf.

There is a lot we don't know about the picture and so much is context dependent.

The main question is who took the picture and for what purpose?

It certainly looks posed, rather than spontaneous, suggesting that both the photographer and the subject knew what they were doing.

We do not know who initiated it - whether the young woman wanted a photo of herself in a new outfit she'd just bought, the photographer asked a friend who willingly helped out or if it was a commissioned shot.

Context is important because it tells us who is in control and who is being exploited.

What is not in doubt in this picture is that the young woman is being objectified; she is shot from behind, a Peeping-Tom angle, so we cannot see her face.

Is she grinning to herself, in on the joke? Or grimacing, as the camera metaphorically prods and pokes at her like a piece of meat?

One potential set of circumstances is perfectly fine: the young woman knew what she was doing, initiated it and was content to pose for an objectified picture of herself.

Another potential set is more troubling: a commissioned shot, demanding a male-gaze view, a naïve young woman uncomfortable but pressured to go along with it, regretting it afterwards.

Staged or spontaneous, the angle of the picture implies that the young woman does not know she is being observed and this, I think, is the most troubling aspect of the image; we are being invited to leer furtively at bare, young flesh. 

It was shared on twitter between a bunch of guys in the same way that a group of teenage schoolboys might pass around a raunchy picture in class when sir is not looking.

The difference with twitter is that it is a public forum; it's the equivalent of standing up in front of the class and saying "Hey, whadda you all thing of this hottie?"

Reactions were, predictably, divided - initial whooping and hollering, one or two calling it out, the trolls wading in, the post going viral and opinions becoming more polarised and more forcefully expressed as the whirlwind gathers momentum.

It's a pattern we see too often on social media; it's what underpins and drives the whole ecosystem. Something attention-grabbing and divisive, followed by reactions on both sides and then the inevitable in-fighting before everyone, exhausted from the scrap, moves on to the next outrage.

It's tiring just to be a bystander, let alone in the middle of it.

I won't be muting anyone in the thread just yet; I allow most people to be rude to me a couple of times before I mute them and everyone needs to be allowed to make a couple of mistakes in the heat of the moment without serious repercussions.

I'll happily discuss controversial or taboo topics like business, growth and profits with anyone on wine twitter as long as we are debating the issue and not making ad hominem attacks.

But, guys - and I do mean guys - for the sake everyone on the platform, please think before you post this kind of stuff and before you wade in with outrage.

It's what the algorithm wants you to do, so don't get sucked into feeding the machine.

And, please, let's make sure everyone feels respected.

What Drives The Price of Wine? And Who Buys What?

How is wine priced and what sort of a wine purchaser are you?

The price of wine (and pretty much everything else, for that matter) is driven by two fundamental factors; cost-to-produce and seller's margin.

Some wines are priced on a cost-plus basis, others are value priced.

Certain industries, such as airlines, are famous for the sophistication of their pricing approaches, including dynamic demand-led pricing.

However, the basics are always fundamentally the same.

Cost to produce

At its most basic, the cost-to-produce is simply the cost of making a particular wine (including selling and distribution costs as well as duties and taxes). Key variables in this include:

- the cost of the land for growing the vines

- labour in tending the vines, picking the grapes and making the wine

- cellar techniques, such as aging (requires vessels, space and time), oak (the newer, the more expensive) and lees stirring (requires skilled labour)

Another factor is the amount of grapes produced for a set area of land; some vines are naturally more prolific than others and in many areas, maximum yields are defined by regulation. Frost, hailstones and even wild boar can all reduce the amount of fruit produced per hectare.

In cooler, damper climates vines do not live as long (so therefore need replacing more often), and require more attentive care to deal with late frosts and vineyard pests. These can be some of the most expensive wines to make.

For this reason, English wines and Chablis, for example, will always be expensive to produce and this will be reflected in the price. 

Dessert wines from cool-to-moderate climates are also much more expensive to produce; late, manual harvesting, sometimes on a berry-by-berry basis and the need for botrytis brings a greater risk of disease and harvest failure.

Sauternes can often be a great bargain vs production cost, since it is expensive to produce yet largely unfashionable due to being sweet.

Land prices are driven by a combination of fashion and quality; well-appointed vineyards producing better-quality fruit will command a premium. Even more so if they are inside delimited areas that also command a premium, so you will pay more for land in AOP Pauillac vs generic Bordeaux vs vin de pays.

You will pay less for land in Languedoc-Roussillon or Cahors vs Bordeaux or Burgundy, yet may well find yourself able to produce very high-quality fruit from sites with the right combination of altitude, cooling breezes. the right aspect and good soils.

Margin

The margin on a wine depends on how much profit the seller wishes to make; wineries that invest in making themselves distinctive are able to command more of a premium than those that don't, can't or won't.

Fashion is a significant factor here; rosé has gone from deeply unfashionable in the early noughties to the insta-influencer's bottle of choice, so the entire category commands something of a premium vs the cost-to-produce.

Within the category, Provence rosé commands a further premium and a celebrity association adds more again. A well-branded celebrity Provence rosé will generally command very healthy margins for the producer.

Other super-margin wines include First Growth Bordeaux and top Burgundy as well as classic regions within Italy and California.

Unfashionable wines, be they individual producers or entire regions, may struggle to command any premium and may have to be sold at a discount; for years, sherry and entry-to-mid level German wines have been a difficult sell and therefore relative bargains.

Austrian wines are a case study in a region (rightly) going out of fashion and then gradually, but successfully rebuilding its reputation and increasing prices over time.

In principle, however, any wine can command a price premium over cost of production plus margin, provided the producer invests in effective brand-building.

Cost-plus pricing

Cost-plus pricing is the simplest to understand for supplier and consumer; you simply take your total cost to produce, say £10 for a bottle of wine, and then add your margin, say 20% mark-up. This gives you a selling price of £12 per bottle.

In reality, the system is more complex than this as there are wine producers, importers, retailers, packing and distribution costs as well as fixed vs variable costs and differing sales volumes, but conceptually cost-plus is simply cost + margin = price.

Cost-plus pricing is best suited to undifferentiated commodities where premiums are hard to command; it encourages scale and efficiency in the production process to gain share and increase overall profits.

