Continue reading »]]> The Park Lane Champagne team are in high spirits today after a hugely successful and enjoyable Affiliate Reception last night.

At 6pm we popped a few corks to get things going and the champagne flowed freely from that moment forth! With an eclectic mix of affiliates in attendance, the evening proved to be an education for all. While Alastair and the team shared much of their champagne expertise, our affiliates provided us with some really useful feedback on our website and discussed some fantastic promotion ideas.

We were lucky enough to have gallery owner Raymond O’Shea in attendance with artist Annie Tempest of ‘Tottering-By-Gently’ fame. The Tottering prints and paintings that decorated the walls from top to bottom provided the perfect, quintessentially British, backdrop for our newly launched Diamond Jubilee bottle. This special edition piece has been hugely popular with our customers and promises to be a familiar site at street parties across Britain in a couple of weeks’ time.

So as the ice began to melt and taxis were called we made sure that no one left without a bottle of our finest LeComber et Fils champagne to take home!

In fact, with the evening such a success, we are already planning a follow up likely to take place in November this year. Our affiliates can look forward to an evening of champagne tasting and tips and, of course, a few glasses at the end!

If you would like to join our affiliate programme please click here to view our Affiliate Window profile.

Continue reading »]]> There’s a buzz in the Park Lane office today ahead of our first affiliate evening at the O’Shea Gallery in central London tonight. The event will welcome some of the affiliate network’s most celebrated members all eager to sample our house champagne LeComber Et Fils and to be some of the first to see our Best of British Jubilee range of products.

As part of our rapid online growth strategy, Park Lane joined affiliate marketing leaders Affiliate Window in March this year. Our Champagne Reception tonight is to put some faces to names – (something increasingly difficult in the digital age!) and to showcase our premium products and service.

Affiliate Manager Jon Morse said, “I’m really looking forward to tonight. We already work with some fantastic affiliates and we’re excited about building more relationships with new online companies that are as ambitious as ours. The night will be a great opportunity for us to meet our affiliates and for the affiliates themselves to find out a little about each other. As a channel, affiliate marketing is one of the most diverse, with bedroom bloggers and large multimillion pound businesses all capitalising on the UK’s love of a good deal!”

Park Lane will be represented by Alastair, Nick, James, Will and Jon who have all polished their shoes and straightened their ties for the event.

Our warehouse team have been busily putting together personalised champagne goodie bags for all those attending and the speeches have been rehearsed. With champagne already chilling in the fridge at Park Lane HQ it promises to be an enjoyable evening.

Park Lane Champagne Affiliate Reception. The O’Shea Gallery, 4 St James’s Street, London. Thursday 6-8pm

Continue reading »]]> Strange how taste is influenced by so many different factors – but our mood must be one of the most significant.  The sun comes out, the days get longer and the mind immediately turns to summer, to parties and to champagne.

Champagne is a wine like any other and different champagnes suit our different moods and different occasions.  How about a youthful blanc de noirs (all black grapes and no chardonnay) for a refreshing glass on a warm evening after cycling home from work?  Or a demi-sec (higher sugar content thr0ugh the added dosage) instead of a pudding wine or with cheese after dinner?  What about no added sugar at all with zero dosage or brut nature which makes a delicious dry and crisp glass?  Perhaps the best known is a full fat three year plus bottle age pure Chardonnay blend (blanc de blancs) where the brioche and biscuit aromas really come to the fore.

The opportunities are quite endless.  A few years ago the CIVC (the governing body for champagne wines) tried to educate us to enjoy different champagnes with different occasions and different foods.  In fact it was all a bit too complex for us average consumers – and champagne labels are notoriously difficult to read and understand.  We drink champagne to celebrate, to toast success and as Churchill reminded us “in defeat we need it”.

In the simplest terms, Champagne is a blended wine:  a blend of grapes (chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier) and blend of years – hence the key term “non-vintage”.  This is what champagne is all about and for important historical reasons:  back in the day when Champagne as a region was the northernmost point of viable grape cultivation, the ability to blend grapes and blend from previous years ensured that the viticulteurs always had a product to sell year on year, as well as producing palatable wines – as opposed to relatively thin and light wines from individual grape types.

