Chris Hogg's 2007 English winemaking homebrew extravaganza may have been just a minor mention in the news section of the UK Wine Show podcast but it prompted the WineUncorked investigative nose to wonder What happened afterwards?
The UK Wine Show's back catalogue of podcasts is vast - there's now 669 half-hour shows to listen to, including Show 62 from August 2007 where the main topic was how to match spicy foods to wine in an interview with Warren Edwardes from Wine for Spice with his range of aromatic sparkling wines - blends of Cava and Muscat that match chilli-hot Indian, Thai, Malaysian and even Mexican foods.
Each show also starts with that week's wine news headlines, read by Jane Scott, the founder partner of the show along with husband Chris Scott who also run the wine tasting company ThirtyFifty. Catching up with the wine news is useful background knowledge for any wine enthusiast and the headlines from 2007 were just as fascinating - my ears pricked up considerably with the mention of local (to me here at WineUncorked HQ in the UK Midlands) homebrew shop that was making, bottling and selling 1500 bottles of British wine made with imported grape juice every month. But what, I wondered, had became of this Black Country British wine success?
Contacting Chris Hogg at Hamstead Brewing Centre, I found that the Birmingham-based family business was still going strong. Although he'd stopped making wine he now stocks his own range of wine kits that contain concentrated grape juice to allow the homebrewer to ferment and make their own wines at home.
Times have moved on in the world of podcasts as well as with homebrew wine. Jane Scott tells me that she's "not certain how people first heard about our podcast in the early days other than we were hosting a lot of wine tastings and with word of mouth our audience increased. We were one of very few wine podcasts at the time and so we always came up on i-Tunes if you were searching on wine."
After downloading, those early podcasts they then had to be transferred to your ipod for personal listening. These days downloading is automatic if you Subscribe. Making the listening of the UK Wine Show, and the many other wine podcasts queuing up on my iphone, easy to listen to while I'm out in the garden dealing with weeds, sowing seeds or generally looking off into the distance at the Welsh hills wondering when the rain will arrive.