It is not at all suited to small-scale production such as mid-level wines produced by artisan winemakers (rather than the corporate behemoths of the New World).

However, small-scale mid-level producers may find themselves in a difficult "squeezed middle", lacking the budget to invest in professional price-enhancing branding activities and therefore unable to create a meaningful distinctiveness vs more commoditised, high-volume, low-priced wines.

Mid-level producers / sellers risk getting trapped in a perception gap of simply being more expensive versions of a basic wine and constantly trying to persuade reluctant buyers to trade up.

The solution to being in this squeezed middle, however, is not education but distinctiveness; as the saying goes, the market can remain uneducated much longer than you can remain solvent.

Value-based Pricing

Value-based Pricing does not begin with the seller's cost to produce as a starting point, but with a consideration what the market will pay.

A value-based pricer will look at what people are prepared to pay for a product and set a price accordingly. High-end Bordeaux, vintage Champagne and Napa Cabs all command prices that are in no way based on their cost of production.

A large proportion of what you spend on these wines is margin to the seller; the benefits you get in return are rarity, exclusivity, bragging rights and status.

Examples of value-priced items from other sectors are Apple phones, Nike trainers and Vans clothing.

Cap-and-Collar

Some wines exist in an interesting cap-and-collar spectrum; English wine is expensive to produce but does not yet command the reputation and margins of Champagne and Burgundy. So it is expensive at the bottom and cheap at the top.

The same is true of Beaujolais, New Zealand and, to an extent, Austria.

What type of wine buyer are you? 

It is worthwhile assessing your own attitude to wine and the type of buyer you are, in order to find wines that suit your own buying preferences, as well as palate.

Aside from a preference for red or white, New World or Old, classic or edgy, your wine buying approach can be categorised in several ways:

Maximisers vs Satisficers

If you mainly just want a wine to enjoy without needing to know too much about rootstocks, clones, training methods, lees aging and so on, then you are a Satisficer; that is, someone who wants their wine to be "good enough" with minimal choosing effort. This is said to be around 85% of all wine buyers.

For Satisficers, the liquid in the bottle is just a small part of the overall experience of buying and drinking wine; other benefits may include social elements, appreciation of the packaging and a sense of inclusion as part of a commercial wine club.

If you love reading up about wine, discussing bottles with sommeliers and understanding how Portlandian soil types affect flavours vs Kimmeridgian, then you are a Maximiser who wants just the right wine for the occasion and is prepared to put in a lot of effort to get there.

Sophisticated and enthusiastic, you are representative of a minority of around 15% of wine buyers and you are likely only interested in the liquid in the bottle, rather than any extraneous factors.

Price-Sensitive or Not

The less Price Sensitive you are, the more you are willing to pay extra for the same thing. This is not about absolute wealth or the ability to splash your hard-earned cash on life's finer things. Rather, those who are Price Insensitive simply do not worry if something they want is available more cheaply elsewhere.

A Price-Insensitive buyer does not especially consider price or relative value-for-money when buying a wine; she has some money in her pocket and wants some wine - it is as simple as that.

By contrast, a Price-Sensitive enthusiast will scour the offers and discounts sections for bargains, or attend auctions in the hope of knock-down prices on high-end wines.

Conservative vs Open-Minded

Conservative drinkers will tend to drink the classics, well-known wines from reputed regions; this could be Burgundy, France or the Old World generally, but the overall aim is to choose wines that will be socially approved of and not in any way embarrassing.

It bears repeating; it is not always just about the wine itself. A conservative drinker may well be more interested in reducing her risk of social embarrassment at choosing the "wrong" sort of wine than concerned about the quality of the liquid in the bottle.

By contrast, open-minded drinkers seek out the new and unusual, be it location, production-method or flavour profile; they do not feel the weight of societal pressure to conform, so will happily champion Georgian qvevri wines, amber wines from Croatia, Japan or Israel. At any rate, they will be open to suggestions from a sommelier.

My buying style

I am a Price-Sensitive, Open-Minded, Maximiser; I would hazard a guess that that makes me one of the rarer types of wine purchaser.

I love a genuine bargain, I am interested enough in wine to read up and learn about it regularly and I actively enjoy tasting wines from countries, regions and grapes that I have not encountered before.

It's not much of an exaggeration to say that I prefer the novelty of trying a new wine to the actual quality of what is in the bottle.  In practice, years of wine tasting have taught me what a good wine is like and the sorts of wines I prefer - usually mature classics from cooler regions.

For that reason, you'll often find me picking up an eclectic mixture of quirky marked-down bottles and fire-sale classics.

Mine of course, is just one of many possible approaches; neither "right" nor "wrong", it just is. Equally valid are other approaches, such as a Conservative, Price-Insensitive Satisficer who is very pleased with her purchase of celebrity wines from a large retailer.

On Wine And Branding

Creating labels/packaging for your wine that says BUY ME

By Richard Horwell, Brand Relations

Let me start with a bold statement. Your branding is as important as the product itself. You can have the best tasting wine on the market but if no one picks it up and tries it, no one will ever know, 90% of a first-time purchase is based on the branding; it’s why a consumer will pick your product over their regular choice or your competition.

But don’t confuse design with branding, as many agencies do. Branding is the message you want to give your target consumer - and that message on your packaging should be ‘BUY ME’.

Education

In developing any product, including a wine brand, the starting point is asking a LOT of questions. These questions will be much the same as the ones your target audience will ask. For example: ‘what is unique about this product?’; ‘why is it better than the competition’; ‘should I risk spending money on this untried brand?’; ’does this product offer value for money?’ Your branding needs to answer all these questions.

The MOST expensive word in the Food & Drink category is ‘education’, if you need to take time to educate the consumer, away from the packaging, then you will either spend millions or fail, or both.

The best place to educate your target audience is on your wine’s label and other packaging, so your branding needs to be clear and perfect.

That’s what the branding is for; to provide instant education.

Link to what your audience already understands

We all tend to Pigeonhole everything in our lives and whether we are conscious of it or not, when we see a new brand, we put it in its place. So, if you are attempting to break new ground – perhaps with a mixed product including wine - then you need to add something to the mix that the consumer knows.