Any champagne house is judged by the standard of its non-vintage brut, and the ability of the house to recreate that style year after year, despite the difference in the raw materials due to the vagaries of that year’s weather and the resultant harvest.  The champagne we selected all those years ago for our customers’ personalised champagne has proved to be very consistent.  Back in the day we sought a particular blend of champagne which the French refer to as an “English style” – longer bottle age (three years as opposed to the legal minimum of fifteen months) and a roughly equal mix of each of the three grape types in the blend.

And it has proved popular – we continue to get good feedback from customers about the contents of the bottle, as well as the label we pop on the bottle for them.  As for us, we still love it as much now as we did back then.  Yes, it is great to have Cheurlin involved with our supply, but for me 90% of the time come rain or shine, winter, spring or summer, high or low, home or away, LeComber hits the spot just perfectly.

Do please give us a try – you know you want to!

Continue reading »]]> On the Ides of March, it seemed sense to dodge the daggers in the back and review the first weeks of 2012.

As usual, things have been absolutely flat out at Park Lane Champagne.  Will Goodliffe has stormed ahead in our corporate sales department and is fast developing his online knowledge and vocabulary in tandem with his love of champagne!

Jon Morse has revamped the Internet interface so that even I can hardly recognise it!  Amazing how these things make such a difference and judging by feedback received (more please always welcome) the changes make it even easier for customers to order online.  We certainly notice key indicators telling us that customers are visiting for longer and loving to browse through our ranges.  Our Corporate Services section seems to attract particular interest.

Some of the new products are so exciting that the Mother’s Day gardening hamper will be heading the way of Mrs H on Sunday as it is literally the perfect gift!  The whole range of accessories, special occasion goodies and hampers in particular are all under development so we plan to have our range properly established for all the key events this year, and ready for the Christmas onslaught from September… yes we really are thinking of Christmas already despite the daffodils only just having risked peeking their heads up.

And so we wondered where our personalised champagne ends up.  Special birthdays, engagements, new babies, weddings, civil partnerships and thank you gifts remain ever popular – spiced up with the Valentine’s and Mother’s Day celebrations.  We have seen our bottles in use at The Brits by Capital FM radio, displayed in Vogue Magazine, quaffed during the Fuzz Wire event at Tower Bridge, handed out to purchasers of new Rolls Royce cars and specially commissioned bottles to celebrate Liverpool FC winning the Carling Cup… and much more beyond.

The Tottering-by-Gently launch party looms in mid April, the Park Lane London Partner evening in May and the PLC staff tasting visit to Champagne in June – all before the days start shortening again!

Three really interesting things come out of all this:

1 Our customers tell us that they love the quality and taste of our champagne (which we heartily endorse)

2 Larger order customers telephone with their special requirements that we action immediately

3 We are very busy!

I know this has been said before but Park Lane really is all about service.  If there is something you think we can help with, then please do ask and we will do our best to exceed your expectation.

And with a possible commission pending for a very special division of the UK army for which the dagger is central to their Cap Badge, “backs to the wall” really is the order of the day to avoid modern day Brutus seeing his destiny through…

Drink responsibly and enjoy the advent of spring.  If you can’t be good, be careful and always drink responsibly (James take note…)!

Santé!

Continue reading »]]> Champagne Charlie recounts her Valentine’s experiences for us all to share – and take note of!

If champagne be the drink of love, guzzle on – just give oysters a wide berth.

Valentine’s Day is now recognised internationally as an annual celebration of love; well, apart from in Saudi Arabia where it’s banned.  However testament to the courageous spirit of love, there is a booming black market in red roses.

The reason some Muslim countries, such as Saudi, have banned Valentine’s day is historically it was a holiday honouring eponymous Christian Saints. Yet in the Middle Ages, around the time of Chaucer, the day started to be associated with love, particularly courtly love. In a nutshell, courtly love (not the lead singer of Hole) was a peculiar romantic practice amongst the nobility where they secretly had intense erotic yearnings for someone other than their spouse and after a period of chivalrous admiration and restraint gave into all manner of naughtiness, which they astonishingly thought was ‘morally elevating’ and brought them closer to God.  Now there’s an excuse for an affair if ever I heard one!

