Pride of Britain, Pride of the Chester Grosvenor.

This last weekend we were host to the annual Pride of Britain conference. Pride of Britain (POB) is a marketing consortium for small independant hotels that provide top class service. It counts amongst its members places like the Devonshire Arms, Pear Tree Inn, Cromlix House, Isle of Eriska, Holbeck Ghyll, and of course the Chester Grosvenor as well as many others. With such a gathering of our peers and colleagues you can imagine the tension over the last few weeks building up to this event. Our MD was getting more and more stressed the closer it came, and when he's stressed, we're all stressed. I got roped into the event last night at Eaton Hall to be paraded as his pet monkey, and to ensure that the wines were all tip-top. The wines were all provided by sponsors including Lay and Wheeler who sponsored the starter wine - Fromm Estate, La Strada Riesling, from Marlborough New Zealand. The Wine Treasury provided the wine for the main course and the cheese which was a Joseph Phelps Cabernet Sauvignon from the Napa Valley, and Louis Latour provided the dessert wine which was an interesting Muscat-de-Beaumes de Venise.

So Monday afternoon (my day off - boy was my wife pissed off at that!) I ended up at Eaton Hall opening nearly a hundred bottles of wine (yes I will be sueing for RSI!!!) and then checking them all to make sure that none were corked. Then I had the mammoth task of double decanting 42 bottles of Cabernet. In the end it was only 41 because one was corked. I got finished with the double decanting as they were about to sit down for the starter! Today my shoulder aches, my wrist is killing me, and Im knackered, with another seven days to go until I get a day off. My last day off was last monday, so thats fourteen straight days. Maybe I ought to negotiate a pay rise before I go and do these shifts!

At the end of the night all was well, our MD seemed to be over the moon, most of the guests were two sheets to the wind, and everybody commented on how well the red was showing despite its youth. So I did my job well.