To take one related example to illustrate this point, we have just developed a drink based on the Stinging Nettle called Emunity, so to help consumers to reach out and try this we have added ingredients and flavours they recognise, like gooseberry, cucumber and wild strawberry.

The key is to make sure the messaging is easy to understand and include elements that consumers can understand instantly, which helps then to choose your product fast.

Ask Questions

In order to get your branding right, you need to ask yourself and others some questions:

1/ Where will this wine sell and what brands will sit alongside it? How will my product stand out against them?

2/ What is my brand message? For example, is it based on spoiling yourself or great taste?

3/ Will my consumer be able to read the messages I have on the label from a distance, without picking it up?

4/ Does my brand look premium enough for the selling price?

5/ Why should a consumer buy my brand instead of their regular choice?

Getting the answers to these questions is the first step to creating brilliant branding and perfect labels/packaging.

It’s about them, not you

When I lived in Australia, I knew a very successful businessman who could turn his hand to anything. When I asked him his secret to success, his response was ‘when you explain something to someone and they don’t understand, it’s not them that’s stupid, it’s you for not explaining it properly’. This is the same with branding for wine, just putting your brand name on the front and thinking the brand will sell is crazy, Consumers don’t care about a ‘new’ brand name, they care about what’s in it for them.

So, make sure your message conveys this. Always focus on them, not you.

Point of Difference

In order to have any chance of success in today’s market you must have a point of difference. This needs to be very clear in your branding and messaging on the packaging. Just being vegan wine, for example, is not enough - there are masses of vegan brands now, and when it comes to drinks most of them are already vegan.

What makes your brand different? The MOST important points of difference should highlight on the packaging. The less important ones still need to be on there, but they can go on areas the consumer will read once they pick the product up.

Be wary of minimalism

Minimalism has become a trend in recent years with many designs jumping on the bandwagon. However, be careful not to make it too minimal. I have seen some laughable branding where a designer has tried to be cool but forgotten about selling the brand. This has led to the consumer ignoring it completely and reaching for the safer option, in other words, one of the established wine brands they already know. Find the right balance between doing too much or too little. You also don’t want to waffle; let your branding do the talking.

Your Values

Consumers want brands to be transparent and they want to understand the brand’s heritage and values. The history and tradition of the wine region is clearly important. Also is the product certified to be Vegan, Fairtrade or Organic? Which of these will resonate with your target audience? More recently consumers are looking for certifications like ‘B Corporation’, which commends businesses that give as much consideration to their social and environmental impact as they do to their financial returns.

This move towards wanting to buy from companies with matching values is an opportunity for new, indie brands as the established companies can’t adapt quickly. It takes time to remove artificial ingredients and replace them with natural ones, to change supply chains to Fairtrade or a more ethical source or create a business that cares about the environment and its impact on our future. This is what today’s consumers are looking for and this is what your branding should communicate about your wine business.

Conclusion

Your packaging needs to communicate your brand so that your target consumer back that vital initial purchase. It should also say ‘buy ME’ in a way that they simply cannot ignore!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Richard Horwell is the owner of Brand Relations, a specialist food and drink marketing and branding company based in London. Over the last 13 years, Brand Relations has been behind the launch and development of over 100 brands in the UK. Richard has also built up and sold companies of his own in the Food and Beverage sector. He has over 30 years’ experience in marketing FMCG brands around the world, having lived and worked in the UK, USA, Australia and the Middle East.

www.brandrelations.co.uk

https://brandrelations.co.uk/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/brand-relations-ltd/

https://www.instagram.com/brandrelations/

https://www.facebook.com/brandrelationsltd

https://twitter.com/brandrelations_

Tesco's SMS Sommelier

An on-demand sommelier service from Tesco

Fronted by Helen McGinn, Tesco have launched an SMS-based sommelier service - I asked a bunch of wine people what they thought of the idea and you can see the responses in this twitter thread:

Tom Lewis on Twitter: "Any thoughts on this one: Wine matcher: @winematcher ? Sommelier: @donalde ? Techie: @thirstforwine ? E-commerce: @oldparn ? Marketers: @robertjoseph @mme_hammond ? Journo: @FelicityCarter ?" / Twitter

The press release reads:

Tesco is to give wine lovers access to tailored tips from top sommeliers with on-demand SMS recommendation service

Running from 18 March–16 April, the Tesco Sommelier Messaging Service will deliver bespoke bottle recommendations from leading restaurant sommeliers by text, to help the nation elevate their evenings in with exceptional wines and perfect pairings from Tesco.

From bold and spicy to crisp and aromatic, deliciously dry to sumptuously sweet – you’ll find a wine for every palate, food, mood and occasion at Tesco. With so many choices, it can be hard to decide between the wide range of styles, grapes and regions available, but help is at hand with the launch of the Tesco Sommelier Messaging Service (SMS).

Running from 12pm-7pm daily, from 18 March – 16 April 2021, the on-demand text service will give people access to personal wine recommendations based on their individual tastes, budget and menu.

Following three short initial questions, a Tesco wine recommendation will be delivered in real time to their device from someone on the expert SMS panel, which is headed up by TV presenter and wine expert Helen McGinn, supported by 20 sommeliers and wine waiters from restaurants across the UK.

There is no replacement for the restaurant experience and receiving personal guidance from the in-house sommelier. Until that can be enjoyed again, Tesco SMS will give wine-drinkers access to those experts remotely, to help them make the most of the brilliant bottles in reach – but as of yet, undiscovered – on their weekly shop.

Whether it’s a pasta-friendly red for a favourite quick supper, or something exceptional for a special Easter feast – Tesco SMS will make it easy to choose a winning wine to match.

By using Tesco SMS, people will also be helping to support all those who make our evenings out special, as for every wine recommendation delivered, Tesco will donate £1 to Hospitality Action, the industry’s charity.

USING THE TESCO SMS

To request a wine recommendation, simply text “WINE” to 82228 and follow the steps when prompted. 

A personalised answer will usually be delivered within 30 minutes:

Step 1: Text “WINE” to 82228

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For more information visit: https://realfood.tesco.com/curatedlist/wine-pairing-for-your-favourite-meals.html

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Building An Instant Wine Cellar

How lockdown forced me to build an instant cellar of current vintage and mature wines

Non-wine friends who know of my side-hobby occasionally observe: oh, you must have an amazing wine cellar!

