Archive for the ‘Park Lane Champagne’ Category
Wedding champagne
Wednesday, August 18th, 2010Funny Old World
Saturday, April 17th, 2010
Amid all the Election fever - and are those party leader live debates a good thing? - I never predicted a surge in champagne demand from nearly every category of customer we deal with; strange but true!
Maybe it is the time of year; maybe it is collective joy at emerging from the toughest winter for thirty years, or maybe some of those economic green shoots are for real as opposed to imaginary?
Either way, busy busy in Epernay - field report from France next week when I visit our producers - and busy busy in the UK. At Park Lane, personalised champagne orders and enquiries continue to arrive at all times of day and night - which is just SO exciting! I know the internet never sleeps, but why are some users never sleeping either?!
The build process for the totally new website is underway and we should be live testing in June. This site will offer depth and breadth so usability will be much much better - and thank you to everyone who does send feedback to us as this really does make a difference.
The technological advance also includes state of the art label production on the very best material available coming soon. This new equipment and technology is an enormous leap - think Rolls Royce Phantom from Rolls Royce Silver Ghost (both brilliant in their context) - and is fabulously exciting for us. 
The quality of the personalised champagne labels will actually be better than photograph output from next month so what more of an excuse is needed to break out the bubbly?
I am delighted to announce that James Ingle will be joining the team from 10 May to concentrate on building and reinforcing the bridges we maintain with all our corporate customers. James is a hugely dedicated and capable gentleman and, above all, someone you really want around as he is just so nice! The Park Lane quality and service ethos is second nature to James and I know he will be very popular with customers and fellow employees alike.
And what about the Premier League football shoot out? 
As I have said before, we love working for Barclays Capital as league sponsors but there is certainly something of a sweat on at the moment within the BarCap sponsorship team: at the time of writing, any one of the three league leaders could carry the trophy away! Barclays contingency plans - obviously including personalised champagne! - are being drafted for winning presentations at any of the three possible grounds. A bit like the apparent Buckingham Palace contingency plans for funerals of leading Royals - except rather less gloomy and with less obscure project names!
As a regular importer of goods from France, there is a certain satisfaction to me that the delicious Hélèna (and hubby Patrik) are buying 20 of our highland cows for live export to France next month! Vive Le Republic…
And on that bombshell, today’s 8 year old birthday celebrations beckon. Pip pip.
Moët et Chandon
Monday, March 8th, 2010Moët gets good press and bad but it important not to lose sight of the fact that Moët & Chandon is a hugely significant champagne with origins hailing from 1743. To many, Moët IS champagne!
Moët’s parent, LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy), is a global conglomerate of premium brands, headed by the formidable Bernard Arnault. In champagne parlance, LVMH’s houses (brands) include: Moët, Dom Perignon, Krug, Veuve Clicquot, Ruinart and Mercier. In aggregate, between 20-25% of all champagne production falls under the LVMH umbrella.
What is interesting is the way Moët looks to grow its image and market share as the World emerges from recession. Category sponsorship (champagne) of the 82nd Oscars this year might be a master-stroke.
We note that Moët chose to give away golden jeroboams
(or are they bigger?) to specific Oscar winners - which at Park Lane we know our customers also find popular as personalised champagne gifts…
AND - Moet also personalised bottles (or are they mags?) for each category winner. Not quite a fully personalised label (but then that wouldn’t be brand reinforcement) but the closest they could get. Now this is the thing: it is exactly where we wanted to come from back in 1994 when we started out - personalising a well known brand - but we couldn’t find a house to play ball with us and that included Moët which was a preferred partner.
I doubt Moët will introduce this concept wholescale in the UK but at little old Park Lane maybe we should be content by remembering that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery…
Arguably the World’s most important brand of champagne recognises the importance of personalising the bottles for the end recipient; hmmm - now where have we heard that before?!
