Bolney sells up to German wine giant
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THE BURNING QUESTION
What kind of music do you play in your shop?
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I made a living as a DJ for over 20 years, so I feel music is incredibly important in setting the atmosphere in the shop. I play it through YouTube. You don’t want anything morose so I play stuff that’s light, jazzy. I may even whip out a bit of Stranglers. The Nightfly by Donald Fagen is a great album and I might also play Koop, who are a Swedish electro jazz outfit. Over Christmas I was playing UB40’s first album and one of my customers said how nice it was to listen to instead of bloody awful Christmas music!
Henkell-Freixenet, the world’s biggest sparkling wine company, has acquired Bolney Wine Estate in Sussex. The German sparkling wine giant owns
Champagne, crémant, Cava, and Prosecco brands in more than
10 countries, together with UK-based
Iain Smith H Champagne winner H Smith’s Wines, Exeter
distribution company Freixenet-Copestick.
Sam Linter, Bolney’s
managing director and
head winemaker, will stay on as managing
director. She declined to disclose the value of the sale.
Wine-searcher.com, January 17
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Music plays a part in telling the story of who we are and what we do. We can’t always play our personal preferences, it has to be right for here. We put a playlist on Spotify and currently we are listening to lots of soul jazz during the day and then we move to Afrobeat at night. I think the best music is when customers don’t notice it – it just becomes part of everything.
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Aberlour rarities stolen from Moray
Alex Grahame SugarBird Wines, Aberdeen
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We create playlists on Spotify that go out every couple of weeks with our newsletter. These include songs that have been getting airtime in the shop. Whoever is running the shop has control over the stereo, with the caveat that nobody plays anything with too high a BPM or anything classical. We don’t always agree. My colleague has begged me to stop playing Meat Loaf recently after a week of hearing I Would Do Anything For Love in tribute to the great man.
Tens of thousands of pounds of whisky has been stolen from a distillery in Moray. A number of whisky bottles were taken
from the visitor shop at Aberlour Distillery between December 22 and January 5.
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Police said the highly unique bottles
would be “easily identifiable” as no other
bottles from the batch have yet been sold.
Oliver Dibben Gnarly Vines, Walthamstow, London
STV News, January 27
South African wine booms in the UK The UK, South Africa’s leading export market, saw a jump in exports of
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We rarely move the dial from Radio Fip, to be honest. It’s a pretty eclectic mix, involving every genre you could possibly imagine. It can flip from Led Zeppelin or Tony Allen to Beethoven or Billy Bragg, then it’ll just weird you out with a bizarre cover of a James Bond song or something. It is very good wine shop music although, being French, it does go a bit too jazzy some afternoons. Richard Holloway The Stroud Wine Co, Stroud
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20% by value during 2021, despite challenges caused by the pandemic. The UK currently accounts for 25% of
all exports by value and 12% in terms of volume.
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Champagne Gosset The oldest wine house in Champagne: Äy 1584
The Drinks Business, January 20
THE WINE MERCHANT february 2022 21
