terça-feira, 23 de março de 2010

On your marks, get set, sell!

As winter turns into spring in Lisbon, the marketing of Terrus gets into full swing.

After having spent several years in the UK, I am now based in Lisbon and spend part of my time marketing and therefore trying to sell my mother’s wine (for a salary, I would like to add). My new role started in practice last Friday. Not quite knowing where to begin, I consulted the 2010 edition of João Paulo Martins’ Vinhos de Portugal (the Portuguese wine bible). Other than having a pretty good rating of Terrus, it also has a list of wine shops, in Portugal and abroad. I started off with the former, narrowing it down to Lisbon and surroundings, and started calling places, asking them whether I could go by and introduce the wine to them. And so that is what I have done these past two days. Targets have ranged from new, snazzy gourmet food & wine shops, to traditional Portuguese garrafeiras.

I take a bottle and information about the wine, give a little introduction and answer any questions my interlocutor might have. I thought some people would want to try the wine there and then, but that has not been the case. I have walked up and down Lisbon’s hilly streets, and have gotten to know the city better. The few longer conversations I have had with merchants have also been very interesting and instructive.

We shall see what fruits my labour bears.

Next I’ll most likely be getting in touch with restaurants and wine bars.

quarta-feira, 17 de março de 2010

Well, the photo is here and it was sent from the mobile phone! Miracle!

So I will try again. This one is of my good dear friend Leslie (I hope she does not mind), taken in London, on a cold wet dark evening, when we were having a glass of wine in a bar in Hampsthead and talking wine and families, mainly.


Ah! This time it did not work.

Yesterday I went to see the film The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Some wine drinking there but not a lot. I had read the book and knew what to expect and the violence was not overdone, not compared with the original, which the film follows closely. It was good, very good. In Swedish with subtitles, very civilized.

This sounds more like a diary than a blog. But what is a blog supposed to be? Having been to the conference in Lisbon last year I should know. Catavino will scold me and send me back to school!

Now let us try another photo, one intended for the site, of me and TERRUS.
Ah. did not work again. Time for lunch, and then for siesta.



2010 catching up with me

Procrastination! Procrastination! One of my favorite words...
Now I can hardly remember what went by in the meantime. Several trips to the Douro, attendance at Wine Pleasures Barcelona to meet with possible buyers, the same to Algarvini, both useful for contacts and to breath the specific thick air of wine events. And this permanent nagging feeling that this is a language that I did not learn, not at home in my mother's lap, not in the village school I attended with a really blackboard, not through all my education. And yet I try.
Whom am I writing to? To myself of course, at this stage. To the screen. To Eva, who will check and most likely criticize! And to Catia, who noticed the void.