Nowadays the lives of the ruling classes are arguably a little more straight-laced (save The Marquess of Bath, the royal family, and Chris Huhne – okay so perhaps nothing much has changed that greatly!).  In normal life if you fancy someone, you send them a card; if you don’t, you give them your driving points – no, that’s just Chris Huhne.  If you actually know them you might take them out for dinner and drink a few glasses of champagne, the traditional toast to romance.

I remember one particular suitor called Bernard, who drove up to Gloucestershire from London with a three-course dinner prepared by a top chef. We ate salmon en croute and lemon syllabub for pudding, washed down with a couple of bottles of Cava. The only slight problem was that halfway through the evening I realised that I didn’t remotely fancy him and never would. So after spending an uncomfortable night on a futon he was packed off back to London, tail between his legs.  Even with all the right ingredients of fizz and fine food the essential element was missing – raw animal magnetism.

One Valentine’s in Italy several years ago, I was pursued vigorously by Vincenzo, a Neapolitan tour guide who had fallen in love with me, as only an Italian could.  I think I’d accidentally smiled at him or asked him the time when the thunderbolt struck.  He followed me around my hotel in Sorrento, a cross between a cute puppy and John Leslie.  He jumped out behind pillars to greet me or stopped his coach to serenade me in front of his clients. Why I agreed to go on a date with him, I’ll never know. I think it was a mix of weariness and guilt. The latter emotion was the amount of money the poor boy was hemorrhaging on roses. Everyday another bouquet would arrive at my door. First there were cream ones, then yellow, peach, pink, and finally red.  24 stems in each bouquet to show double the passion.  After a week of this and also the fact that I had been upgraded to a suite to house my flowers I finally agreed to go out for dinner.

We promenaded down to the Ristorante Caruso, dedicated to the famous tenor.  The food was exquisite. We ate frutti de mare and drank the finest prosecco I have ever tasted.  Enzo was fabulous company and his efforts to impress me were unmatchable, unfortunately they were also indigestible.  The next three days my life was centered round my new friend, the white porcelain bowl.  My outing to Vesuvius was cancelled, my day trip to Capri postponed.  However my wretched intestinal tortures were nothing to the anguish poor Enzo endured. He was wracked with despair. What had he done? Each evening he kept a vigil for me. I explained to him in a series of letters (I looked dog rough and didn’t want to shatter the illusion) that it wasn’t his fault; it was just a duff oyster.  We parted company as friends (unlike the oyster). I have no doubt he bounced back quickly.  His overwhelming courtship will not be forgotten.

It was 10 years later I finally found the missing ingredient and last Valentine’s day High Tower proposed to me.  We drank Veuve Clicquot that evening. I keep the cork from the bottle we first toasted our love in my jewellery box. When all the ingredients are right only champagne can mark the occasion.

Park Lane Champagne offers a range of Valentines Gifts to cater for every budget and taste including excellent champagne and prosecco – with not an Oyster in sight!

Continue reading »]]> Here she is – back slimmer and trimmer in this Olympic year thanks to her advocating the switch to champagne but which may only aid weight loss as part of a calorie controlled diet…

Don’t have a dry January, have extra dry champagne.

According to Madame Pompadour, the chief mistress of Louis XV, champagne leaves a woman beautiful after drinking it.  So forget detoxing, cancel your gym membership – the perfect antidote to crippling self-loathing and chaffing inner thighs this January is to quaff more fizz.

Back in the 80s I remember my mother buying a book called The Champagne Diet by The Slender Gourmet, published by Debretts. She swore by it. Yes, she’d forget to pick me up from school sometimes but as she habitually reminded me – better to have an addled mind than Gargantuan over-hang. Well, over 20 years later some bright spark across the Atlantic has re-launched the diet with great success.

