[laughs]

... and decided what new toys to buy for the winery or how to extend their chateau or how to, you know...

And I'm sure you've been to Bordeaux and you've seen, you know, there's hardly, there's hardly a pebble out of place in the main.

But that's an illusion now.

So I had a dream of bringing a connectivity back between sommeliers or selectors to the Bordeaux, um, chateaux so that the, the Bordelais explain their wines not just through price and vintage but through winemaking techniques, through what the wine tastes like, what they did to make the wines taste as it, as it did.

So the first point was to make sure that the chateau were interested in reconnecting with the hospitality trade, and it wasn't easy, frankly.

To begin with, I, I had this dream about, I don't know, you know, it was well pre-COVID, and most...

Let's go

Michael, a lot of people will be thinking about the cost of living crisis and how a prime minister, whoever that might be, could benefit from falling oil prices.

Yeah.

Well, on the face of it, it looks like in the markets right now, it's all good news in that regard.

Um, oil has come down about 5% at the time of recording and, you know, that should feed through to energy prices.

Stocks are kind of rebounding.

European stocks have hit, um, record highs today, which, you know, should mean reasonably good things for growth.

But I think it's too early for perhaps Burnham or whoever to, to celebrate on the cost of living for, for two points.

But Michael, being a details man, I think will have noticed that there aren't many details.

[laughs]

Um, The Cellar Series is predominantly orientated around Bordeaux, and the genesis a few years ago for Robert and I was that we found that restaurants and hotels, the selectors, the sommeliers, really didn't have any relationship with Bordeaux anymore because I think they rather cynically thought Bordeaux was only about points and prizes, i.e. points and prices is what, um, the reality was.

So for them, it was rather boring.

So I saw that as, um, a Bordeaux baby back from the, um, mid-1980s as an opportunity, and really we thought that if we could engineer some excitement for Bordeaux as an area of, um, great quality wines for the hospitality industry, there should be a natural match.

So the question then was, how? And the how was quite sort of straightforward in theory, horrible in practice.

The theory is that we would have Bordeaux chateaux allocate wines that are ready to drink, have been stored and matured in their own chateaux, of a drinking vintage, um, that we as Horgart could sell at a market price, because before that, people were buying on the secondary market.

That's fine, but really it was very uncertain, the provenance.

I think there's going to be a huge interest in this.

What is it like to kinda have that support of the nation? It's one thing when you just kinda, like, think about it, but it's another thing when you actually get to see it there from, with your first-hand perspective.

Yeah, it's pretty amazing.

They call it Canada's Team, right? Like, um, that's why obviously growing up in Canada, it was my dream to wear that jersey one day.

And, um, I think it's just a testament to the spot that they're in right now as a, as a team, and the excitement that they have on the field.

Um, where, where because it's Canada's Team, now I think people are putting it on their schedules from, you know, West Coast all the way to East Coast of, "Hey, wouldn't it be cool," like you brought up Wrigley or Fenway, "Wouldn't it be cool to, to, you know, check the bucket list item off and go watch the Jays here?" And, um, you're not going to watch, you know, the Jays get, get pounded into the ground or, or anything like that.

You're, you're watching them compete night in, night out.

Um, and, and go experience these things that you might not otherwise spend the money to go do, right? And, and, uh, that just is a testament to the excitement nationwide across the country.

[laughs]