Curacao Visit
Over the New Year holiday period we paid a visit to the beautiful island of Curacao, and were able to catch up with several of our projects as well as enjoying time with old friends - and avoiding the European wintry weather for a few days!
As well as staying in our apartment on Blue Bay, which has been upgraded to improve the overall hotel experience for guests, with new furniture, a paint refresh and high performance wifi - we also heard about the exciting new developments on the resort from Sepp Koster, who showed us around the site of the new Ocean Drive and Shore projects.
View from the apartment
We also caught up with the wonderful team at Kome - celebrating its five year birthday and going from strength to strength with talented, passionate owners Dave and Su - the New Years Eve party was something to see!
Happy Birthday Kome!
We had meetings about the future of Active Chance foundation, which we are planning to relaunch with renewed enthusiasm in 2018 (details to follow), and also met the team at the Triangle for an update on business there. The business park is full and this leaves us a little short of parking facilities, something we are addressing in the coming weeks.
Finally, we both took time out to enjoy the island from the saddles of our hired bikes - both alone and with friends. Sometimes the sun shone, but not always.......
I will be heading back to the island in March, and will look forward to more updates then - it is always a busy trip, with so many centres of interest - but one I always look forward to!
Arakele visit
At the end of November, I was fortunate enough to be able to take a short trip to Addis Ababa to visit Arabella and Mikele at Arakele. It was an interesting time to visit as the school is currently working to get College status (update: as of 2018 this has been granted!!). I met some new key staff members, being Hadush the General Manager and Maki who works in Marketing and PR. Maki also happens to be Mikele's wife - they were married during the summer. She is taking all the courses available in order to familiarise herself with the school.
I had a tour of the upgraded school including the new digital library and the computer aided design room with an impressive plotter for printing out patterns once they have been designed. Some of the classrooms were being renovated to make them compliant with the regulations for becoming a college. This allows Arakele to offer levels 2, 3 and 4 to students rather than just level 1 as is being currently offered. On top of this, the school is going to move to production to provide school uniforms for children who don't have them and items for resale.
The school currently has 76 students: about 80-90% of these are female and comprise many girls who failed their Grade 10 exams. Attendance at Arakele gives them a vocation and keeps them working while studying to retake their exams. Without this the likelihood is that they would be told by their families that they have to find work to support the family and they would never get around to retaking the exams. Classes run for 4 hours in the morning, 4 hours in the afternoon and 2 hours in the evening. Part of the course involves work in a local textile factory which often leads to full-time work after the course but many girls set up on their own and work from home. At the end of the course, the student will sit an exam to obtain a "Certificate of Competency" which is required to get a job.
The following day, I visited a small business called LOMI. This is made up of 3 young women who were in the first graduating class of Arakele. They now work together designing, making and selling their own designs. It was really wonderful to see the results of the school courses and the clothes were of good quality and attractive. All in all it was an interesting visit to be able to sit in on some of the classes, meet the people involved in the project and see some of the daily running of the school. I wish Arakele much success in their new venture as a College.
Alpasion in London
Just because I haven't posted in a while doesn't mean we haven't been busy one way or another - far from it!
I recently had the pleasure of attending a very pleasant evening dinner at the lovely M restaurant in the City of London, organised by Alpasion and it meant several fellow shareholders in the wine project were able to get together for a delicious meal - accompanied of course by the finest wines.....
It was also an opportunity to check out the hugely successful new, enlarged den facilities at M in the City and to learn about the excellent growth the business is seeing under Zack's (former top sommelier) great leadership.
I went over to London on my motorbike, which limited somewhat the number of bottles I could bring back - however we recently took delivery in France of an initial delivery of Alpasion wines, designed to enable us to promote the project and our wines to a very wine-friendly (if somewhat domestic focused) nation. Watch this space for developments there in the weeks and months ahead.
We are proud to have been involved with the first stockist on the wine in Curacao (Kome), the first in the UK (M) and now we intend to break into the French market (not counting the existing availability at the Igloo restaurant of course......)
Alpasion needs to expand our sales; the vineyard is growing well and we plan to have a more or less full grape crop in April 2019. This year (April 2018) we anticipate having around 100,000 kilos of our own grapes - about 20% of the future total, all being well.
Wine and Food
It's been quite a while since the last blog what with the summer holidays and various other things going on but Alistair and I did manage to squeeze in a lovely little trip to Beaune recently as part of our investments in the French vineyards with GFV Saint Vincent.
We checked in to an amazing boutique hotel in the countryside and then went to meet the other investors at Veuve Ambal where some of them had been visiting the factory. There were about 90 people in all and the plan was to exchange wines. As a result of our investments, we receive bottles of wine from the Chateaux. A points system was applied to value the different bottles and everyone was encouraged to exchange wines to enable us to taste some of the wines from where we didn't have investments. It was a lot of fun and over in a very short time!! We managed to exchange all the wine we had gone with (mostly Médoc and Champagne) and came away with several bottles of white Burgundy and some other Médoc wines.
After all that excitement, it was back to the hotel to freshen up before the gala dinner. This was truly delicious and we were able to meet other investors of other vineyards. It was a very interesting evening chatting with like-minded people who enjoy good food and good wine. We missed the first couple of these events but will definitely be attending next year!!
Visit to Bordeaux
I was lucky enough to combine an AGM for one of our vineyard investments with a weekend in Bordeaux with my best friend Sarah. The meeting was very interesting and enabled me to see the newly planted vineyard and sample some of the wines already produced. This was followed by a lovely lunch and a chance to chat with fellow investors as well as the winemakers.
The rest of the weekend was for eating, drinking and discovering the city of Bordeaux which is beautiful. It is also very flat and, therefore, popular with cyclists. We took the opportunity to go on a gourmet bicycle tour of the city where we sampled foie gras, wine, oysters and chocolate whilst seeing some of the major monuments of the city. It is definitely a city to revisit as it wasn't possible to do everything I wanted in short weekend.
The Cité du Vin is a must for people interested in wine, its history and all things to do with wine.
Tour de Yorkshire
At the end of April, Alistair and I rode a "sportive" as part of the Tour de Yorkshire. This took place on the final day of the Tour, starting early so as to be all over before the professionals came in. This was our first cycling event after a year of cycling so it was very exciting!! Our friend Sarah is to blame for talking us into it but at least she and her brother, Tim, joined us. The boys did the 75km circuit while we girls did the 50km.
It was a fantastic experience but boy did those hills hurt. Yorkshire is not known for its flat plains and our routes followed several very steep hills. We had tried to train for this, having an idea of what was coming but none of us really expected them to be so steep or go on for so long. However, we all finished and felt great at the end. We came down the same finishing lane that the pros would follow later in the day and the sound of all the spectators cheering and banging the boards was impressive - it made us feel as if we were in a proper event!!
Champagne delights
Alistair and I went to Avize in Champagne to the first shareholder's meeting of our investment there, and we were very well received by the Waris Larmandier family.
We made it an overnight visit to enable us to explore Epernay a little and really test some of the local Champagnes!! After the meeting, we were taken into the cellar to taste some of the wine in barrels. This was particularly interesting as it was still at the pre-bubble stage. I look forward to tasting the finished product in the future.