Paxton & Whitfield and Taylor’s Port recently held an event at Paxton’s headquarters to offer some guidance on those all-important Port and cheese purchases for the festive season.

That idea of “ beauty of fatigue and thrill of conquest ….” Giancarlo Brocci

On October 7th 2018 , Andrew Hawes , Justin Liddle and Alan Montague-Dennis travelled to Pisa with their vintage steel bicycles  to join our Italian agency Principals , Ciacci Piccolomoni D’Aragona to form “Team Ciacci” and participate in L’Eroica di Gaiole.

Last weekend from Friday 15th June thousands of lovers of vintage cycling, Great British life, fashion and wine flocked to Friden Grange in the Peak District for the fifth annual Eroica Britannia.

On a recent visit to Riga Mentzendorff’s Ruta Barulyte visited the home of Mentzendorff Kummel…

In mid-September Justin Liddle, Andrew Hawes, James Dodsworth & James McKenna travelled to Alsace for a meeting with Chapoutier at Schieferkopf where Michel Chapoutier and four friends, all, like him, passionate about great grape varieties and great terroirs, decided to turn their dream of “making a fine Riesling in Alsace together” into reality.

As a huge fan of Sherry and with a keen interest in horse racing, I was very excited to have been invited to The Famous Carreras de Caballos ‘Horse Racing’ as a guest of Bodegas Hidalgo La-Gitana.

The Carreras de Caballos is held on the beaches of Sanlucar de Barrameda, but how exactly the races started is unclear. One story is that fish buyers raced the horses along the beach as they waited for trawlers to bring in their haul to the port. What is known is that a horse racing society was established in Sanlucar in 1845, creating a tradition that would become a part of the city’s cultural fabric.

Earlier this year, the Sales & Marketing Teams plus the Management Team gathered at Heathrow airport for their early evening flight to Marseille for their annual Sales & Marketing conference at Chateau des Ferrages, newly acquired by M Chapoutier in January 2016.

As a huge sherry enthusiast, I was very excited about my first trip to Sanlucar and Jerez to visit Bodegas Hidalgo. Still family owned and run, Hidalgo has recently been taken over by the 8th generation of the family and is run by four brothers – Luis, Antonio, Juan and Fermin. Being the 9th oldest company in Spain, and the 3rd oldest sherry bodega, Bodegas Hidalgo has fantastic heritage and is among the top 500 oldest companies in the world.

At the beginning of March a small group travelled from London to Aÿ to experience the 2016 vins clairs tastings at Champagne Bollinger & Champagne Ayala. The vins clairs is a unique opportunity to discover the first expressions of a harvest and understand the essence of the Ayala and Bollinger style.

Setting off from Adelaide airport, we drove our rental car 139 km north along the Harrocks Highway to the main town of Clare. The initial drive north consisted of sweep pastoral scenes with rolling green hillsides populated by sheep and Gum trees. Once we reached the town of Auburn, this then changed to vineyards. Here is where the Clare Valley starts, at 250m above sea level, it continues north through the main towns of Watervale, Pentwortham, Sevenhills and finally Clare.