The reality is that modern townhouses are not really conducive to storing wine reliably and given that even amateur-league writers get enough invitations, masterclasses and samples to support a mixed diet of interesting wines on a regular basis, there is little need to start a collection at home.

Then, a year ago, lockdown happened; all tastings were completely cancelled and no-one had any samples to send out.

Even worse, there was no reliable prospect of popping across to France for a couple of weeks and returning with a bootful of inexpensive bottles.

I had to start actually buying wine in this country.

This was a new experience, but I took it in my stride.

A year on and I now have a decent instant-cellar, stored under the stairs in boxes and under blankets to keep out heat and light.

With zoom tastings coming on stream to replace in-person events and no actual guests to entertain, these wines may now end up staying there for a while; this will be OK for some, but others are at a peak now and have not got much further to go.

A good wine cellar should have a range of wines at every stage of maturity (ready for early drinking, maturing and at peak) in a range of styles from fizz to dessert via white, rosé and red.

Building an instant wine cellar

The cellar was built up in a somewhat ad hoc fashion; I did not set out from the start to create it as such. Rather, it evolved naturally as I found inexpensive wines I liked on special offer and decided to buy them in quantity.

The cellar is big on European classics, with the occasional curve-ball, and also big on mature wines.

There are probably around 100+ bottles left now and as I am no longer acquiring faster than drinking, there is roughly a year's consumption in there assuming a shared bottle every Friday and Saturday night.

All my purchases have been opportunistic; a tweet here or FB mention there by someone in the trade sees me heading off from my desk during wfh lunchtime to check out whatever is being recommended. Ironically, lockdown and working from home has made it possible to keep an eye on social media and pop out during the day in a way that would not be possible if I were still commuting daily into London.

So thanks to:

- Richard Bampfield

- Tom Cannavan

- Tim Carlisle

- Nayan Gowda

- Charles Metcalfe

- Nick Oakley

for bringing all these to my attention.

Palate preference and recommendations

Everyone has a different set of preferences; by now, I know who in the trade shares my classical, old-school European, cool-climate palate-style and whose recommendations I can expect to like.

If you like Big New World wine with lots of ripe up-front fruit and alcohol, you won't find much of that here, but that's not to say you cannot get reliable recommendations; I just cannot tell you where to find them.

I also tend not to bother with trophy wines - the big names that everyone knows and approves of, which carry a hefty price premium for their quality and lineage; I rather prefer to go off the beaten track and look for the quirky and underpriced.

I also don't particularly do the edgy natural wine thing, orange wines - except this superb one - or hipster pale, Alpine style, delicate reds from obscure grapes.

The Beginnings

In late winter 2020, when we were still commuting and working in offices, the Co-op started marking down some interesting wines and I had done a tour of local branches for half-price English pink fizz, Vouvray, mature Mosel Riesling and a few others with a view to laying some down.

Mature Burgundy

I've never been able to get excited about red Burgundy, despite several attempts. It's expensive yet meh, in my book, so discounted mature red Burgundy was a chance to see if I could establish what all the fuss is about.

Cambridge Wine Merchants picked up several pallets of mature red Burgundy destined for the now-closed restaurant trade and I bought around half-a-dozen of various reds at 50% off standard price off-trade price. I liked some better than others and have a few left, but never quite went back for more of the same.

I did, however, buy several bottles of various whites - which I prefer.

Inexpensive Bordeaux - from a Good Year

A Facebook post from Richard Bampfield alerted me to some on-offer red Bordeaux at Lidl. 2016 is the year to lay down and is under £7 a bottle when on promotion, so I bought a mixture of these plus some 2017s for earlier drinking.

Sherry

My local M&S has been selling off various own-label darker sherries from time to time - always under a fiver, sometimes under £2 for Cream, PX, Amontillado and Oloroso.

Port

Nick Oakley dropped a note onto FB offering some ruby port uncovered during a stock-take at half list price - minimum order of a dozen with courier at cost, so I took one of those and handed a few out to friends and neighbours at Christmas.

Mature Rhône

Mature Rhône is not really a thing as it tends to get consumed when young, but this half-price ex-restaurant stock demanded to be bought by the caseload. So I did.

Italy

I don't know Italy as well as I'd like to; Nayan Gowda brought this Dolcetto at Cambridge Wine to my attention and the Bridge Street staff suggested these two Ricossa wines were a bargain worth trying.

Dry Botrytis Semillon

The oldest wine in my newly-established cellar is a 20yo Australian (off)-dry botrytized Semillon. I thought the first case was good value at £10 per bottle. Then I bought a second case further discounted to £6 per bottle.

That's £18's worth of storage costs on a £6 wine - mad.

Whilst I was in there, I also noticed some half-price mature Bordeaux and Rioja which Tom the manager said were good. He seemed like a reliable guy, so I picked up a case of those.

Younger Wines

Lidl has been a great source of easy-drinking well-made younger wines: a case of Pecorino for £3:50 on special offer; Cava contentiously at the same price, a 5yo Rioja for a fiver and a few end-of-range markdowns, including a brace of Beaujolais.

And not forgetting the other German discounter, Aldi. Charles Metcalfe gave a thumbs up to a fruited and easy-drinking Portuguese blend for a fiver, so I cycled to the other side of Cambridge and filled my rucksack with those.

I know people who spend more than that on a wine just to put in the cooking.

Buying interesting, mature wines at below cost-price requires a bit of effort, research and the ability to follow-up on leads quickly. It also helps if you are not too attached to any one wine area or style and are willing to try something new.

There are plenty of wine merchants who will help you build a conventional wine cellar with professional storage that will bring much enjoyment. I happen to prefer the novelty of doing things unconventionally.

Why Life Is *Not* Too Short For Bad Wine

I rarely drink the same bottle of wine twice.

I don't mean that in any philosophical sense. I don't mean that wine is a dynamic, living thing and therefore no two bottles can be identical, given differences in production, bottling or storage.

I don't even mean that a single bottle changes over time, just like the river we can never step into twice.