The underworld
Thursday, February 25th, 2010Sorry folks - not the mystical World of Hades reached only by crossing the river Styx. Instead the murky underworld of crime; online fraud has hit us - and that is scarey!
We all get spam emails and countless viagra offers, etc., but duff transactions with validated cards? Now that IS news - at least to us anyway. Beware any overseas originating credit card registered to a UK address, even if all the addresses match…
All remedied now with a new layer of security in place but curious how Barclays Merchant Services, Sagepay and 3rd Man do not have a cohesive policy of prevention between them - thanks guys! Any loss is born by the merchant, of course.
I wonder, though, if one can get caught up in a suckers loop of some sort? Reason being, we have now had two stolen or cloned UK cards (again validated?!) attempt to be used to purchase champagne - but our human alarm bells rang because the purchases did not fit with the normal pattern so we checked in the old fashioned way and you know what: our telephone messages were not returned… 
Beware Rebecca Romero - but not the real one, of course!
And now we have a gazillion spam comments attached to various blog posts and my email account has been hijacked - apologies if I have not sanctioned your genuine comment or responded to an email query but I will as soon as normal service is resumed.
Roll on spring - and an end to this perpetual cold (and rain) - thanks Withnail; we do need a jukebox, methinks!
Pip pip.
A new decade
Monday, January 4th, 2010So 2010 has dawned and with it a new decade; Happy New Year to one and all.
There seems to be a tone of optimism in the air - certainly it is being peddled by the UK media. It makes a change, certainly, from the steady trickle of gloom in 2009 (and on that note where has Robert Preston gone?) and let’s hope it is justified. The general election campaigns appear to have started (David Cameron’s email today told me that there were under 150 days to go until election time) and banking bonuses are still in the headlines.
While a lot of people seem very pleased to see the back of 2009, for us it was a year of consolidation and planning. If the noughties was the digital decade, maybe we were late onto it but we did get there and thank goodness we did. Sadly my old S2 Land Rover didn’t as terminal chassis rot called time…
PLC online made its debut and we are very pleased with the results - and seemingly so are our satisfied customers. If a New Year resolution for 2009 had been for us to sell champagne to buyers from all the 7 continents of the World, I would have thought it impossible; as I write we are still waiting for a buyer from Antartica to test our skills….!
We also took our hamper range at Frisky Partridge online and were almost overwhelmed by the success. One client was very pleased with the bespoke internet offer for their business which we created - judging by the surge in champagne that was needed to quench the order flow - and we have had invitations to take the online side in several new and exciting directions.
And onwards we march. Personalised champagne online will be even simpler and even better when the new version of our label maker hits the www towards springtime. Our traditional corporate clients will each have a bespoke micro site and be able to order online if they wish. Embracing technology has certainly made our business better: more efficient and more focused, yet perversely also more personal.
What about the bubbly itself? Well, 2009 was a super vintage and the champagnes will be delicious when Park Lane start shipping them in 2013. The region at the moment is 
suffering with the same chill that the UK is - except that it is forecast to drop below -10c later this week. The vines are hibernating at the moment but prolonged temperatures of extreme cold can seriously damage the prospects for this year’s harvest. In January 1985, the temperature barely rose above -25c for several days and nearly 15% of the region’s entire vineyards needed replanting - 5,000 hectares in total; these frosts were retrospectively known as the “frosts of the century”.
Aspersion anybody? Aspersion irrigation really; so called because it comes from the traditional meaning of aspersion being to sprinkle with water, as in baptise. When spring frosts threaten young vine shoots, some Champenoise Vignerons spray their vines with fine jets of water so that the bud itself is actually protected inside a mini igloo from the very cold air currents; more of an April fallback but nonetheless interesting.
Apologies for the silence throughout December but the whole team was running extra fast as the hamster wheel of customer requests just seemed to spin faster and faster and faster - right up until the 23rd!
There will be lots more to come from us as this year unravels. Please do keep the suggestions and feedback coming - and thank you all for your support thus far. Bon annee.
