I don't drink often but the wife is partial to wine, so when Hugh from gapingvoid was offering free wine for bloggers I thought I'd throw my name into the hat. The bottle arrived a couple of weeks ago, number 66 out of 75, complete with a Hugh designed booklet and a custom label with my name and url on it. Very nice indeed. Hugh's going for "marketing by guilt" with this one; the booklet (peter cooper took photos of it) talks about trying to raise a buzz for Stormhoek by blogging.

Thanks for signing up for your free bottle of Stormhoek. I hope you like it.

OK, so what's the point of all this? Sure, I suppose giving out a few bottles to some bloggers could potentially be quite good PR, etc etc. Maybe a few of you will blog about it. Maybe not. You never know.

"We sent you free booze, so talk about it". It's a bold approach, after all what if the wine sucks?

What was more interesting for me is the proposed label for the wine once it's released; they plan to have a "freshness" label, their best before date for wine. All this "let wine lie for years" is nonsense when it comes to the bottles you pick up in your local waitrose. The enclosed booklet explained the thoughts behind it and the adoration of screw top. I can remember screw top being the mark of cheap wine my parents bought (Blue Nun anyone? <g>). It's still a hard sell to convince people that a screw top isn't a mark of cheapness, but after corking bottles on quite a few occasions I much prefer the screw tops. Not that I know much about wine technicalities anyway, for that I'd suggest you start reading the spittoon blog which apparently is only half a mile down the road from where I live. The wonders of geourl.

So what about the actual wine? It was a sauvignon blanc, apparently different people got different types. To me it smelt of pears, and from the small sample I tried it tasted "fresh" and "crisp", if something can taste fresh and/or crisp. It looked wonderfully clear (no, I don't have a picture of that, it vanished too quickly). I liked it, I can see it going down well on a hot day with a crisp saled. The wife liked it too, she said she'd be happy enough buying it again at £4.99. Funny, I've not seen a price point mentioned anywhere.