No. I mean it quite literally that, as an (amateur) wine reviewer, I am often invited, to sample all sorts of different wines and it is rare that I am offered the same wine twice.

This suits my nature; I get bored easily and enjoy the unpredictability of constant variety. The more wines I try, the more other wines I can can compare them to. And comparing wine is where the fun is - for me, at least.

For me, wine tasting has always been as much an intellectual activity as a physiological one.

Building A Taste Memory

The name for this in wine education is building a taste memory; that is, learning and memorising what a wine should taste like given the grapes, region and wine-making style used. Blind tasters then apply this in reverse to make educated guesses about the wine they are attempting to identify. Is it pale enough for a Pinot? Is it oaked? Warm-climate or cool?

To my mind, blind tasting for its own sake is something of a party trick, and the MW exam rightly focuses more on candidates' reasoning than whether or not they guessed correctly.

Back in the world of assessing wine for its quality, rather than identity, I find judging a single wine in isolation to be more difficult than when comparing a number of wines.

Behavioural Science and Tasting

The reasons for this can be found in behavioural economics. Start with Daniel Kahneman's observation that thinking is to humans is as swimming to cats; we can do it, we just prefer not to.

As a result, when making decisions, such as whether a wine is good or not, we find it easier when presented with a small range of options. Relative decisions (preferences) are easier than binary absolutes. Good / better / best is a more straightforward assessment than good / not good.

Three is ideal here; the Romans knew this and often used the power of three. The very fact that we have good / better / best dates back to Roman times and has been preserved linguistically ever since.

No-one has quite established why we like threes, but it does seem as if three genuinely is the magic number.

This bias towards threes is known as "extremity aversion" (again, from Kahneman) and has been empirically proven; in simple terms, when faced with a choice of small vs medium vs large, we will tend to gravitate towards the "medium" option, regardless of the actual size of a "medium".

To our three S/M/L options, add in a new, larger choice, then remove the smallest and what happens? People will now gravitate to the formerly-large-now-labelled-as-medium option; we prefer the relativity of "medium" not the absoluteness of medium.

The Value of Pointless Choices

Dan Ariely demonstrates this point with his talk on the Pricing of the Economist magazine. It's worth watching the whole clip, but the TL:DR is that even a choice we don't want has a function, which is to help us decide what we do want.

This field of behavioural science is known as Choice Architecture; it is literally the science of how we make choices and how to make choosing easier for people. More formally, it is the design of different ways in which choices can be presented and the impact of that presentation on decision-making.

Tasting in isolation requires an assessment of the quality of the wine by reference to our taste memory of other wines. We compare the present sensations of tasting a real wine, one in a glass in front of us, against the historic memories of having tasted other wines previously and mentally comparing actual sensations to historic memories.

Do it enough times and the brain will build short cuts, but like physical exercise, these have to be developed and maintained.

This is why, I believe, tasting wine in small groups is the easiest way to make an assessment.

The Magic Number?

I find two is a good number for wines of the same style; do I prefer this Pinot or that Pinot? Is this oaky Chardonnay better than that oaky Chardonnay?

Two is slightly less helpful with wines of different colours or styles, say when comparing red Burgundy with white Burgundy. Yes you get a sense of the producer and you can compare each against the other, but you are also assessing each wine against its theoretical type from memory.

I find groups of three wines to be helpful when the wines are more diverse, but still relatively familiar and this is my most usual tasting routine. I open three bottles on a Friday evening and taste my way through them over the weekend to see how the develop with time, food and aeration.

Larger numbers are better for deeper dives, where differences are more nuanced. This can be logistically more difficult with whole bottles, especially where they are sparkling wines, but can be done and certainly repays the effort.

Larger numbers of smaller samples also work well for breadth; the entire range of one producer or a masterclass on a country, for example.

As a general rule, the smaller the size of the sample provided, the more effort needed for an assessment and therefore the more useful it is to have a tutored tasting to highlight nuances that might not be immediately noticeable on just a few sips. The flip-side of this is that while you get a detailed snapshot of the wine, there is less of a sense of what it is like to live with, what foods it matches with and how it develops once opened.  

The Role of Bad Wine

I have also noticed another phenomenon: palate acclimatisation / fatigue.

The more bottles I drink of particular wine that I drink over time, the more bored I get with that wine., regardless of its absolute level of quality. It happens with basic wines, which is fair enough, but is most upsetting when it happens with expensive wines; paying a lot of money for a wine but then not having the energy to appreciate it properly is, for me, one of life's great disappointments.

Once lockdown started, with no tastings to go to and no wines to be reviewed, I started buying wines in quantities that I have never done previously (for various reasons). And I found the second bottle of any particular wine bought as a case was never quite as interesting as the first - regardless of price. With palate boredom quickly setting in even for the more ambitious wines, perhaps especially for the more ambitious wines, I found I had to stash away the multiple bottles I had bought and keep as long a period as possible between trying the same wine again.

This distance of perspective sorted the problem and returning to a previously-sampled wine after months rather than weeks meant I could enjoy it almost as if tasting it for the first time again.

The reason for this phenomenon is that our brains need novelty of experience to be most receptive, as Tim Harford points out in this Financial Times article about the role of location in forming strong memories.

So, for me, the custom I have acquired of constantly trying out new wines on an ongoing basis means that each experience, each new wine sampled, is as memorable as it can be and not "just another bottle of x".

Viewed this way, not only is life not too short for bad wine, but bad wine is actually an essential part of our wine enjoyment.

Not So Much Bad Wine As Basic Wine

Now, let's not exaggerate here; no-one wants to drink faulty, vinegary plonk on a regular basis or suggests that that's a good thing. Rather, a mixed diet of pleasant and uncomplicated wines alongside the complex, nuanced and in every way world-class highlights the superiority of the good ones in such a way that we can appreciate them more than if we had to drink them all the time.

This is not a Romantic observation, albeit it has slightly Romantic overtones; rather it is based on the science of how we think and choose.

Those who focus on the liquid in the glass may find this approach at odds with the notion that a better wine is a better wine. Placing the wine at the centre of the observation is understandable but flawed. If a wine tastes better simply by being priced more expensively, then it is too simplistic to consider the (subjectively-assessed) quality of what is in the glass alone.

