Back home...

I’ve just had my longest-ever separation from this site – 10 days in a beautiful beach house on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean off the south east coast of Africa – and am now back in London ready to start the New Year fully refreshed. It was so lovely to spend time doing nothing much other than reading (see above) and discovering an entirely new land and culture with our children. We did speak occasionally,

 

Yes of course I took my laptop on this family holiday (only our third-ever Christmas away from home and the first for 12 years) and have to confess that I felt almost grateful when I found there was no way of getting online in our rented house. I was helped enormously in this by the fact that I knew that the site was in Julia’s very capable hands. Thank you, Julia. She will be taking a well-earned week’s holiday in Chile next month after judging the 2008 Wines of Chile Awards. The southern hemisphere holds great attractions for us northerners at this time of year.

 

Now that we’re all back, the family distribution centre for our new Vintners’ Tales DVD is operative once more, so you can buy this exclusive 90-minute compilation of film portraits of nine strong characters in and around the British wine trade once more here (just as soon as Subhub have reopened our online store).

 

See my description of our Christmas celebrations which culminated in what we pretended was Christmas Day yesterday here back home in London. 

My best Christmas present is pictured below and resulted in a video, the first of what I intend to be many of much more interest to wine lovers, all courtesy of purple pager Peter Bradbury of Merseyside who, reading my enthusiastic comments about the new Flip Video here, asked his nephew in California, marketing director of Pure Digital Technologies who produce Flip Video, to send me one since this miraculously user-friendly product is not yet available in the UK.

 

You can buy one from $150 in the US or online at www.theflip.com and they are planning to launch in the UK in summer 2008. I cannot recommend this blissfully portable camcorder highly enough. Setting it up is so miraculously intuitive and simple, as is operating it. It just plugs into your USB port and from there you can email videos, publish them online or view them on your tv. I can’t wait to use it to interview wine people. Typical that after a frantic autumn of travel I am not planning any wine trips in the next two or three months… Nevertheless, I can assure you that l will do my best to put this fantastically useful new invention, the size of a cigarette packet, to good use. 

Lastly of course, I wish you all the very best possible celebrations of the New Year. We're still getting over jetlag so are planning to celebrate New Year's Night rather than New Year's Eve. Very many thanks to all those who have contributed to this thread on members' forum started by Martin Nettleton on bottles opened and food enjoyed over these holidays. Please keep all these fascinating reports and observations flowing in.