This February the Berkmann Team went on tour visiting 5 cities across the UK to showcase the star wines from the portfolio. This tour of intimate trade tastings, Berkmann Unplugged, gave new and existing customers the chance to discover the Berkmann portfolio, meet the team and be entertained with live music and carefully curated musical playlists matched to each wine region.

Proceedings kicked off in the city of York on 20^th February at the Grand Hotel where customer from around the region descended en masse to taste and enjoy a special selection of wines and enjoy an afternoon tea. The very next day we were at the Kings Street Town House in Manchester joined by our valued customers from the North West, making for a great event in a beautiful rooftop setting.  The next morning, we headed south to the seaside city of Brighton where customers could discover the portfolio, listen to live music and enjoy some local cuisine – all with a sea view!  Next up was the south west of England where we hosted our customers at the historic Harbour Hotel in Bristol with more live music, great food and of course amazing wines!  The 5^th and final stop on our whirlwind tour saw us land in London at the Institute of Directors on Pall Mall where hundreds of our new and prospective customers joined us in a memorable celebration of the Berkmann portfolio.

At each event, we also invited our guests to share their experiences of combining music and wine tasting at our interactive “Can you taste the music?” experiment. Participants were invited to listen to three contrasting music samples while they tasted a wine of their choice and were then asked them to rate each pairing. Classical music came out as the choice pairing for shiraz and for sparkling, but for Riesling it was hip hop which came out on top (beating classical and rock & roll)! We also asked participants to share their experiences of tasting the wines as they listened to each piece of music and found that for red wine, jazz saxophone was most likely to bring out pepper, chilli, wood and spice notes over the fruit notes which were more prominent against classical music.