Moreover, wine scoring is merely the trading of subjective assessments around a consensus. A wine's score is not inherently provable, just as any one person's rating of anything (music, films, books) can never be proven to be right or wrong, it is merely a subjective opinion of preference. And if we insist on always coming to a consensus, in practice this allows no room for innovative, nonconformist dissenting voices and we stagnate.

Scoring a wine on points has always struck me as looking through the wrong end of the lens, albeit it has practical uses when done in certain ways.

More important than a wine's score is the subjective opinion of whether I like it. And each person has to go through that assessment for themselves; it is not for me or any other reviewer to tell the reader what she should like or to criticise him for preferring something else.

And yet I do not quite adhere to the iconoclastic, populist, "anything goes" philosophy of appreciation; the notion that the wisdom of crowds will always identify the best result (it does not, as it will exclude outliers, i.e. the greats and the terribles) or the idea that we don't need wine experts to tell us what to like.

This conundrum sits at the heart of the Willy Russell play Educating Rita; in becoming more educated, Rita finds herself having to become more of a conformist to views and values that undermine her natural inquisitive spontaneity. The paradox is that broader experience leads greater conformity of thought.

Yet if we are to have any sense of order, rather than complete anarchy, we need to have at least some agreement around parameters; balance, complexity and elegance are good things, finer tannins are better than rustic tannins. These things are generally agreed in wine-appreciation circles but are not objectively, provably correct (however much you may consider them fundamental), but merely a long and widely held consensus around preference.

Ultimately, there are no absolutes here; there is neither a free-for-all on assessments of quality, nor empirically provable, ironclad rules about what makes one wine better than another. Rather there are schools of thought (belief is perhaps more accurate) that we either go along with or oppose.

As I was taught doing whilst doing my essay subject options at degree level, having your own opinion is a good thing. Knowing how your opinion matches up against the academic consensus of thought on the issue is a better thing.

The role of education / criticism in wine appreciation, therefore, is to help us:

- broaden our experience

- establish the limits of what we like and don't like

- understand the consensus on quality (even as it changes and develops)

- verbalise, should we choose to do so, why we agree or disagree with established consensus 

This piece was inspired by a series of twitter conversations over the course of 2020 with:

- Felicity Carter

- Liz Gabay MW

- Meg Maker

- John Atkinson MW

- Andrew Neather writing for Tim Atkin

- Peter Pharos

- Richard Bampfield

The Wine Swap - Francesca Gaffey

Delivery for Gaffey! Ooooh laa laa!

Manchester-based PR, Francesca Gaffey, writes up her wines sent and received for a twitter bottleswap in a guest post  

I love a bottle swap, so when Dan Kirby set about organising a crowd of us to sign up, I jumped in and offered up my personal data in exchange for a mystery bottle of wine.

I usually love to think of the person I’m sending to on a bottle swap and take much pleasure in thinking about what they might like, what might they not have tried, what might they be curious about.

But, for this swap, the bottle had to represent the sender, so I automatically went for something pink and sparkling.

My recipient was Tim Milford – someone I was aware of from social media but hadn’t met IRL; I tried to look back through his posts to see if he had a penchant for pink.

He did not. 

A quick scroll through his pics and I saw he enjoys Riesling, Spätburgunder and Grauburgunder, Weissburgunder, Wirsching Scheurebe… you get the idea. I also spotted he’s taking part in Movember and had also defaced a Trump tweet so I thought he must be a decent, broad-minded kind of person, therefore open to trying something unusual.

Earlier this year, I was the recipient of a bottle of Ca’Salina Brutissimo Moscato Extra Brut from another bottle swap and loved the fact it was so dry, had tiny, racy bubbles and really gentle notes of raspberry and tangy citrus fruits. Because the colour is peachy pink, and it has the word Moscato in there, you’re expecting something sweeter but as the sugar level is only 0.5 grams/litre it’s a delightfully dry wine.

I sent the bottle to Tim via @JustPerfectWines so it was cleverly disguised. Tim had already popped it open and almost finished the bottle by the time it got to his turn to guess, so I think he and his drinking buddy enjoyed it. He described it as ‘light, dry and quite stylish’ …his guesses went from Heather to Kirsten and finally to me!

So glad I was the third driest and stylishest person in the zoom!

My sender was Tom Lewis – who had also stealthily sent it from a retailer (Cambridge Wine Merchants). I received a very unusual bottle of aged Côtes du Rhone – a Syrah / Grenache blend – and at 15% I was merrily enjoying it, having decanted it earlier.

On first pour, the colour was a mahogany red / brown colour, so deep and dark, and on first sip, I got plenty of dark juicy fruit (ripe cherry, blueberry), liquorice, and a hint of spice. I love a big bold red so this was right up by street and a style I hadn’t tried before. Tom did say it’s unusual to age Côtes du Rhone so I wasn’t being a complete moron for saying I hadn’t had one this old.

It was a Domaine de Fontbonau 2012, which after me guessing Sam, Tom, another Tim and not even noticing Hal (owner of Cambridge Wine Merchants), I plumped for Tom Lewis. Turns out he had a Gaffey anecdote as he went to school with a person sharing my surname, so my follow up from the bottle swap is to look into my family tree and see if we’re related!

It was a really fun session and great to see people’s choices and find out why their wine represented them. We went from bagnums and Jammy Gits to leather saddles, and of course, Mike (from Dalwood) talking bull, so to speak. 

Thank you to Tom for introducing me to aged Côtes du Rhone, something I will definitely buy more of. 

And a big thank you to Dan for organising, hosting and refereeing on the night! It was definitely the most well-organised bottle swap I’ve been a part of – plenty of updates and communications along the way, fun build-up via the newsletter and Twitter feed, and the bottle reveals worked really well and I think we all thoroughly enjoyed ourselves!

Link to purchase the pink Moscato: 

https://www.justperfectwines.com/products/casalina-brutissimo-moscato-rosato-extra-brut

A Century of Ukraine - the Life of Ivan Mikhailovich Raichuk

On the 8th of May 1926, Ivan Mikhailovich Raichuk was born in Kitaihorod in Western Ukraine, a mid-sized village on the Dniester river, just north of the Moldovan border around 25km from the historic city of Kamianets-Podilskyi.

