London Wine Fair - my favourite pictures ; plum, mulled wine, squirrels and Marilyn Monroe

Nyetimber bus. Of course as it's a London wine fair I have to start with a wonderful award winning wine from England.

Wine and Spirit Education Trust. A reminder of what I learned on my Level One course. How different wines paired with lemon or cheese or a sweet such as marshmallow will taste differently.

The free massage. Of course they want to sell you the machine at £149. The massage was really good, like three rotating golf balls either side of your neck or back or wherever you put the machine.

Speakers Corner

The audience members did blind tasting trying to guess the wine, whilst so did the speaker, Joe Wadsack. He told us what he looked for when guessing which wine it was. Red or white grape? Which grape? Aromatic or not? Which flavour? Tannic or acidic? From warm or cool climate country? If you can identify the grape, you know where it is likely to come from. Oak aged or not? My favourite wine was the sparkling white sweet Nyetimber wine, from England.

Origin colourful bottles and a stand with a tree. A major exporter from South Africa, now expending and innovating with wines sourced from other countries.

Plum wine from Japan on the stand showing Sake.

Red Squirrel wine. The rare red squirrel is beloved by the British. A recently set up company, 2012, specialise in importing unusual wines with unusual packaging.

Marilyn Monroe on label

Mulled wine from Forest Glow gives you a warm glow. (They were also smart enough to offer a free tasting of something on a cracker - a good move at wine fairs and in pubs, found everywhere at Tapas bars in Spain, and increasingly popular in England. Some people are willing to pay. Pubs which offer mulled wine and free food before lunch on Sundays in England in winter time are packed with drinkers who stay on to drink wine and dine.) 

Their wine is from Sweden, Europe, blended with fruit and flowers and spices.

More information from:

Nyetimber wine www.nyetimber.com

WSET Wine and Spirit Eduction Trust www.wsetglobal.com

Massager: www.begate.co.uk

http://www.marilynwines.com/WINES/MARILYN-MERLOT

Origin wines: www.origin

Plum wine and sake: Daishchi Sake Brewery Co Ltd 

Red Squirrel Wine: www.redsquirrelwine.agency

Mulled wine from Sweden: A Taste Of Ltd / Forest Glow www.forestglow.co.uk

If you are in the trade and missed this event, or want to read about the next one, it will be the 37th London Wine Fair, 22nd to 24th May 2017, again at Olympia, London, England. 

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.

Wonderful Wines For Weddings, Romance & Surprise Novelties: Icewine For Valentine's Day, Wedding Wines, Cork Showing Klee; label with Dirdl

1 Squashed Wine Bottles Displaying Business Cards
The Austrian wine show at the Institute of Directors in Pall Mall, London showed Austria's latest wines and wine related gifts. Business address cards were displayed on a flattened bottle. You can buy these bottles and use them to serve cheese and biscuits with wine.

For a special occasion such as a wedding, anniversary, Valentine's Day, birthday, or birth of a baby, you can have your wine or champagne bottle flattened afterwards as a souvenir. I found flat-bottles.co.uk . Their charge in Feb 2014 from the website was £12+£9 postage for a bottle without label. (You remove your label and save it and stick it back afterwards.)  With labels £18 plus postage. They also do champagne and beer bottles. Other sellers offer bottles as olive trays or spoon rests, with a wine quote (old wine like old friends  better with age) and personalised. The bottle in my picture was at the Austrian wine trade show in London and was made for Weingut Hellmer by an Austrian company. I thought it was flattened by www.mth.com.at but I haven't yet found the website. The bottle itself is from Weingut Hellmer, www.winzer-hellmer.at office email office@winzer-helmmer.at tel:+43 (0)2738/3149

2 Ice Wine In Icicle Thin Bottles
I loved the ultra sweet ice wines which have to be picked at night when the weather is icy, sold in a bottle slim as an icicle. I first found this delicious wine in New Zealand, then in Canada, and did not realise it was closer to home in Europe, from Austria. My favourite eisweins were by Lang; and by Zantho whose bottle labels feature the winery's local lizard.

 Lizard Logos On Bottles Of Sweet wine - how sweet!

For the lizard logo on bottles of ice wine www.zantho.com

3 Dirndl Dress On Labels
Wandering through the show was a girl wearing a wonderful iridescent skirt. The same outfit, a folk fashion of Eastern Austria, is worn by the girl pictured on bottles of wine. The Dirndl dress has a laced corset-style bodice, a full circular skirt, and often a white puff sleeve blouse, skirt lengths varying from knee length to ankle length. You can buy these dresses in various colours for girls of all ages from babies to brides up to grannies, and co-ordinating lederhosen for boys and granddads too.

This wine with its wonderful label is brand new, so they are looking for importers to the UK. If you want to buy a dirndl dress, google dirndl or Salzburger dirndl. The pretty dirndl dress featured in the film Sound of Music so many little girls would love to have one. I met Bianca, above, the daughter-in-law of the people who run the winery.

More details of the wines from www.schmelzweine.at

info@schmelzweine

t:+43 (2715) 2435. 

4 Klee Paintings on Corks & Labels
Another novelty is a portrait from a Klee painting on a cork. Klee was an Austrian painter. The whole painting is shown on a wine label.

For the klee labels and corks check out wwww.szigeti.at

5 New Baby Bottles With Hearts and Keys For Valentine's Day and Weddings
The same company makes miniature bottles, the smallest bottles in the world, holding just a glassful of wine, 125 cl, with trinkets around the bottle neck as gifts. You can have little hearts or keys. Or anything you want to order. The bottles come in conventional colours or silver.

More Details From:

For the bubbly bomb baby bottles, with Bubbly Bomb Vienna designs, Bubbly Bomb Christmas Designs, Bubbly Bomb Wedding Designs - www.szigeti.at

You can buy the bubble bottles from Selfridges, Conran, the British Library or from the producers' website. They specialise in sparkling wines. The bottles with the hearts and keys cost about £8.99, while the ones with silver bottles and pink ribbon are about £12.99.

www.austrianwine.com

For anybody in the trade some more details:

Szigeti, Am Anger 31, 7122 Gols

T: +43 (2173) 2167 F: +43 173) 2514

E:sektkellerei@szigeti.at

W:www.szigeti.at

Contact: Hans-Peter Hofmann

Importer Grays & Feather Ltd.

Haider & Malloth make little lightweight glassy coloured printed papers to go under glasses (in German Glasuntersetzer) Vol.1.

They also double as circular business cards for their marketing staff:

Christopher Malloth MSc, marketing und Sales, Haider & Malloth OG, Am Schrandlsee 2, 7142 Illmitz, Austria.

www.weingut-haider-malloth.at

tel:+43 1 512 29 90-0

More details from:

Facebook: www.austrianwine.com/facebook

Twitter: www.twitter.com/austrianwine

Austrian Wine Marketing Board

www.austrianwine.com

Visit their Webshop shop.oesterreichwein.at

info@austrianwine.com

Next year I hope to go back to their trade show and taste the other sweet wines I missed by wineries: Fritsch; Haider & Malloth Weinkellerei OG; Etz; and Weubrueder

WINE QUOTATIONS

Finally a few quotations on wine:

A glass of wine and thou.

Drink, drink, drink. (Drinking song.)

In vino veritas.

In victory you deserve it; in defeat you need it. (Napoleon on Champagne.) 

Wine, women and song.

Angela Lansbury is the author of Quick Quotations which you can buy on line from lulu.com