With Red Nose Day (last Friday) behind us, and many donations yet to be received and counted, we can say that it looks highly likely that our target of £2 million raised from the four Wine Relief campaigns so far of 1999, 2001, 2003 and 2005 has been achieved. On Friday, a conservative estimate for the 2005 total of £625,000 was announced on the BBC's evening of wall-to-wall fundraising through humour and pathos which just about does it – but there is so much yet to be counted.
Our Classic Wine Dinner for a start, for which a kind London-based wine enthusiast has already bid £6,000. You have just one more day to better this total!
The major retailers and some of the brand owners have been quite wonderfully supportive this year, making the really big impact on the total raise. But what I have been really delighted about this year is how many very varied people have done something – from Justerini & Brooks at the smart end of the wine trade, to my sister in law and her wine tasting party in Glasgow which raised more than £500 and our fellow wine tasters at Gidleigh who generously donated a total of more than £700 to participate in a blind tasting competition, via Neal Martin of the inspired blog www.wine-journal.com who has offered up himself and lunch at a Burger King for auction and managed to extract a bid of £175 for it. Click here to read more of his delightful nonsense.
Very, very many congratulations to all who have been involved in this, including those featured already in Wine Relief Parts 1-7 on these pages. Knowing Comic Relief as well as I do I am absolutely confident that the money is spent well and extremely wisely on truly worthwhile work in Africa and to a lesser extent the UK - and not a penny raised goes on overheads. Don't forget – there's still time to give at www.comicrelief.com, or top that £6,000 (or £175) bid!