The week in pictures

In DB news, the Wine & Spirits Show launches today!

Held in the heart of London at One Whitehall Place, part of the five-star Royal Horseguards hotel, the show is due to attract over 2,000 members of the general public, alongside members wine and spirits trade.

The show will have two separate spaces: one dedicated to wine and the other to spirits.

Inside these halls will be the Global Masters Zone and the Spirits Masters Zone, showcasing medal-winning wines and spirits from the competitions held by the drinks business and The Spirits Business throughout the year.

The event is open to both the trade and consumers, with a free trade session taking place on Friday from 1pm to 5pm. For those who have not yet registered, please enter your details here. For general tickets, please click here.

Congrats to Orlando Marzo, who was crowned The Diageo Reserve World Class World’s Best Bartender at the drinks giant’s competition finals in Berlin on Monday night.

In the 10th anniversary of the competition’s history, a series of challenges in the ‘Cocktail Clash’ saw Orlando battle it out with fellow finalists, GB’s Daniel Warren, USA’s Laura Newman and Turkey’s Gökhan Kuşoğlu for the award.

GB champion Warren was awarded second place in the competition, compèred by DJ and BBC personality Reggie Yates.

For one of the challenges, competitors where tasked with creating a classic serve with a twist from a spinning wheel, only giving them seconds to know which cocktail they would be creating, depending on which spirit the wheel landed on.

The next phase of the Grain to Grape seminar series took place on Tuesday evening at the Bloomsbury Club Bar in London, and this time Wine List Confidential’s man on the ground Niall Penlington rocked up to refresh his memory.

Wine consultant Harry Crowther knows that the world of wine can be intimidating for consumers and servers aline. Grain to Grape offers bartenders, and other non-wine focused members of the hospitality community, the chance to attend free, wine training sessions in a “safe and comfortable environment.”

This week in sustainability, single malt experts Glenmorganie have pledged to introduce 20,000 oystersinto the sea near the distiller’s Highland home, as part of a mission to restore oyster reefs fished to extinction a century ago.

Glenmorangie alongside its business partners brought 300 oysters to the protected waters, to test whether the oysters would survive at all. Now, for the second phase, they are to recreate entire reefs – the very first time this has been attempted anywhere in Europe.

Feel free to use this one as your screensaver.

What do you get if you cross Black Mirror and a supper club? Besides the novel I’m working on, this:

Charles Spence, Professor of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University, has teamed up with The Little Blue Door to create a series of Pleasure & Pain dinner parties which will be held over Halloween, specifically 31 October, 1 November and 2 November.

Like the novel I’m working on, the dinners will offer guests a “multi-sensorial dining experience, and each course will aim at titillating people’s senses through texture, colour, smell, flavour and music.” On the menu for the press launch on Tuesday night were such delightful treats as ham croquettes dusted in locust flour, Duvel Triple Hop served in serrated glasses, and fried whitebait served with a fish head (pictured).

Unlike the novel I’m working on, everyone’s still alive at the end.

Pierre-Emmanuel Taittinger, president of Champagne Taittinger and partner Patrick McGrath, managing director of Hatch Mansfield.

Pierre-Emmanuel Taittinger, President of Champagne Taittinger and partner Patrick McGrath, managing director of Hatch Mansfield, are celebrating the very first harvest at Domaine Evremond in deepest Kent.

Tattinger, you will remember, is the first big Champagne House to establish a vineyard in the UK to make premium English Sparkling wine. The Evremond vineyard is a joint venture between the Champagne house, its UK agency Hatch Mansfield Ltd, and a few friends.

It’s all very exciting, but we’re not going to get a taste of the good stuff just yet. Tattinger is doing everything by the book, from grape to glass, so the first wines from the vineyard should be released for drinking in 2023, after three years of ageing in bottle.

From Champagne to Bud Light, AB InBev has unveiled a new, automated warehouse at its largest UK brewery in Magor, South Wales in an effort to reduce the beer giant’s carbon footprint.

The “robo-warehouse”, which can store around 23 million pints of beer, builds on several green investments at the Welsh brewery, including a CO2 recovery system and a waste-to-energy power generator.

Robotic cranes operating across six stories and 9 miles of racking will be able to retrieve any one of the stored pallets in under 60 seconds.

Also in fancy new brewery news, up North, Cumbrian-based brewery Hawkshead unveils its new £3 million brewing facility today — hoping to treble its production capacity — and has now announced plans to expand into Asia, the Americas and Europe.

In Petty Neighbour news, A 24-year-old woman was arrested after re-enacting a scene from 1980s hit film Dirty Dancing in a Total Wine & More store in Florida after reports that two people were causing a disturbance.

Police officers were called to a Total Wine & More store in Martin County, Florida following reports that two people, who were believed to be intoxicated, were causing a disturbance.

The manager of the store subsequently reported that two people were “trying to re-enact a scene from the movie Dirty Dancing“.

The initial report did not specify the scene in question, although one can presume it may have been the famous lift, performed in the final minutes of the 1987 film.

(Back row l-r Nigel & Julie Rainbow, Three Horseshoes; Katrena Derricourt-Gibson, Catherine Wheel; Brakspear chief executive Tom Davies; Mark & Sandra Duggan, Chequers; David Thompson & Chris Peverell, Belgian Arms. Front row: Vanessa Cooke, Catherine Wheel; Julie & Hendrik Dutson-Steinfeld, White Horse.)

In Blighty, Christmas came early for a handful of Brakspear licensees who came up trumps at the pub group’s 2018 Hospitality Awards, each receiving a £500 cheque and plaque for display at their premises.