After trying to have a dry January – I managed six days – I decided to give the diet a go. Five days into the new regime I can report the effects have been miraculous – I am no longer an uptight cow obsessed with the size of my thighs. I am funnier, more effervescent and definitely a size ten.  My husband, High Tower, who is still off the booze, is not convinced it’s working and has been chuntering that my new diet will turn us into Greece, financially.

That’s when I pulled out the God card.  As a devout Catholic there was no way he could deny me my daily elixir discovered by Dom Pierre Pérignon, a French monk from the Abbey d’Hautvillers credited with creating the magic bubble in champagne wines.  “Everyday,” I told him, “I feel the love of Jesus.”  This was music to High Tower’s ears. “Does that mean I can get you rebadged?” he asked opportunistically.  “If I can stay on this diet for life I’ll be whatever you want me to be – Hindu, Jew, Jehovah’s Witness, you name it.”  He too is on the diet and is extremely handsome, taller and less obsessive compulsive.

Champagne is very low in sugar, even a full fat vintage is only 100 calories a glass, but if you really want to see the weight fall off or you are diabetic, why not opt for the zero dosage (aka Brut natural or Brut zero) variety that has no extra sugar added at all. During the ‘methode champenoise’ all the sugar in the original wine converts to alcohol therefore it can be very dry, so before bottling a small amount of dosage is added, which is either sweet wine or older champagne to balance the taste. The zero dosage is sometimes eye-wateringly dry so you might want to add a little crème de cassis to make Kir Royale or perhaps orange juice. Remember Bucks Fizz prevents scurvy. Fact.

The type of glass from which you drink your daily champagne is as important as choosing the bottle. For a drier, zero dosage drink from a crystal flute, as the narrow surface area will keep the wine sparkling for longer.  A champagne coupe or saucer is the perfect option for a sweeter blend and it might make you more beautiful, too.  The glass is fabled to be modeled on Madame Pompadour’s breast, which as you sup your bubbles can’t fail to bring a smile to your ever slimming face.

Continue reading »]]> It’s a very warm welcome to Champagne Charlie (aka Charlotte Reather or @charliereather) who has bravely agreed to join Park Lane Champagne by writing a monthly snippet, squeezed in amidst all the other works that flow from her pen, including her “Wild Life” column for The Field.

We can’t guarantee exactly what each month will bring, but Charlie has promised to live up to the moniker and delve deep into her life experiences involving champagne that she promises are many and varied…  There will also be guides to champagne, interviews with champagne aficionados, and much more beyond.  We hope she will find a moment to cover off personalised champagne in the mix, so long as she wasn’t the buyer we had to invoke the label veto for…

And with no more ado, it’s over the top we go.  Remember if you like what you read do come back next month for more.  To quote another great West Country loving eccentric, “thank you Charlie”:  [Ed]

Screaming Orgasms and other festive champagne cocktails

Forget mulled-wine and eggnog, Christmas is the time for screaming orgasms.  If you’ve never had one, then you’re most likely the uptight guest in the corner covered in cobwebs.  Well, it’s time to dust them off and live a little.  Three parts Champagne to one part sloe gin really gets you in the mood for a party.  I remember one occasion, back in my ever so naughty past, when I was dating a gentleman of advanced years and wicked ways known as Comb-Over Man (COM). It was early December and we were on our way to a lavish do in Rutlandshire.  Unfortunately we bumped into one of COM’s alcoholic compadres, Bad Johnny (BJ), who invited us back to his house for a quick screaming orgasm. How could we refuse? After multiples I realised we were late for dinner. Now incapable of driving, BJ’s son drove us to the party on a trailer full of wood chippings attached to his quad. This wouldn’t have been so bad if hadn’t been blizzard conditions.

We arrived half an hour late with intimate splinters and heads like snowmen.  As we entered the hall a lady screamed. ‘Had we crashed the car? What on earth had happened?’  “Yes, it was awful – the car’s a right off,” said COM. “Could we have a drink?” I looked at him in astonishment.  Everyone fussed over us both. “Brandy!” called Major Broom. “What they need is brandy.”  As he ushered us in to the drawing room he had a brainwave. “How about Champagne cocktails?” I pleaded for clemency but COM thought it was a splendid idea.  I surveyed the scene, everyone was in smoking jackets and wearing monogrammed slippers.  Where was I? Downton Abbey?  As I was introduced, I discovered all the guests had double-barrelled names so, in order not to be left out, I decided for one night only to be Charlotte Smith-Reather.

