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.

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.

outono

Chegou o outono que quase parece inverno. Frio, chuvoso, cinzento, maravilhoso. As videiras ainda têm muitas folhas e a cor apenas começa a mudar. Mas a cor da paisagem é térrea, castanha e verde de erva fresca e de solo cavado.

EWBC2009

I am back home from 4 extraordinary days at the EUROPEAN WINE BLOGGERS CONFERENCE 2009. I feel almost like a blogger!!!
I do not have a single photo (big mistake) but my head is full of the faces present. Many thanks to the organizers, sponsors, participants.
sao

Life delayed / Life goes on

A week spent in the north of Portugal, on my mother’s vineyard. Having gone with so many plans and ambitions, much time was wasted, distracted by impossible fantasies, and lost moments of staring into space.

One of my many cousins picked me up from the airport in Oporto and we drove to the depths of beauty and seeming nowhereness that is the Douro Valley. He’s a strapping young (gentle)man of 25, and off to do a PhD in biochemistry in the Netherlands, where his younger brother is also embarking on an exciting career as a dancer.

My 88-year-old bedridden grandmother commanded her usual authority from her abode, while we strained to make her comfortable and maintain an acceptable level of dignity, sitting her up, taking her her meals, remembering to give her her medicine. I was stoical about it, but also disturbed by the perceived constant presence of death, and the anxiety brought about by the feeling of life trickling away, and life without an apparent purpose. Back in London, in a whole other environment, I wondered if I was proud of what I had done, and concluded that no, it just had to be gotten on with.

One of my plans had been to re-do some of the walks that Michelle and I had mapped last year. But I only got around to doing one walk, down to the river from my grandmother’s farm, and up again, including part of the path that my mother used to cover daily when, as a child, she used to go to school nearby.