After five years and countless talks around my home county of Shropshire, it’s time for me to pack up my doilies, hang up my gingham table cloth and take myself off the WI speaker list.

Last week our newest wine, Pasotismo Blanco, was awarded ‘Commended’ at the International Wine Challenge. I was gutted. I still am.

It’s no secret that I love a blend. I believe my wines are better because of it and my company was able to develop an identity much faster because of it. So I’m paid up. I am unashamedly pro-blend. But we live in a world where people mostly order by grape variety and my wines don’t work that way which is why I wanted to briefly explain why I do it, what the benefits are and hopefully help you understand why Paso is the way it is.

One of the biggest issues facing Paso-Primero is establishing our brand. We know we make great wines but finding enough elbow room to get noticed in a crowded marketplace is difficult to say the least. And to make things even harder for ourselves we’ve started from scratch with an annual budget that is dwarfed by a sales rep’s bar tab. We can’t afford to fund press trips, can’t afford to attend industry events and even sending out samples needs to be planned well in advance. In a world of hospitality, nepotism and glad-handing we’ve only got ourselves and our wines.

I’ve been banging the drum of ‘buy what you love off someone who loves it too’ for ages but with the annual crescendo of consumerism on our doorstep and another year of chaos behind us, it felt right to bring the drum out again.

I love harvest. Probably more than I should given how tough it can be, but every year I leave a young family and travel more than 1000 miles to get there so it’s a good thing I do. I always feel like it gets a bit of a raw deal in the media though. Everything is dominated by instant gratification click bait and formulaic vintage reports. There’s no soul, there’s no passion and harvest is absolutely bursting with both. I appreciate these are intangible, ethereal emotions but without them no combination of perfect terroir and temperate summers will ever result in a perfect wine. There is magic in the wineries during harvest, and I want more people to know about it.

a red wine with clear fruit focus, a hint of age but embracing the exuberance of youth, a careful use of oak, a depth of flavour and enough acidity to sit with food but a softness to the palate to make sure it’s still a wine to be enjoyed on its own

Planting a tree for every order is a pretty simple proposition so why am I reopening my blog after four years to write about it? Well, just like putting your head above the parapet to say you make vegan wines, the world of eco-balancing and carbon offsetting it fraught with a surprising amount of contention and the backlash to a company revealing their green agenda can be gobsmackingly vile.

I’m often pushed on why I consider my wines to be vegan. This usually works in two ways; Customer A has no idea that wines aren’t all vegan while Customer B challenges me on how my wine can be vegan when there’s a chance some animals get hurt during harvest. Both points require a person to have their own, very personal, opinion of what veganism means but I’ll come back to that in a bit.