Monaco Yacht Show – what a week!

Helen Brotherton — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:33:22 +0000

FWW at Monaco Yacht Show

The sun shone, the Red Arrows flew, the Super yachts gleamed and we poured and poured!!! Four hectic days manning the Riviera Times stand at the Monaco Yacht Show, offering glass after glass of our Vilmart Grand Cellier champagne to ours and their clients, colleagues, prospective customers and yacht crew. In exchange for the champagne plus some sexy Vilmart prizes for their readers, we were able to
be at the Monaco show for the full 4 days, getting to meet up with brokers, shipyard companies and most importantly, putting a face to some of the crew members who will be attending some of our WSET® Wine Training courses this Autumn.
All sorts of possible new clients for our Wine Tasting Events also presented themselves – we still have heaps of follow up to do. Everyone was seriously “wowed”by the quality of the champagne on taste and even people who swore blind they never drank the stuff, enjoyed sipping this heavenly nectar with us.
The Riviera Times & Zeitung team happily launched their new website and invited people to subscribe on line in exchange for a chance to win a “jeroboam” (that’s a Double Magnum for those who don’t know – equivalent to 3 Litres!) of the Grand Cellier. The oversize bottle certainly looked impressive on the stand and drew envious looks when we finally pulled the winner’s name out of the hat on Saturday – thank heavens it was someone who was still actually at the show and could come by and collect it! It had dawned on us as the entry slips for the competition started to pile up, that between us we had attracted such a cosmopolitan range of nationalities to the stand and not all of them lived on the Riviera
– could have been a bit sticky trying to bubble wrap it and post it to Hong Kong!!!
I met a charming chap from the British Consulate in Milan who asked me if I could tell him the classic mix for a Martini cocktail (I advised him the high quality French vermouth Noilly Prat was what he was looking for – oh, and just to “waft” it over the gin and not drown it!); Nigel had a near brush with royalty as he passed just inches by Prince Albert of Monaco and we gave a glass of champagne (or three), to the team of “Yachting Matters” to celebrate its current issue with a top notch article about Wine Training for Crew by…..ahem, me!
Getting the train in and out of Monte Carlo each day, then the drive from the station home, was spectacularly knackering and yet a very pleasant way to get there each day. As the train trundles along the coast past Beaulieu sur Mer and Villefranche you can spot some very elegant yachts at anchor which takes your mind off the fact that you have your nose buried in someone’s armpit – it was quite busy all week so a seat was a luxury!
To conclude, we think it was a good partnership with the team at the Times & Zeitung and the arrangement worked really well for both parties – I can see us doing the same again next year! Watch this space for details!!

Helen Brotherton
05.10.09

Wine Appreciation – 9 glorious weeks of quaffing!

Helen Brotherton — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 16:02:44 +0000

We have been pretty busy so far this Spring, and will be right up to May with our WSET Accredited Wine Courses, mostly for Yacht Crew in the run up to what will no doubt be an interesting Summer season…..but that’s for another Yachtie BLOG! Meanwhile we have been asked continually for a gentler approach to Wine Appreciation, skills and knowledge that might be acquired at a more leisurely pace.

Our WSET Courses tend to be “intensive” 1, 3 or 5 days to fit in with Yacht Crew timescales and their naturally nomadic lifestyles. But there is a wider Anglophone community here on the Riviera, more accustomed to a relaxed way of life, but who are still passionate and fascinated enough by wine to want to know a little bit more. We’ve looked as a starting point at the WSET Intermediate Level 2, which needs no prior Wine Training, just enthusiasm, greed for knowledge and a basic ability to tell the difference between a Red and a White wine. Rather than cram it into 3 days, we opted to run it over 9 consecutive weekly evenings, each around 2 ½ to 3 hours. We would also propose that taking the exam itself on the 9th session is entirely optional – some folk, would prefer not to have the pressure of lots of study and homework but just to enjoy exploring the wines of the world and getting to taste rather a lot of them! We did originally plan to run the course in this format from late Spring, but have found that the urge to learn gets clouded by visiting friends and rellys (it is amazing how popular one becomes in the Summer here on the Cote d’Azur!). We are also finding that the more people who attend our Events (see piccie) and start to understand what we are really about, then express interest in doing a Wine Appreciation course. So, in order to spread the net as wide as possible and give lots of gourmands and wine fans a chance, we have moved the dates to the Autumn and will kick off with the 1st session on Thursday 10th September. The details are all on our Training Page of this website and also show that we’ve managed to reduce the cost and instead of a full price of 750€ TTC, we’d split it into weekly sessions at just 70€ per session (this is if you are wishing to take the exam in Week 9), making a saving of 130€ all told!
There are also a few more tempting peeks into what we will cover in the 9 weeks, on my original BLOG on this course in January 2009. As I usually get a bit carried away with things, we are bound to taste a few more than the 50+ wines you are required to experience throughout the course. I can’t resist pulling another bottle from the rack if I think it will illustrate my point better – wine is such a real, tangible and practical subject, one can only talk about it for so long before the need to taste an example becomes apparent. If you, (or you know and love someone enough to give it them as a pressie), are interested in possibly getting together with like-minded individuals to taste wines and learn about their origins, then get in touch. Roll on Summer then we can start planning a decadent and vinous Autumn – something to really look
forward to!

Wine Tasting Riviera . Wine Events Riviera . Fine Wine Works » Autumn

Monaco Yacht Show – what a week!

Wine Appreciation – 9 glorious weeks of quaffing!