People are always asking if we "do tastings", and I can answer that question in two ways...

No...

we don't:

always have a bottle on the go at our own shops (English Market and Wine Depot) as, while this isn't a bad idea in principle, it needs to pay for itself, and achieving this is harder than you might think;

run night-school type wine-tasting courses along the lines of those organized by the Wine and Spirit Education Trust, overseen here by the Wine Board of Ireland. They do it extremely well, and impartially, at a fair price, in Dublin and usually in Cork too;

open bottles for prospective customers who aren't sure if they'll like a wine or not before buying it. Word would get around.

draw attention to ourselves with a portfolio tasting such as last October's Big Wine Event (more photos and so on of that still! to come) in Cork's Clarion Hotel, providing a tasting opportunity for all interested parties, trade and public;

"do tastings" by prior arrangement for groups, generally those who are happy to provide a venue and meet a reasonable fee;

There's one of this last kind today! Owing to the wounded-gastropod progress of some connection in the world wide web this morning, what should have been an advertisement now becomes old news, but here 'tis anyway:

You can try some of our wines today between 12 and 2-ish at URRU Mallow, the newly opened specialist food shop built on the success of URRU Bandon, and run by Willie Healy, brother of Ruth. Our new recruit, Cyril Besnard, who really knows all the details about wine that I pretend to and then look up later, will be promoting two red and two white wines from our range. Cyril is hoping to fill the shoes, if not the beret, of Godefroy Baijot,

who you can see here and who I hope will forgive me when he returns to Ireland in a week or two to do some business for his new employer in the Languedoc. It's Jean-Marie Rimbert's hat.

Hello to anyone who's reading this following Blake Creedon's very kind words in today's Irish Examiner. I feel that if Darina Allen is permitted to "tickle our palates" (online, I mean), Blake should be too; and I mention this because it seems only fair, and also because it would be very beneficial to the paper too if there was a way of referring electronically to Blake's expert and amiable column when I'm writing to customers, suppliers, the readership of this blog, &c. &c. I'd be very pleased to get a weekly tip-off for a good bottle from the Examiner's website, and I'd be more pleased than that if I could get it sent to me as an RSS feed. The BBC's website explains what RSS is about pretty clearly.