Fellow Wine Lovers,
Hard to dispute this but I think we might be hitting winter. Certainly the ski resorts would agree with me as they prepare to start their seasons, with photos from Tignes showing heavy dustings, whilst our friends in Oslo woke up to -7°c and sunshine this morning.
Still the good news is that it’s stopped raining. Until tomorrow. And Sunday.
But it’s not all gloomy news, some of it is trivial. This week I learnt that 205 million people follow Elon Musk on his now retitled Twitter platform. @elonmusk or Muskland (capital city Muskow, population 1) would be the 6th biggest country in the world, sliding between Brazil and Bangladesh. Whilst that sounds like quite a large population of Muskish, it is in fact only 2.5% of the world population so, happily, 97.5% of us aren’t really listening to him.
Whilst we’re still playing silly games, President Trump, before he was banned from Twitter, could have filled Turkey and Mauritius; Boris Johnson would populate Panama; Keir Starmer could almost fill Latvia whilst Joe Biden could inspire Morocco. Rachel Reeves’ empire, however, would include Greenland, Faeroe Islands, Saint Kitts & Nevis, American Samoa plus the Northern Mariana Islands… lots of jokes to be made from all this silliness, we’ll leave them up to you!
Slow news day in Wimbledon Park, you can probably tell.
So, as we had time on our hands, we thought we’d have a look at our branding. For over 10 years we’ve had a fairly solid message: the name Park Vintners is a simple yet effective description of what we are and where we do it; the logo (alright, you didn’t know we had a logo, I’ll tell marketing) is the corkscrew with the vine-leaf handle that doubles up as the ‘I’ in Vintners; our ‘motto’ – Wines with Personality is, again, simple yet effective.
So we thought we’d get rid of it all and re-brand ourselves as paRvin.
Parvin, from Persian mythology, is the name for the Pleiades constellation (also known as Seven Sisters), associated with the moon goddess, symbolizing beauty, radiance, and fertility – an obvious naming choice then for a wine shop in Wimbledon, or even Haringey.
We’ve scrapped our motto and replaced it with a depiction of the star cluster which has 7 stars on it, as you’d expect. To accentuate it, we’ve given it a periwinkle hued background and stuck a Union Jack in the corner (to confirm our provenance)… people may think it looks like the Australian flag but it’s obviously very different because the aussie flag has six stars, not seven…
We’ve also dropped the corkscrew logo because we’re now in a screwcap world and we want to push forward with our reinvention as we predict that 85 per cent of our customers in future will be new fans of our brand – younger affluent drivers looking for electric motors wine drinkers.
Basically everything you thought you knew about us, you now don’t – sound good?
Elsewhere, we hear that 800 people have been working on a radical redesign and re-branding at the car manufacturer currently known as Jaguar. This seems to mainly have involved erasing the past and destroying a story that has been almost 100 years in the making and actively looking to alienate your current customers – who would do such a madcap re-brand? Probably the same company that announced earlier this month that there will be no new cars available for purchase in the UK market until some point in 2026!
On reflection, perhaps best we don’t follow the Jaguar example…
In the world of quality booze, the trade magazines have little news to offer except for one morsel relating to Christmas drinking and which spirits will be most in demand – whisky leads the way as ever but the talking heads are also predicting a sharp rise in Rum, Tequila and Mezcal sales – invariably they get their predictions completely wrong, we’ll see if they stay true to form!
Here at the bottom of the hill, we’re starting to get a few more wines in for the festive season and we are also on the verge of completing our Christmas Cases which we’ll tell you more about next week, once November is pretty much done.
With this in mind, we’ll continue opening more seasonally focused wines over the coming weeks – this week I think we’ll go to Italy.
Poggio al Tesoro ‘Solosole’ Vermentino Toscana 2022 – £27.99 – This comes from the famous Bolgheri estate owned by the Allegrini family, next door to Ornellaia. Most famous for their reds, we’ve always really enjoyed this white. It’s crisp, fresh, with citrus and herb notes, a lovely texture and a great finish – a fabulous all-rounder, which at this time of year is exactly what we’re looking for!
Crociani Vino Nobile di Montepulciano 2021 – £24.99 – this is a perennial favourite of ours and indeed many of you and we just received the new vintage this week so thought we would get a bottle open! Made using local varieties, 80% Sangiovese, 10% Canaiolo and 10% Mammolo it has a distinct mineral and subtle oak influence from 24 months in Slavonian oak and a further two months in bottle. A delicate and intense nose, with a bouquet of pronounced notes of redcurrants and violets and a palate full of red fruit flavours of redcurrant, red cherries and spicy notes give us a very well-structured drop, with fine grained tannins and a long mouth filling finish.
That’s almost it from us but just three quick recommendations before we go:
- The Christ the King Christmas Fair is this Saturday from 11am until 3pm – you can pop in there on the way to us…
- The England Rugby team is playing against Japan on Sunday – which sadly clashes with the Palermo vs Sampdoria football match in the Italian Serie B – I’ll let you decide which to watch!
- Take a brolly!
Ciao Ciao!