The butler placed a La Perruche sugar cube into a hand engraved champagne saucer, expertly shook a couple of dashes of Angostura bitters to soak the cube, poured a measure of Courvoisier XO Imperial Cognac into the glass and topped it up with 1992 Perrier-Jouet Champagne Grand Brut. As I watched him work I realised I was swaying again. I tried to pull myself together – the Brooms obviously had a superb cellar and I wanted a return ticket.

COM knocked his glass back and began to smile inanely. I sipped mine but soon discovered it had evaporated and everyone around me was listening to my witty vignettes and laughing uproariously – I was a hit. Thankfully many of the guests got ‘drink envy’ and soon cocktails started to flow all round. By the end of dinner I couldn’t speak and it was best I didn’t.  COM was necking the ’62 port and becoming more inappropriate by the minute. It was at his suggestion of playing ‘naughty horses’ things really began to unravel. All I remember was riding a high court judge to victory at 50/1 – the favourite had been taken out by The Chair.  Now that’s a party – you won’t get that kind of atmosphere with boring mulled wine.

Recipes for Screaming Orgasm and Classic Champagne Cocktail, by popular festive request – perfect when topped up with any of the excellent champagnes we supply…personalised or not!    Happy Christmas.

Continue reading »]]> Amazing after such a warm autumn – where was the October snow that we were promised?! – to think that only 7 weeks on Sunday is Christmas Day…

I reckon that quite a few of our customers have also just realised how close Christmas is as the ‘phone has started ringing off the hook!  All we need is Slade to start playing on the radio and the Iceland adverts to appear on TV and the full onslaught will be with us!

So this year, more and more of Park Lane Champagne’s customers are choosing to order online;  we have a newly revamped range of hampers (retaining all the hallmarks of our previous Frisky Partridge collection), a larger selection of ports (5 types) and whiskies (5 types), in addition to a cheeky bordeaux wine offer AND a burgundy wine offer, all to compliment the excellent champagnes (personalised champagne, house champagne or Grande Marque champagne), house wines and prosecco!

Don’t want to create an essay but we are excited about all that is going on.  New suppliers are fuelling our stampede forward and relevant information can be found in the our producers section of the website.  As you would expect, we choose suppliers carefully on a variety of criteria, including quality, uniqueness, service, sustainability and value.  Note that for us, value is measured in many ways other than just the price and one of the things we really want is products that are not readily available on the high street.  Artisan but established; great quality but affordable with good continuity of supply.

So here it is, whether you want a single bottle of personalised champagne, a large corporate order or a unique festive hamper, please do contact us and we will be delighted to be of service.

Our last day for regular orders with guaranteed delivery before Christmas – assuming snow does not come and interrupt things – is Tuesday 20th December 2011.  However, and as always, the sooner you can get us started, the better for us!

And just to round off, we hope Old St Nick doesn’t dig into too many of the Park Lane Champagne pressies before he squeezes down your chimney on the 24th and lapses into this kind of sherry-fuelled chaos…

Continue reading »]]> It is hard to believe that the last finger to keyboard jotting was Tom’s insight back in August;  here we are nearly two months on and what an eleven weeks it has been;  no need to bore one and all but the roller-coaster is definitely to be avoided if at all possible!

A warm welcome to Beth and Jason who have joined the team.  Good luck to Andy and Tom who are now back at school university studying hard – and helping us out while they can – and more good wishes to Mark who is on a sabbatical year’s break from uni with us, focusing on design, and fighting daily with the “to do” list on his workboard…

Personalised champagne has remained ever popular.  We have increased production capacity by introducing new working practices and procedures to deliver new efficiencies.  Amazing, though, how people are afraid of change – even relevant changes to our internal job sheets have caused unease.

