Wine TV, of a sort

Spent the day on camera, recording videos for a wine retailer, http://www.winedirect.co.uk/, down in Hailsham. This is something I’d been quite keen to do because I’ve been thinking about recording videos to put on this blog. I think it could be quite fun.

Of course, doing videos for a retailer creates a conflict of interest. After all, I got paid a fee for my services – my usual daily rate – and therefore it could be argued that my views on the wines are not going to be impartial. But the deal with Andrew Birtley, who heads up winedirect, was that he’d select the wines and I’d say what I really thought of them. Which is what I did.

The production company he hired were very professional and easy to work with. The routine we followed was the same for each wine. The bottle was filmed, then I proceeded to introduce the wines on camera, pour a glass, sniff and then slurp, commenting on the wines as I tasted. We didn’t rehearse, and I didn’t have any notes. Nor did I pretaste the wines – for the sake of freshness it was all done in one take, where possible, with my at-the-time comments on the wines being recorded.

As anyone who has spoken to camera before will know, it’s actually quite difficult – more difficult than it looks. In the majority of cases we got everything in one take, but a few times I had to stop and then start again. I haven’t seen the results yet, but everyone seemed quite satisfied. Altogether we did 35 wines, starting at 9.30 and finishing just before 7 pm. A long old day.

Standouts included a Pinot Noir and Syrah from Craggy Range (two separate wines, not a blend!), Spinifex Indigene 2005, a really lovely 1er Cru Meursault from Louis Latour, a couple of elegant Moeiux Pomerols, some rather nice restrained Baeulieu wines from Napa, The zippy Leeuwin Prelude Chardonnay, some nice Cloof South Africans and a lovely liqueur Muscat from Yalumba. These were nice wines I was happy to day lots of complimentary things about. When I get the results I’ll post some of them here and you can all critique my style.