Part of my time here at El Celler Català central is spent keeping up on some of the best marketing blogs on the net. Gapingvoid and Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users are among the favourites. Her latest piece on being remarkable, rather than spending money saying how remarkable you are rang a big bell.

I just had a visit from Jaume Bertran, who produces a Sauvignon Blanc in inland Penedès (Sant Joan de Mediona). He makes about 4500 bottles a year. It's not the very greatest Sauvignon Blanc I've ever tasted (My friend Primoz Laurencic from Slovenia and a couple of Friuli wines can slug it out for that honour) but it's a well made wine with an interesting story.

And Jaume tells an interesting story. And he's not sugar coating anything. Each bottle comes with a leaflet folded around the neck of the bottle, explaining in some detail the vintage: the problems they had, how they solved them. In short, explaining what makes that vintage unique. In the scorching 2003 they explain why they picked early when they did, and how that has affected the wine they've produced: They reproduce the analises they did on the grapes showing how the acid levels started dropping alarmingly in late August, without the alcohol levels gaining much.

Maybe it's more information that some might need, but when faced with that kind of transparency as apposed to the "commercially correct" but meaningless blah one finds so often from larger companies: I'm sold.

The wine is called Tayaimgut - which is maybe my main complaint - a name chosen to make it stand out (it does) but that doesn't actually mean anything. But he was straight about that too!