Soul Tree Wines

Issue 4
December 2010 | Soul Tree Wines | www.soultreewine.co.uk
Soul Tree Wines
Your Window into our Soul
Happy New Year!
Soul Tree wishes all friends and associates a very happy New Year and a
great festive season!
It’s been three months since you were last reading this, folks! Yes, time
flies, especially when you’re having fun.
The festive season is upon us now, and we at Soul Tree are looking at
celebrating too. There is, after all, a lot to celebrate about. Soul Tree is 6
months old. Starting from within the confines of West Midlands it is now
learning to spread its wings and to fly. Slow but sure steps have seen it
travel to East Midlands, Warwickshire, Oxfordshire, Surrey, Norfolk, and
finally, London City! Soul Tree is now available in over 50 restaurants
across 20 towns and cities in the UK. Woot woot!
It would be easy to run away with the early success and to try and scale
up rapidly. We realize, though, that it is time for just the opposite. It is
time to pause, to take stock, and to review.
Not everything has gone swimmingly well. We are yet to hit on the magic
formula that will get every restaurant goer to order one wine and one
wine only. There remain some logistical and importation issues outstanding. But then these are but opportunities to make sure that the proposition, as we go forward, is robust and designed for long term success.
We are now working with some great people and are confident, that
working together, we can take Soul Tree to great heights. And we are
now looking at forging great new partnerships that will help us scale up
from here. But we look forward to those moments of celebration that we
can fit in, when we can kick off our shoes, pick up a glass of some lovely
red wine, and relax with friends and family looking forward to even
greater things in the New Year.
Here’s to the future!
Contents
Happy New Year!
1
Helping Raise Money
for the GEN Initiative 2
Oxbridge Jazz Night
2
The Capital of Wine
Consumption
3
Nasik Valley – the
Birthplace of Soul Tree
3
The Joys of
Entrepreneurship
4
Helping Raise Money for the GEN Initiative
Diwali this year saw the customary lights and fireworks, but it also saw us
heading towards ‘the other place’ – Cambridge - in aid, this time, of the GEN
Initiative, a grassroots initiative working for sustainable development in India.
We pitched in by donating a case of wine for a fund-raising auction, all proceeds of which were to go towards a GEN Initiative project in Alwar district
in Rajasthan, India. The auction included over 30 lots and generated some
£3000, while the event overall raised over £4500 in one cold, festive, fun night
filled with great food, a fire show, a live blues band, and some thumping fireworks. Great show! You too, can help – just go to www.gen-initiative.org.
Soul Tree pitched in to help with fund-raising for the GEN Initiative
Oxbridge Jazz Night
Oxford and Cambridge Business alumni joined hands to host a fantastic jazz
night event at the Oxford and Cambridge Club in London in October. One
thing’s for sure when the two come together, the result is one awesome event
for everyone concerned.
The event saw the coming together of over 80 alumni from Oxford and Cambridge into a rather cheery and festive function room at the club. The highlights of the event? Super people, some of whom we were meeting after quite
some time, and many we were meeting for the first time (we’ll concede that
Cambridge alumni are not all that bad after all). An amazing jazz band, All That
Jazz, that kept us hooked from the word go with great performances one after
the other (the evidence is in the shape of a video clip on our Facebook page –
www.facebook.com/SoulTreeWine). Yummy canapés that kept following you
wherever in the room you were.
And to cap it all, awesome wines from Soul Tree! Soul Tree sponsored the
drinks for the evening, ensuring that the guests had some lovely Chenin Blanc
and Zinfandel to sip on (some might have been guzzling them, but we’re not
telling).
Yeah, I know, it’s hard to beat such a combination, but there you are. Fantastic
networking opportunities through the evening meant that we walked away
having made several great new friends who we are hoping to meet again
soon.
The Capital of Wine Consumption
We’re talking about London, of course! Come November we made a foray into
the largest, and by far the most significant, market for wine in the UK. Greater
London consumes a significant proportion of all the wine sold in the country. It also has nearly a third of all Indian restaurants in the UK – an amazing
number!
Soul Tree is now available in restaurants in Soho, Kensington, Brentford, Swiss
Cottage, Bloomsbury, and Ealing Broadway. Towns around London include
Woking, Guidlford, and Farnham. So all you Londoners – check out the details
on our website, go visit these restaurants, and sample some of our fantastic
wines.
Soul Tree is now available in several towns and cities across many counties in the UK
Nasik - the Birthplace of Soul Tree
My first visit to Nasik was some 18 months ago. We flew into Mumbai from
the UK, and then drove the 5 hours or so it takes to get to Nasik from Mumbai
airport.
A modern highway from Mumbai to Nasik was still only partly built, and sections of the old highway made the journey, well, eventful. The scenery changes from the high-rises and the adjoining slums of Mumbai to drab looking
swamps and flat-lands, but as one climbs the Western Ghats it rapidly changes
to picturesque.
I did not really know what to expect from the city, but the first thing that stuck me was the relative lack of traffic (as
if this was possible anywhere in India!). It must be the inevitable, though subconscious, comparison with Mumbai,
or with New Delhi, a home-town from my years in India. But compare almost any city in the world with Mumbai, and
one’s sure to get a feeling of space and openness.
Anyway, the remainder of the drive into the city was unremarkable- Nasik seemed like your average mid-sized Indian
city. We went out for a drive soon after we’d settled in, and once again I was surprised by what I thought was a very
small number of vehicles on the road. Yes, people still had their love for honking incessantly and for creating lanes
where none existed, but in spite of this the city was having a calming effect on me! In the UK we tend to take it for
granted (with the possible exception of London in rush hour), but the relatively calm, laidback atmosphere in Nasik
seemed completely out of place.
(to be continued…)
The Joys of Entrepreneurship
Of the many joys of entrepreneurship is the fact that one very quickly learns
to be a jack of all trades. If one is devising sales strategies in the morning, it is
book-keeping in the afternoon, import regulations in the evening, and creative
artwork and copywriting at night!
Yes, that’s been pretty much my day today, with the last of these occupying significant proportion of my waking hours over the last week or so. The
subject is table top cards (more commonly called tent cards) to be placed on
restaurant tables, one of the very few tools available to a new drinks brand
with no advertising budget.
Visual style. Images. Message. Copy. Visibility. Readability. Fitting all of these
together to make an end-result that works. Having a consensus in a team with
people with varying tastes. And knowing, before spending big money on printing and before sending it out to every restaurant, whether it is going to work.
What fun!
It’s still work-in-progress, but one thing’s for sure: there never is a dull moment. What’s in store for tomorrow, I wonder!
Soul Tree Wines
Ignisis Limited
alok.mathur@soultreewine.co.uk
www.soultreewine.co.uk
SoulTreeWine
@SoulTreeWine
Fax: +44 2476 10 10 20
Please stay in touch with us
We always want to hear from you. Whether it is a quick tip or a suggestion, or
even if its brickbats you have in mind. Let us know what you think of the wine,
or of the label. Or get in touch if you have anything to say about this newsletter.
We have great things planned for Soul Tree, and are glad for your company
along the way. Together, we can make it happen!