Christmas is fast approaching! There’s still time to find the
perfect Christmas gift idea for your favourite wine lover. The Gourmet Odyssey
Wine Experience gift packs can be ordered up until the 19th December for most European deliveries and up until the 20th December within France. And for those who wait to buy a
very last minute Christmas present, we can send an email copy of the gift certificate for orders received before the midday French time on the 24th December.
Adopting a vine for Christmas is an original personalised gift idea. And with our award-winning organic winemaker partners, you’re sure to find the perfect gift. Your recipient will follow the making of their own organic French wine and will end up with their own personalised bottles of wine when their Wine Experience finishes.
Your Christmas gift becomes even more special if you include a Wine Experience day at the winery to meet the winemakers. The Discovery Experience Day will teach you all about the work to prepare the vines and nurture the grapes. The Harvest Experience Day will get you involved in picking the grapes, following their journey into the vats, and learning about the first stages of fermentation. The Vinification Experience Day will reveal the choices that the winemaker takes in the cellar to make and age the wines. These three wine courses last a full day from 09:30 to 16:00, and are designed to be hands-on so that you can learn by participating alongside and interacting with the winemaker. Wine tasting and lunch are included in the package.
To have a present to put underneath the Christmas tree, our personalised gift boxes contain a wine cooler bag, drop stop, re-usable glass wine stopper, and a personalised vine adoption certificate. Pull out all the corks this Christmas!
More information about the Christmas delivery schedule for 2017
More information about the Gourmet Odyssey Wine Experience
This week sees the start of the end of year wine fairs, where our
partner winemakers will be touring France to share their latest wines. Put the dates in your diaries and come and taste their wonderful organic wines!
Domaine de la Guicharde – Côtes du Rhône
Domaine Chapelle – Burgundy
- 27-29 October – 17ème Rencontres Oenologiques – Abbaye des Prémontés, Pont-Mousson (54).
- 27-28 October – Foire aux Vins – La Cave, 11 Rue de Stang Bihan, Quimper (29).
- 4 November – Biennale des Bourgognes – Loire sur Rhône (69), salle polyvalente.
- 10-12 November – Salon des vins et produits de Terroir – Sevrier (74).
- 15-17 November – Private wine tasting at the Hôtel Napoléon – Paris, 40 Avenue de Friedland. To receive an invitation, please contact us.
- 24-26 November - Natura Bio – Salon des Vins Bio – Lille, Grand Palais. Click here for a free invitation.
Domaine Stentz-Buecher - Alsace
- 18-19 November– Salon Ô l’Amour - Mulhouse, DMC.
- 29 November – 4 December – Salon des Vignerons Indépendants - Paris, Porte de Versailles, Stand K34.
- 1-16 December, Alsace Christmas market (marché de Noël Alsacien), Paris - Parvis de la Gare de l’Est (in front of the Gare de l’Est train station).
Château Coutet - Saint-Emilion
Domaine la Cabotte – Côtes du Rhône
- 2-3 December, Open day and wine tasting at Domaine la Cabotte : champagnes from Domaine Jean-Marie Massonnot, Burgundy wines from Domaine d'Ardhuy and Côtes-du-Rhône wines from Domaine la Cabotte – Domaine la Cabotte, lieu-dit Derboux, Mondragon. Free entrance.
Château de la Bonnelière – Loire Valley
Château Beau Rivage - Bordeaux
The Gourmet Odyssey partner wineries look forward to meeting and sharing their wines with you!
The annual quest to find an original Mother’s Day present is once again upon us. If your mum is a wine lover, we might have the perfect gift for her. Adopt some vines in France in an organic French vineyard, and she’ll get to follow the making of her own organic wine from the work in the vineyard to the bottling of her own personalised bottles of wine.
The
Gourmet Odyssey Wine Experience is a great Mother’s Day gift idea that will let her in behind the scenes to learn all about the art of winemaking. She’ll receive an adopt-a-vine welcome gift pack to have something to open straight away, and then thanks to the newsletters and photos from the winemaker, she’ll follow all the key stages in the vineyard and cellar, and will be able to personalise the labels for her bottles of wine.
And if you think she’ll enjoy a short break in France to explore one of France’s wine growing regions, and actually get involved in helping to make her wine, you can include, or she can add at a later date, a
Discovery,
Harvest or
Vinification Experience Day at her chosen winery. Each Experience Day is valid for two people, with a winemaker’s lunch of regional delicacies and wine tasting included.
All of our partner wineries are organically certified, and are selected for the quality of their wine and the enthusiasm of the winemakers to share their passion for wine and how it is made. One thing is for sure. At the end of her Wine Experience gift, your Mum will appreciate wine in a whole new light, once she has learnt about all of the hard work, skill, love and effort that has gone into making her personalised bottles of wine.
Our welcome gift packs are delivered within two working days in France and 2-5 days for the rest of Europe depending on the country and delivery option selected. For those last minute Mother’s Day gifts, a personalised adopt-a-vine certificate can be emailed.
So go on, and spoil your Mum this year with her own mini plot of vines in France. It’s sure to be a Mother’s Day gift that she won’t be expecting!
Next week wine professionals from around the world will gather together in Montpellier for the
Millésime Bio 2016 organic wine fair. The
Challenge Millésime Bio wine competition is also run for the event, and this year saw three of our partner winemakers win medals.
This international wine competition receives more than 1200 wine samples from France and from others countries around the world. It is always presided over by a well known personality from the professional wine world, and this year the Jury President was Lars Torstenson, a Swedish oenologist based in Provence for the past 25 years, and who travels the world tasting wines for his job.
The tasting of the 1392 wines presented this year took place on the 12th January, and the jury awarded 419 medals:
- 136 gold medals
- 172 silver medals
- 111 bronze medals
Our partner winemakers once again figured amongst the winners of this prestigious organic wine competition:
- The Clos la Bohème (Haut-Médoc) 2012 from Château Beau Rivage, near Bordeaux, won a gold medal
- Domaine la Cabotte in the Rhone Valley saw their Garance (Côtes du Rhône Village Massif d'Uchaux) 2014 awarded a silver medal. This is also the wine chosen by Gourmet Odyssey for the Wine Experience!
- Domaine Chapelle in Burgundy received a bronze medal for their Chassagne-Montrachet Premier Cru Morgeot 2013 red wine.
Congratulations to all
Other Millesime Bio related posts
Awards at the 2015 Millésime Bio fair
Being an organic winemaker
