Benjamin Tirone Nunes

This week I had the pleasure of visiting the London International Wine Fair (LIWF) and having a great dinner with some wine personalities.

It was a great Tuesday and Thursday for me this week as I got to see a bit of a world I’d only heard of. During these days I met wine makers, bloggers, distributers, as well as people studying wine related subjects and just generally wine enthusiasts. It was a great experience for three main reasons: People, Wine and Work.

Though people are the most important, I’ll talk about that last, and give wine precedence. This week I’ve tried roughly thirty different wines some of which were just utterly amazing, others…not so much. I don’t really know their names, so don’t ask me, for that I’ll redirect you to adegga.com and catavino.net. I really hadn’t noticed the great discrepancies in taste and smell of wine before, how some can just invade your nose and others dominate your mouth. How some can leave your mouth dry, and others just overload you on sugar. A new friend of mine, Ryan O’Connell a winemaker in southern France, made me realize something which for me is just amazing, wine is a great art. Yet unlike most arts the job of the artist doesn’t come in the form of inventing, but interpreting. When you look at it simply, the agriculture and manipulation of the grape doesn’t seem like much, but when you smell and taste all the different outcomes, it seriously convinces you, or at least it did me. Where as we think of art in a more pen on paper or image reproduction thing, it is really creativity that involves any of our senses, and what better than one that affects two different ones? I really recommend visiting those websites because those people know their stuff, while I, when it comes to wine, am just a plus one.

The second thing was work. During the week that my friend from Adegga was here he didn’t stop while at the conference. From doing presentations to establishing networks, getting contacts and making deals, he achieved a lot and came out very happy. My friend Ryan O’Connell got into contact with distributers so that he could sell more of his wine. Naked wines did a ‘little’ competition (based on consumer opinion) which led to a wine maker selling all the crates she had available of one wine at the time more or less overnight online. There is example after example of energy flowing so well, excitement and deals being struck. The atmosphere was amazing, everyone was buzzing, and at the end most people came out winning. Even I got a potential job offer for my work placement year.

Lastly the people. I don’t know if it’s the wine or the blogging, but the people at the dinner and at the ‘Access Zone’ of the LIWF were electrifying and just nice people. They got you pumped up, trying wine, and were always smiling, happy and nice. At the Wine Bloggers Dinner, I got to talk to people better and my reaction after all the wine and talking is just that it is indescribable. There were many examples for all of this, and I won’t get much into it, but the topics ranged from anything at all to anything else. Wine, work, life stories, boobs, blogs, wine, photography, food and some more wine were just some of the examples, and I have to say, Farringdon is a really nice area.

Well, that was my week, I had a lot of fun, I thank all the people I met for the great time, but especially André, who was a guest at my house, and invited me into this world. This is one memory to keep; I wish I just gave the writing a little more thought, especially the last part.