More thoughts on the London trade fair. The previous post was penned on Wednesday morning, after a long, difficult day on Tuesday, when I had the tough job of chairing the closures symposium. Wednesday was a much better day, largely because I restricted myself to the biodynamic producers exhibiting in the Waterfront rooms, with a break for lunch with a new Madiran initiative from Plaimont.

The biodynamic exhibition was incredible. More than 60 (mostly small) producers getting together to show their wines. It’s not that I think biodynamic producers are the only ones making interesting wine (a ludicrous idea), just that these producers want to make interesting, natural wine, and on the whole they succeed.

One other thing I want to mention from the trade fair is Stormhoek’s winefairlive blogging (www.winefairlive.com). It’s a really imaginative idea: people were encouraged to blog away and immediately their entries were displayed on large screens around the show. Kind of gimmicky, but it’s encouraging the take up of this powerful communication tool (even if almost all the posts are tosh). They had arch blogger Hugh Macleod (http://www.gapingvoid.com/) on their stand, and I had a quick chat with him (he’s pictured in action above). Cartoonist Hugh is a big dude in the blogosphere, and his cartoons were used by Stormhoek in their award winning, blog-centred marketing campaign.