Thank you.
The end of the year is approaching so I wanted to take the occasion to say a big thank you!
Thank you – to all readers and visitor on the site! We now have 16,000 subscribers to the BKWine Brief and more than 30,000 “unique” visitors per month on the site. And thank you for letting other know about the newsletter and the site so even more read it!
Thank you – to all participants on our tours. This year we’ve done almost 25 wine tours, taking some 400 people around the wine regions – today probably one of the leading organisers of wine and gastronomy travel. Today we do tours in several different languages: English, Swedish, Finnish and others on request. We have travellers coming from a bit all over the world, even if the majority still come from Scandinavia. We have both scheduled tours on our “public” program as well as a lot of custom made tours. And the best of all, I think, is that many of the customers we have become “addicted” and come back on new tours!
Thank you – to all of the people I work and collaborate with and who make it possible to develop the business: Kay, Martin, Asa, Peter, Astrid, Esther, Graham, Hasse, Tommy, Helen, David, Gabriela, Marianne,… and no doubt some that I have forgotten to include on the list. Some of you contribute by being in charge of tour management on some trips, others contribute with marketing or contents or other things. And thank you too to Per, my husband, the other “half” of BKWine.
I hope that you are all as happy with 2007 as I am and look forward to next year!
Projects 2008
And next year will be exciting. There are lots of project on the table. First of all I will be making even more wine tours, both scheduled and custom tours – let me know if you are interested!
And here are some other projects in the pipeline:
— More tours in English – we want to do even more English language wine and gastronomy tours. To be honest, it is a market that it takes quite some effort to get into but I believe we have a high quality product that could find many customers – in the UK, in the US or from any other country where people speak English. Perhaps you know someone who would be interested?
— New website – Well, this is a long term project perhaps… I know that the site is very “old” (designed more than 5 years ago!) and not very user-friendly. We want to change that and make it easier to use, easier to find information, easier to manage, make it possible for you to contribute,… But it’s a big project and we’re not yet sure how to go about it. Perhaps you do?
— More custom made travel – We want to develop the activity with specially designed tours, exactly according to your requirement. This can be for a private wine club, a company get-together, an incentive event, customer conferences, specifically educational tours and events (e.g. for wine professionals and restaurateurs and also for “amateurs”) and much more. Let me know if you are interested.
— BKWine TV?! Everyone has to try video these days so we’ve started recording interviews with wine personalities and visits to vineyards. We already have ten hours of recordings so the big question is when we’ll get the time to edit it and put it online. But we will publish more wine video clips over next year (we already have a YouTube channel). Perhaps we can find a video “stagiaire” to help…
— More wine writing – We just did our first book and it is itching to make a second. We have several new ideas! But we also want to publish more articles in magazines. We already contribute to several Scandinavian wine, food and lifestyle magazines and to some English language publications, but we’d love to do more. So, calling all editors out there – we’ll be happy to work with you!
— More photography – we have a substantial backlog with wine pictures waiting to be processed. We visit some 200 wineries each year so we produce quite a few thousand pictures. Per says he wants a photo assistant as Christmas gift. I’m not so sure…
— and much more.
And then we’ll take a day vacation over Christmas perhaps.
Christmas Gifts
Talking about Christmas – here are some suggestions for Christmas gifts: The best gift of all is of course a wine tour to someone you like (or to yourself). We can make you a specially designed gift card and let us know if you will be celebrating something special when you arrive (wedding, birthday….). We’ll organise something special on site.
Take a look at our Truffles, Foie Gras and Wine tour in February and our “Three Classics” to Champagne, Chablis and Burgundy in June!
Another gift idea is one of the wine books we write about in the book review section in this Brief: Portugal, Tokaj, or even the whole world. Or take a look on our book page on the site for more reviews.
Or you could get the USBWine computer accessory that lets you download a selection of wine to a USB device.
Happy reading with this month’s BKWine Brief.
Britt
PS: Read more in the full BKWine Brief newsletter
