Back to work

Holidays over. Back from the lakeside tent and talking to ducks. Got this fascinating report from …

… our very successful Vintage Festival two weeks ago. New this year was an idea we are working on which we call ‘Tastography’. Justin, our tame MW, is developing it (we call him ‘the Prof’), and the Vintage Festival was the first time we have unleashed it. We asked 500 of you to act as Guinea Pigs, and test out your taste buds to see if our idea works – and it does!

Justin, Len and Guy put on white coats and invited people into their 'surgery'. 'Looked like everyone was having great fun - it was so busy I couldn't get in! 

All you do is answer 10 simple questions about your food and drink preferences, and with the answers, they think they can predict which one of our 12 best-selling wines you will like the most.

If we just guessed and gave you one of these wines randomly, the chances of you really ‘liking’ or ‘loving’ the wine would be about 50%. But with your questionnaire answers, we can raise the likelihood of you ‘liking’ or ‘loving’ our recommendation to 75%.

That's pretty good for starters. And the technique is getting refined all the time.

And the best news is that once we know a wine that you like, we can find you other ones that taste similar. This will help us get even better at doing what we do well already – recommending wines that you will love – and even more of you will come up to me in the future and tell me you’ve ‘never had a bad bottle from Laithwaite’s!’

Clever chap; Prof Justin.