This is the story of his life, times, descendants and legacy over a tumultuous century in the borderland of Europe.

There is little easily-available information about Kitaihorod; it barely shows up on maps, but the internet records that it was a Jewish shtetl with a population of around 1,000 at the turn of the 20th century and probably somewhere about the same at the turn of the 21st.

Ivan Mikhailovich was not Jewish but Ukrainian, and grew up speaking Ukrainian; other nationalities in this patchwork borderland (the literal translation of Ukraine is "borderland") include Hungarians, Poles and Jews and the land has been ruled over at various times by Mongol, Polish-Lithuanian, Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. 

After the conversion of Ukraine to Christianity in 988 and the emergence of Kievan Rus', the country was annexed into the Russian empire in the late 1700s and briefly achieved a short-lived independence during the chaotic aftermath of the 1917 Russian revolution (with Kamianets-Podilskyi as its capital). By 1922, it had become the Ukrainian SSR after being ceded to Soviet Russia under the 1921 Treaty of Riga; this brought some level of stability but not prosperity.

The Soviet genocide of 1932–33, now known as Holodomor ("death by starvation"), left millions dead as a result of a  man-made, intentional famine which rejected outside aid and saw confiscation of all household foodstuffs and restriction of population movement.

This was the Ukraine that Ivan was born into and worse was yet to come.

1941 saw the start of Great Fatherland War with Germany; a brutally pragmatic non-aggression pact had bought time for Germany to win victory on its western front and for the USSR to prepare for the inevitable. Aged 14, Ivan was captured and transported as forced labour to the Austrian hamlet of Höflein, a few kilometres north west of Linz with around 100 residents.

He was well-treated there, like one of the family; properly clothed and fed, he was worked no harder than anyone else. In some ways he was the lucky one; he had been captured to work as a farm labourer to allow the sons could go off and fight on the front. He survived, they didn't.

After the war, Ivan was given various options - stay, return or go to a third country such as the UK or USA. He chose to return home to Western Ukraine where he met and married Ganna Ivanivna Gatsmanyuk. She was five years older than he and had been previously married, but was now a widow after her husband had died in the war. There was also a baby daughter, Alexandra, whom he brought up as his own and who as an adult moved to Odesa, a port on Ukraine's Black Sea coast, where she had two sons, step-grandchildren to Ivan.

Ganna lived in Vrublivtsi, a settlement of a few hundred house on the banks of the Dniester only a few kilometres from Kitaihorod but over an hour's walk away.

The communists authorities were notoriously suspicious of anyone who had been abroad and returned; the ostensible fear was that they may have been recruited as spies, but a more practical concern was an ability to question communist propaganda about Soviet lifestyles vs those in the West.

There is no evidence that Ivan suffered from Soviet officialdom as a result of his time spent on enemy territory and it was perhaps ironically this experience of life abroad that gave him a broader perspective about the world generally, given the narrow confines of his subsequent rural life.

"Village" in Ukrainian refers not so much to population size as to lifestyle; Ukrainian villages are, effectively, groupings of smallholdings, detached houses built on plots of land of various sizes with vegetable gardens, orchards, flower beds and pot stills for samohon (home-distilled spirit, aka moonshine).

The local currency here is largely barter; you might trade some fruit for eggs, milk for a lift into town, a cut of meat is the butcher's fee for slaughtering your livestock.

A typical smallholding size is around 1,000 sqm and with electrification being a key aim of the early Communists' modernisation programme, most village homes had electricity by the 1920s and 1930s for cooking and a radio; however, cold storage, running water and flushing toilets remained a rarity for many decades.

Civic amenties amounted to a post office, a small general shop, a church (the Church of the Intercession of the Holy Virgin) and a bus stop on the main road to Kamianets-Podilskyi around 2km from Ivan and Ganna's home. Entertainment, such as it was, probably consisted of name days, birthdays, religious festivals and perhaps just sitting around in the yard in good weather.

The farmland of Vrublivtsi was collectivised under Stalin into a kolkhoz (collective farm) and Ivan worked as the kolkhoz vet, making him likely the most highly-educated person in the area. At home he tended his vegetable garden and orchard and kept small amounts of livestock; several rabbits and chickens plus a pig and a cow for as long as he was fit enough to do so.

Two children were born in the 1950s, with grandchildren arriving in the 1970s and 1980s.

The older girl moved from the village to the nearby town of Kamianets-Podilskyi into a professional job and living in a newly-built apartment in a low-rise development on the edge of town. It sat one one edge of a loose square with a grassy central yard, benches and a small playpark. Behind and beyond the flat were village-type houses, detached dwellings with outside toilets, kitchen gardens and livestock.

The sound of cockerels crowing in the morning served as a daily reminder and literal wake-up call of how close you were to a peasant lifestyle, which the roughshod communist naming of the street could not hide. It was Ulitsa Frunze - Frunze being the Soviet re-naming of Bishkek (the capital of Soviet Kyrgyzstan), itself named after Mikhail Frunze an associate of Lenin who had been born there.

Following his sister's lead, the younger boy moved to the capital Kyiv where he studied engineering, listened to music (western pop whenever he could get hold of it), married and settled down to start a family.

Eventually, there were four grandchildren (as well as two step-grandchildren), all girls and all living at some point in Kyiv. The oldest granddaughter went to study English at Kyiv State University, later followed by her younger sister who, after taking a business degree in Ternopil, moved to the capital in the post-communist era to work in the very western discipline of advertising and marketing.

By now, the Berlin Wall had come down, the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine had finally won its independence. Shortly afterwards, the country agreed to give up its nuclear weapons under the Budapest Memorandum in return for guarantees of security for its territorial integrity and political independence.

For all the political progress, the unwritten rule in education remained that male students took the more rigorous English translation course which would equip them to be KGB officers or technical translators whilst female students had to settle for the English teaching course, designed to turn them into schoolteachers of a language that, at the time, they hardly dared hope to speak in one of its native countries.

It was whilst living in a student hostel, that the oldest granddaughter met an eccentric British language student on her 19th birthday. He had travelled with a party from his university in the UK for a term's placement and, being a foreigner, was placed in newer, better accommodation that was not available to native Ukrainians. 