A large single client project has been successfully completed, although the hand-shifting of 1,100 bottles from the loading bay into the Great Hall at Grosvenor House in the scorching September heat caused James and I to suffer!  The complex packing and distribution of 400 individual shipments was completed on time, on budget and without a single error – which is very pleasing although service-second-to-none has always been a key Park Lane Champagne ethos.

Our internet custom has continued to grow.  There are some exciting third party collaborations in the pipeline for early 2012 launch, as well as olympic growth planned for next year.  Our sponsorship of Euroseries has been interesting and put us in great company.  It is also super that Mike Butcher’s TechCrunch have come back to us to get involved with personalised champagne for this year’s Europas awards.

The harvest started (and finished) an unseasonal three weeks early.  Good yields and good natural sugar levels are report and while it may or may not be declared a “vintage” year, that is somewhat immaterial given that champagne is all about the blend of different years – ie. the non-vintage.  From that perspective, the harvest of 2011 will give great wines for the future.

And the World waits to see if Sarkozy and Merkel can pull off enough of a plan to give the €uro and the Eurozone a much needed breathing space and hopefully save us all from the catastrophe we have been told awaits.  I think the body language needs brushing up a little and perhaps the rhetoric as well if the helpful advice from across the Channel which Cameron and Osborne have been dispensing has caused such Sarkozy foot stamping – or maybe that is new father syndrome?

I have returned this week from a quick producer visit and overnight stop in Paris where the radio was full of Euro doom and gloom.  Great to find out that when you get to the top of Gustav’s magic tower, a quick flute of reviver can be purchased to regularise the beating heart;  maybe they need a flute or two of bubbly to ease tensions round the negotiating table…

More soon – especially as Christmas careers closer – and we are likely to become a distributor of a very cheeky little Sussex sparkling in the near future that is really really surprisingly good…

Pip Pip.

Continue reading »]]> Relatively new to Park Lane Champagne, I joined the team back in April after a previous stint to help build the ever growing web presence of the company. Like James, I am another virgin – on the blogging front – but here goes!

Working alongside Andy and Nick, James, Al and the warehouse team, life at Park Lane is not only a steep learning curve but a great experience as well.  Personalised champagne is what we are all about, from a single bottle for an individual customer to over 6,000 bottles for a major UK company – it’s all in the mix!  So we get on with designing banners and customer labels, building bespoke landing pages and client micro-sites, geting involved with order processing, and every day is different.  Coming fresh out of my first year at university where I am studying web design, Nick our lead technology bod has definitely helped me grow my knowledge in the design field.  As for the champagne side of things, this is something that has grown and grown on me since being here and now it’s safe to say I’m a fellow champagne drinker myself – and of course I organised a personalised champagne bottle for my mum’s 44th with a custom label…

Here at Park Lane the working environment is fun and relaxed, whilst making sure everyone gets the jobs done.  Coffee is a must first thing in the morning and luckily we have a great coffee maker, James, on hand when we need one!  Whilst absorbing that caffeine fix, Andy and I liaise with each other on what web development jobs need to be done in the day.  After this it’s work, work, work until the baguette bar in town is shouting out for me at lunch time;  we all love a tasty baguette here (especially a tuna torpedo) when the boys’ vigorous weight loss regime permits – James, Al and London to Brighton bike rides!

Throughout my time here our web presence is ever growing, leading us to exciting new levels.  Whilst James and Alastair continue to sell, sell, sell, our work remains in the background pushing our web presence higher and higher and constantly evolving our systems and processes so that everything runs smoothly. Amazing to think that Park Lane’s ecommerce web presence is only two years old and in that time we have grown to over 4,000 visitors per month.  It will be even more exciting when we top 40,000 per month and especially to think we all laid the early foundations to allow that growth.

Since being a part of the team it’s been a great all round experience and the working environment is one that I definitely haven’t experienced before!  Following my passion for the web, I’ve now grown a new interest for champagne, and I can safely say it is one that is definitely going to stick with me.

Working on the web design and development team at Park Lane Champagne is great – even the nickname of ‘skinny legs’ from the Harrison children!  I can certainly recommend it and if you are searching for a dynamic, diverse, challenging but fun job, do contact us as we certainly need a good digital marketing person and a full time technologist.

Cheers!

Tom