.
I know things are getting a bit much when I make time to have my nails done. It gives me at least an hour to concentrate on sitting still. I spend a lot of that time wondering what my nails are going to look like when I walk out the door. If the state of the beautician’s fingers is anything to go by my hands will have aged a decade and be flaking at the tips.
The distance between painting nails for a living and giving a monkey about your own reminds me of a friend whose dad was a handyman but spent her childhood in a house full of odd jobs that needed doing. There are people that work to live, others that live to work, and then there are the lucky few aboard the ultimate busman’s holiday who rarely distinguish between the two.
Like me.
As a lot of you know, and a lot of you probably don’t, the line between my work and play is a very hazy one. Not in a Saturday night one-glass-too-many sort of way of course but in the way that wine touches most parts of my day. Whether it’s professional to pay the bills, educational to quench my thirst for wine knowledge, as a hobby for my blog or in play out with friends. Wine makes my living, it gets me up in the morning, I read about it, I write about it, I talk about it. I get invited to wine tastings as a writer and blogger, I get invited to wine tastings commercially as a Buyer, I speak to traditional wine journalists to promote the wines of the importer I work for, I’ve held wine tastings for the public and for corporate clients to spread my enthusiasm to others. I’ve been paid to talk about wine on the radio, heck I even created a wine app for the iPhone! But you know the most important thing of all?
I drink wine.
Confessing to have such a multifaceted interest in wine won’t please some, but in doing so I hope it highlights my point. We’re all in this trade for the love of wine and it’s time the trade woke up and smelt the bouquet; it’s not about them and us. It’s we.
Segmenting wine people in this simplistic way is a rookie marketers tool of choice but as an insider to the inaugural campaign of the almost brilliant National Wine Month whose sole purpose was to raise the profile of wine, it is exactly this sort of segmentation in an industry like ours, in a time like today, that is at the heart of a trade confessed and obsessed with its own inability to speak to its consumers.
We’re all wine ambassadors, you and I, us and them. We. A number of the world’s wine trade have already hitched a ride, but there are several empty seats and they’re allocated to the UK. This bus knows exactly which way the future of wine communication is heading. First stop? 1st May, Central London, The Thinking Girls Wine Night.
All aboard??
Bouquet bisous to Charles Saunders who kindly donated the cartoon above from his ever amusing The Quaffable Comic Strip.
