​“A goal is a dream with a deadline” – Napoleon Hill.
Not THE Napoleon but with a first name like that, who cares?
It was our last week together for a while at AHW HQ as Dario flies back to Italy now having enjoyed Christmas in England. He’ll be visiting new vineyards and sampling wines for our next collection (poor darling!).
So talking of goals, or should I say dreams with long overdue deadlines, it was time to hire a photographer to make our beautiful bottles and their labels really come alive. We wanted an urban, contemporary, modern look that’s right for our site, our wines and our consumers .......would love to know what you think of the new images.....?
Tim, our wonderful photographer (www.timmartinphotography.co.uk), talked about the main product shot as the ‘hero’ shot and as the day progressed, we realised that our ‘babies’ - the bottles of wine that we have spent months carefully selecting from particular vineyards and which have eventually made the grade through our ruthless editing, cold-hearted culling and rigorous criteria-setting – had now become our ‘heroes’! They were handsome hotshots standing proud in the darkened set-up that Tim fashioned; lined up for their group shots they stood together like the cast of ‘Ocean’s Eleven’ – all superstars in their own right and pure box-office-gold as a whole (The Mixed Case).
Oh dear, have I been swept away by Oscar fever?

“Nothing more excellent or valuable than wine was ever granted by the gods to man” – Plato.
Well said Plato! No going 'Dry January' for me. No, no, far too much wine tasting for that to happen. You see, I’m still learning about wine (thankfully one of those subjects that can happily keep you going for a lifetime – or less depending on whether you spit or swallow….!)
And, I’m discovering just what a diligent student I can be – thoroughly dedicated to the cause.
So, the business has been well and truly embarked upon, website is live (obviously) and has had its initial hiccups (I’m sure there’ll be plenty more of those). We have all got our long lists of stuff to do at AHW HQ: there’s marketing, marketing and more marketing to be done, new vineyards to approach, some professional photography to organise and the year ahead’s calendar to plan (mainly consisting of ‘discussion’ about who gets to go to Italy when?). All this, while keeping sales buoyant in the face of some killjoy’s idea of national austerity measures (aka Dry Jan).
Despite not going dry for January (or any other time of the year for that matter), it can still be a long, difficult month so I’m employing the following tactics to fool my way through it….What works for you?

• Keeping my Christmas Tree going as long as possible. All the coloured baubles are gone so now it is my chic January Tree with fairy lights instead of a sad, bare corner. It’ll probably shed all needles by the time I’ve written this and I shall have to embrace sad, bare corners…
• Not feeling guilty about wanting to spend whole evenings just snuggled down on the sofa with a delicious glass of Cascina Albano’s Barbera and husband (not necessarily in that order) to watch more than one episode of a series at a time. It does get dark early!
• A slice of toasted pannettone with butter for breakfast.
• Sheepskin slippers without socks.
• Lying in at the weekend with a pile of lovely new books and magazines which include:

Fernandez & Wells 'Rustic'
Kinfolk's 'The Kinfolk Home'
Garance Dore's 'Love x Style x Life'
Elle Decoration's 'The Trend Issue'
Ellie Tennant's 'Chic Boutiquers at Home'