The ring-leader of the party, a student with connections in the year above and an inside track, had then persuaded the group to move en masse from this accommodation block into something more authentic where they would actually get to meet local Ukrainians and be able to practise their language skills.

The hostel was made up of two wings on several floors with rooms of four bunks. If you were lucky, only two or three of the bunks would be occupied, giving a bit of space - or, importantly, room for a foreign visitor for a couple of months who might be persuaded to write you a letter of invitation to the UK.

The process of getting the UK was not straightforward; there we no direct flights from Kyiv and embassies for this newly-created country had not yet been established either. Travelling overland meant a train to Prague and from there a scheduled coach to London. But the embassies were not keen on the idea of letting someone in if they did not have a clear way out. So, after getting your letter of invitation from a UK student, you then had to have it countersigned at the British consulate in Kyiv for authenticity and travel to Moscow to get a UK visa from the embassy, then visit the French and Belgian embassies (in that order) to get your transit visas.

You didn't necessarily need to be on friendly-enough terms to expect a welcome and accommodation on arrival; just getting the authorised written invitation would enable you to get a visa and you were bound to find some low-level work somewhere that didn't ask too many questions so you could improve your English, stock up on western products like jeans and trainers and come back with a wallet full of valyuta - foreign hard currency that would hold its value during the Weimar-style hyperinflationary years.

Such was Kostya's plan; invite the eccentric language student to shack up with him and his buddies, then work the charm offensive to get the invitation.

Social life in Ukraine in those days generally meant eating and drinking with friends, or friends of friends. So as a show of good faith, Kostya took his long-haired new best friend to meet his girlfriend who was helping her roommate celebrate her 19th birthday.

The rest is pretty much, as they say, history: Kostya's plans to be invited to the UK went completely awry as the hostess and his guest took a liking to each that quickly developed into a relationship that had both of them contemplating the prospect of marriage within weeks - albeit unbeknownst to one another.

It would be several years before the eccentric student, by now a graduate and on the cusp of becoming a young professional with a presentable haircut and his first suit, would visit Ivan Mikhailovich in Vrublivtsi. A direct flight to Ukraine was now possible; from there he would take an overnight train to Kamianets-Podilskyi and finally a lift with one of Ivan's daughter's local contacts was arranged to get him to the village for a couple of weeks of R&R in return for a little work on the soil and occasionally fetching buckets of water from the pipe half a kilometre a way.

In his late 60s, Ivan was now a widower and could no longer manage to keep a cow, so his livestock consisted of a pig, chickens, rabbits and a series of dogs, all called Reksik, as well as growing fruit and vegetables that he would smoke to preserve for the winter.

The visit took place just before his granddaughter's wedding; Ivan was unable to travel for the UK leg of the ceremony, so a celebration was organised by the mother of the bride in Kamianets-Podilskyi with extended family travelling in from Siberia, Kyiv and Lviv.

A few months later, on an unusually mild day after a long, hot UK summer, Ivan's oldest granddaughter married her scrubbed up Russian-graduate fiancé at a town hall in the north of England and began a new life that would see her move to London, Vienna and finally Cambridge.

Her native Ukraine's hard-won independence remained under regular threat, increasingly so in the 21st century: 2004 saw the President poisoned and the resulting "Orange Revolution", 2014 saw the Euromaidan revolution which deposed Kremlin stooge and convicted criminal Viktor Yanukovych.

Russia, fearful of a democratic, prosperous, pro-EU Ukraine on its border, responded first by seizing control of Ukraine's Crimean peninsula and then by invading eastern Ukraine and installing pro-independence puppet leaders. The play was brutal but simple: turn Ukraine into a failed state that would halt EU and NATO expansion. Thus, it would inevitably fall back into the Russian sphere of influence and overturn the Western rules-based order - in that part of the world, at least.

The threat of democracy could not be allowed to seep into Russian kleptocratic despotism and this low-level aggression would act as a further warning to anyone looking to meddle in Russia's backyard. After the economic chaos of the Yeltsin years, Russia was back; if this time it was neither a global superpower nor a reformed quasi-democracy, it was at least a regional dictatorship, fuelled by oil wealth, that could act however it pleased in its "near-abroad".

The USA and UK (as co-signatories of the Budapest Memorandum) failed to live up to their obligations of preserving Ukraine's territorial integrity; noble-sounding words of outrage and solidarity may have been spoken for domestic audiences, but meaningful actions were not taken in practice. Indeed, Russians and Russian dirty money continued to flood the Londongrad laundromat.

By now Ivan was in his late 80s; like many elderly, widowers, he had become a creature of stubborn habit and refused to leave his home and move in with his daughter, despite the freezing temperatures in winter and the physical demands of a self-sufficient agrarian lifestyle.

He lived to be 88 and eventually died on January 16th, 2015. He is buried in the Church of the Intercession of the Holy Virgin in Vrublivtsi, next to his wife Ganna.

In life he was not a physically large man, of below-average height with the wiry build of someone living off the land; photos of him in middle age show only a slight filling out. Whether it was his education or early life experiences, he retained to the end a sharp mind with an interest in the world around him beyond his village and country. A curiosity matched with self-modesty and a strong-willed nature, to the occasional point of stubbornness, was his gift and legacy to his descendant generations.

He lived to see all four of his great grandchildren and, with some modernisation, his home became something of a summer retreat for them during the long school holidays.

Where 21st century Kyiv has become a self-confident, middle-class sort of city full of cafes, bars and supermarkets with deli counters, wine aisles and freshly-baked bread, the roads in Vrublivrsi remain rough tracks and the lifestyle has changed little in a century, if not longer; a few weeks in summer spent there is akin to glamping, with only the occasional nod to modernity; there is a phone signal (in the right part of the kitchen garden) and down by the river Dniester, an hotel has been built with facilities for day-visitors.

The lifestyle is rural, but far from idyllic; it is hard physical work at the best of times but there are fresh fruit and vegetables, home-made cherry wine, and both a physical and spiritual connection to the land for visitors prepared to roll up their sleeves and work the soil.

In a different world, it would be an international tourist destination. For now, it remains just another small, remote western Ukrainian village, a millennium old but facing an uncertain future with an aging, dwindling population.