Jancis Robinson, MW OBE, one of the world’s most respected wine journalists, weekend wine columnist for the Financial Times and creator of Wine Relief, wrote a column on Wine Relief 2007 in the FT yesterday.

She wrote a nice piece about one of our Stormhoek wines supporting Wine Relief 2007:

Stormhoek Shiraz 2004 Western Cape at just £4.49 is another good wine – fragrant, extremely fruity and easy – and has the distinction of having been made by the company that has pioneered blogging as a wine marketing tool. It was Stormhoek that published online just before Christmas a 40 per cent discount voucher at Thresher, the country’s dominant chain of off-licences. (This was far from crippling for the company, which already prices their lines as though everyone will take advantage of their three-for-two offer, and resulted in a dramatic increase in sales.)

Wine Relief was born in 1999. For the past eight years they have spearheaded a biennial fundraising campaign that has seen most of the major wine retailers donate a proportion of the retail price of a selection of wines to Comic Relief. So far £2 million has been raised. This admirable sum is the equivalent, for example, of giving 4,000 African street children shelter, food, healthcare, skills and the training they need to get a good job and escape poverty, or 700,000 hot meals at an old people’s lunch club. While all the big high street names get involved, Tesco has a special part to play in the proceedings. Thirty-six wines and around 16 of their own branded wines are taking part in the campaign for 2007. “Tesco carries an invisible halo in the Comic Relief offices because it has raised so much money for the charity,” says Jancis.

Ten per cent of the retail price of the chosen Wine Relief wines, which should be clearly signalled on the shelf, goes directly to Comic Relief. Many of the retailers have already started their Wine Relief promotions, most of them culminating on Red Nose Day, Friday March 16, although the big two, Sainsbury’s and Tesco, concentrate their efforts on three weeks from the end of February.