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More on Wine, Foodography and Winter Classes
For the last few weeks I have been travelling around NZ running a series of Wine Tasting Competitions for the NZ Sommeliers and Wine Professionals for which I am chair. It's been fun putting together a selection of 40 classic wines and preparing sets of questions to test our teams of winelovers.
We have used Kahoot! which has been enormously successful as a electronic quiz platform in these Covid times. It adds the results instantly and takes away the risk of calculation errors plus the backend provides detailed analytics on who got the answers to how many seconds it took to answer correctly. We know that of the 24 teams the highest scores were 75% correct with over 8 teams achieved above 68% correct. I can see we will use this platform for sometime!
It seems that interest in wines and spirits programmes is also bounding upwards and we have had record enrolments for all our wine classes including WSET Wine and Spirit Education Trust from UK.
This week I had the results of the latest WSET Level 2 Certificate in Wine and with a class of 20 students, 60% gained distinction, a pass of over 85%. Exciting.
Our NZQA Certificate in NZ Wine Micro-Credential is also going for strength to strength and we are about to start offering Corporate & Team Building wine options so that you can get together a group of 8 people and we will run a private programme.
New Zealand wines are much more diverse that most people imagine and it's a great thrill to be able to share lesser-known wineries and underrated regions with our participants as they taste through the wine selection. For more information, email admin@foodandwine.co.nz.
Coming up we have the Winter Forage with Riki Bennett which provides an opportunity to explore our native flora along with innovation around urban hāngi kai-cookery techniques. The FOODOGRAPHY Dinner is back and this year our theme is a Midwinter Christmas Dinner. Both events are part of Auckland's Elemental Festival.
On Sunday 1st August, we host the NZ Sommelier of the Year Awards along with wine tasting events and a Gastronomic Dinner prepared by Chef Finn and our students.
Ngā mihi,
Celia Hay
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🕵️♂️ Solve It If You Can! 🔎 Riddle Time
I’m a place of beauty,
from mountains to sea,
where the long white cloud drifts gracefully;
I’m far from most but close in heart—
what country am I,
a world apart?
Bonus points if you know the photo's location, here's a hint: it's the Riddler's home town!
Do you think you know the answer to our riddle? Don't spoil it for your neighbours! Simply 'Like' this post if you know the answer and the big reveal will be posted in the comments at 2pm.
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Heads or Tails?
Be in to WIN a once-in-a-lifetime experience for a young Blues fan!
Tell us why your youngster should be the special coin toss guest at the next Blues home game.
The Prize includes:
- Tossing the coin with the referee and team captains.
- x2 Silver Stand tickets so you and your child can watch the game.
- x2 food & beverage vouchers
- x1 goodie bag and blues jersey.
- Visiting the commentary box
- Being taken to the field side-line where you can watch the team warm-up.
Terms and conditions apply
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Climate change is linked to world population explosion
Global warming which is caused by population explosion; particularly in Sahara and desert regions is now causing huge problems with millions of displaced people now living in refugee camps even whole cities like Cox bazaar and Gaza.
If we look at the statistics on the worldometer site
www.worldometers.info...
we can see that the fertility rate column shows which countries are responsible and have more than 2 children per family.
The UN world health organisation WHO needs to address this problem head on at it receives over $6 billion annually but instead of providing free contraceptives and vasectomies to these third world countries where their economies and house building and road, water, sewage and electric infra structure cannot keep up with a doubling population every 10 years it is just supplying free drugs and food which just makes the situation worse for them, as it wrecks their agricultural economies and self sufficiency with the result being the creation of refugee cities like Gaza.
CliveS