Sipping a glass of Cotes du Brian

This summer we had a little expedition to France, and though the miserable exchange rate with the Euro means that the booze cruise is a thing of the past, if you are over there anyway it's well worth stocking up on wines.

Apart from the usual red we were buying a bit of the pink stuff for the alleged summer days. (I've no idea why we call it rosé - it would be very pretentious to call red wine 'rouge'.) It proved absolutely impossible to avoid buying a box of the wine illustrated. Who could resist sipping a glass of Cotes du Brian? (And it really is quite sippable.)

It strikes me there's a real opportunity here. Find out the 20 most popular names in the UK (first and last) and put out wines with that name on the label. You'd get lots of sales.

In case there is any suspicion that this had already happened I ought to point out that the Cotes du Brian is a real wine growing area. If you take a look at this page in Oz Clarke's Wine Atlas you will find it in Languedoc-Roussillon, fairly near Carcassone (number 72 on the map).

As well as my cheap and cheerful stuff, there's also a slightly posher Cotes de Brian producer - see for example this and this.

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