“Why do restaurants and chefs think they know better than their customers when it comes to alcohol-free wine and beer?”

It provoked a few responses.

One person replied “perhaps because they do, food and drink being their area of professional expertise?”

This is the same sort of thinking the leads to chefs refusing to cook a steak to the customer’s liking because the chef knows best.

Well, maybe the chef does know best, from a technical perspective, but from a taste perspective the only thing that matters is the taste-buds of the paying customer.

The same applies to drink.

If a customer wants an alcohol-free beer or wine, that’s what they want.

They don’t want water.

They don’t want cola.

And they don’t want yet another orange juice.

They want a good de-alcoholised Merlot, a fruity de-alcoholised Chardonnay or a great alcohol-free wheat beer.

Other people replied agreeing that they found it hard to find alcohol-free drinks when they went out, and they wanted the choice too.

One woman said she often phoned up before hand to find out if the restaurant sold any alcohol-free wine or beer.

Her husband doesn’t drink, and he isn’t alone. There are lots people like him around the country.

Pregnant women. Dieters. People on medication. People in recovery. Drivers. Workers on call. People of certain faiths.

There are lots of reasons people don’t drink.

As I said in my reply to her “yes & many people base their decisions on availability of alcohol-free for one or more in the group. no alcohol-free = lost sales”

We’ve had restaurants tell us they don’t sell alcohol-free wines because they don’t think they are good enough.

The chances are they haven’t tasted an alcohol-free wine since Eisberg, 20 years ago. We don’t sell Eisberg.

But even if they have tasted a good alcohol-free wine and still don’t like it, that isn’t the point.

We are testament to the fact people who drink alcohol-free wines like them.

We’ve been selling them for nearly 4 years. We sell a lot of them.

It’s like a restaurant refusing to sell anything but meat.

No one expects all restaurants to sell only vegetarian food. But they do expect a vegetarian option.

If you were a vegetarian in a group of meat eaters and the restaurant had nothing to offer you except beans on toast, you’d be understandably annoyed.

Especially if your fellow diners were tucking into the finest steak or lobster.

But when it comes to drinks, all we are offered are the beans on toast – the water, the orange juice, the cola.

We aren’t 10 years old. We don’t want soft-drinks.

We are adults. We want an adult drink with our adult food.

Is that really asking too much?

In this particular case the customer did order in plenty of time but things still managed to go wrong.

Whilst delivery problems are rare, it’s always best to order as early as possible because it at least gives us time to fix any problems that might occur. If you order the day before then all it takes is the delivery van to break down and your event is ruined.

To start the debacle off, our couriers managed to lose the customer’s order. It doesn’t happen often, but when you ship at lot of parcels it’s inevitable that the odd one will go missing in the system. Sometimes they are found the next day and delivered, but sometimes they are never found and we have to send out a replacement. That’s exactly what we did in this case. We sent out a replacement on Friday for special delivery on Saturday morning.

Would you believe it, our couriers managed to let us down again. Having lost the first one, they then failed to deliver the replacement on Saturday morning. At this stage, you can imagine just how embarrased we felt. We had promised the customer they would have their order twice now and twice we were let down by our couriers. It would have been bad enough had this been an existing customer who knew how good our service normally was, but it was a new customer and we all know how important first impressions are.

I can’t pretend we do this for every problematic delivery (although it’s certainly not the first time we’ve done it) but we decided we couldn’t let their event be spoiled so we got up early Sunday morning and drove down to Birmingham from Manchester with their 6 bottles of juice in the boot. They had to get it before 12 and we got there with plenty of time to spare.

We received a lovely email from them on the Tuesday thanking us for bringing the replacement down. They told us the football team (juniors) loved the juice, that they were really impressed with our service and that they would be ordering again in June for their awards evening. Hopefully this time our couriers (whoever they may be then…) will get it right first time and we won’t need another trip down to Birmingham!

That said, we decided to make a day of it and spent a lovely afternoon there and had a really nice day out. I’ve not been to Birmingham for about 10 years – it was Chris’s first visit – and they have certainly done a lot to the city in recent years. The canal area at Brindley Place was particularly nice. I think we’ll go back soon and spend a weekend there although hopefully not because he have to make a delivery!

I have a number of personal favourites but what I choose to drink depends on what mood I’m in and, over time, I might move from one to the other. I also go through phases of what type of drink I prefer. Currently I’m drinking mainly red wines. In the summer I may start drinking more whites and cider, and sometimes I’ll go through a beer phase. I’m sure many of you do the same.

My favourite red wines are currently Bonne Nouvelle Rouge and Romance en Rouge, both of which are dry, and Bonne Nouvelle Merlot which is nice and fruity.

Bonne Nouvelle Rouge

Bonne Nouvelle Rouge is a really nice, solid, dry red wine. It’s very drinkable and a perfect bottle to compliment a meal – especially meat – or to drink with cheese.

Romance en Rouge is slightly acidic, which really suits my tastes, although Christine finds it too tart for her palate (her favourite red is Weinkonig Merlot by the way).

The Bonne Nouvelle Merlot is delicious but it’s a tad thin. If it had the consistency of the Bonne Nouvelle Rouge it would be near perfect. All wines benefit from a swirl in a large glass to release the flavours and aromas but probably none more so in our current range than this merlot. A good swirl really sets the flavours free. If I open a bottle, it’s guaranteed to be finished that evening.

We had a new batch of Sutter Fre Merlot in this week and it’s changed from the 2007 Merlot to the 2008 Merlot. I’ve never been a fan of the Sutter wines, I find them too sweet, but many of our customers love them.

We’ll be running down the 2007 stock shortly and from then on it will be the new 2008 wine being shipped. I tasted some before and, whilst it’s still too sweet for me, I prefer the new one to the 2007.

If you are a fan of the 2007 merlot I’d suggest you order quickly before stocks go. And when you next re-order for the 2008 Sutter (which I’m sure you’ll love), why not try a few other reds too? Don’t forget, you don’t have to buy all the same wine, you can buy any of our wines by the bottle so you could buy 10 Sutter and add a couple of others to try.

And if you order twelve bottles or more, you can benefit from our free delivery service.