We all love a glass of good wine but I also enjoy a decent beer from time to time. Not the mass produced, highly preserved artificial stuff, but good traditional beer made in a brewery by a man, not just machines. Hard work, sweat and toil to craft a delicious cooling foamy brew that gets drunk by the pint! And plenty of them.

Well good news on this front. My brother, Dave Lang, started his own brewery - The Forge, 18 months ago in Hartland (Devon) unsurprisingly in an old forge.  His beer has just been awarded Society of Independent Brewers Gold Medal and overall Champion Beer of the Competition for the South West 2010. He also took two Bronze Medals for two of his other beers. A truly remarkable achievement when Dave only started brewing 18 months ago.

He designed and built The Forge Brewery from scratch using a limited amount of  second hand equipment, but a great deal of it he actually engineered himself in the workshop, building his own cooling system and cask washer system. He works harder than anybody I know, as his brewery was at full capacity within months of going live. Somehow Dave manages to put in the equivalent of 9 days a week when I thought I was busy working  only 7!

It’s great for the Forge Brewery to get this recognition but sadly it doesn’t mean you’ll be able to buy his beer in your local pub. There was already a waiting list before the awards, there’s certainly going to be even more demand now. Dave won the Champion Beer Award for his Lighthouse Ale which is fantastic. I arrived there about 6 months ago and pulled up by the storage shed. I’d drunk 10 pints before I even got as far as the house, then we went to the local pub where we polished off another half a dozen. And the hangover? What hangover? I woke up fresh as a daisy because, like our wine, Dave’s beer is made naturally without the use of artificial preservatives. I was ready for another 10!

You may be lucky enough to try a pint in the Sportsman’s at  Newtown though, where Dave has a good working relationship with Pam Honeyman from Monty’s Brewery – another runaway success story in the world of brewing. Pam’s only been brewing a few months longer but has already won Champion Beer of Wales for her stout – Monty’s Midnight, plus other awards, and has been featured in various press articles as her beer is fed locally to ‘Wagyu’ cattle to produce the world’s most expensive beef! She also supplies her beer to the House of Commons where our beloved MPs can enjoy a well earned pint – although it’s you and me who’ve earned it, and are paying for it, but it’s our MPs who are drinking it!

Finally, if you live in North Wales, you may be lucky enough to find a good pub with some Forge beer over the summer months. Dave will be sending some up to be distributed by Quick Keg along the coast.

Following on from my comments about the number of websites who blatantly dishonestly claim to have the cheapest prices, I’m amazed at the ‘misleading’ (to be polite) text on many wine retail websites claiming to be scouring the vineyards to bring you the best wines!

Ok, some of the big ones like Laithwaites really do travel looking for - shall we say to be kind - the most economical wines. But we also note on many of the smaller retail sites they use phrases like ‘from the vineyard direct’ to imply that they’re out there calling at tiny vineyards to source wines just for you. They’re not! Take a look at the products they stock and you’ll see the same products on other websites. Is there a constant stream of little old fellows in tweed jackets popping into each vineyard in the Mclaren Vale and picking up half a dozen cases each? Of course not.

To ship one pallet of wine to the UK from the southern hemisphere costs about £800 – more than £1 per bottle. However to ship a container with 12 pallets will only cost £3000, or £250 per pallet. To ship individual cases is simply cost prohibitive. Then of course there’s the EU wall of beaurocracy to get past. The producers have to label the back of the bottles with EU compliant labels before they can be admitted. These labels are ludicrously beaurocratic but are a legal requirement. So this notion of the traditional British wine merchant driving round, tasting wines in the vineyard and picking up a few cases just for you is complete nonsense, but then there’s an awful lot of nonsense and cloak and dagger work going on in the UK wine trade that these wine merchants don’t want you to know about.

Some wine merchants do buy direct and have arrangements with specific vineyards, but the majority of wines are imported by agencies who build a portfolio and then take samples out to the independent merchants. It’s basically economy of scale. But for these wines to be commercially viable the vineyards pressurise the agencies to take bigger quantities. The agencies then negotiate over price then take a slice of every bottle they import. The system works well and means that a small merchant can offer a wide variety of wines from different countries without having to buy container loads from each winery. And we’re all delighted about that. But I don’t think any of us are particularly happy being patronised by a smarmy wine merchant claiming to have imported that bottle just for you, especially when we could have bought the same wine for less simply by taking a few seconds to Google it!

Being an honest, truthful person I’m frankly amazed at the incredulous claims many retailers are making on their websites to attract customers. Or more to the point I’m amazed that they’re actually ALLOWED to make these claims. We all know about the completely fake ‘half price deals’ from the supermarkets. But now there are many independent retail websites claiming to offer the cheapest prices – but blatantly not doing so!

For example if you go to a website called Bin ends London, they claim:  ‘At Bin Ends we pride ourselves on selling not only great wine, but also the cheapest wine that you will find on the web. Yes, you read right, the CHEAPEST wine that you will find on the web’.

Yet they sell Bosan Ripasso 2006 for a horrendous £22.99 when you can clearly buy Bosan Ripasso 2006 from www.goodwineonline.co.uk for £14.10. This isn’t simply because someone’s discounting it in a sale, this is a permanent price. It’s also not a matter of a difference of  a few pence which can be overlooked - this wine is a whopping 50% more expensive, a staggering £8.89 per bottle! This is daylight robbery – literally. Then take a look at the difference on Cesari Il Bosco Amarone 2001. It’s not just one wine they’re out on!

But the frustrating thing is there’s virtually nothing we can do about it. The Advertising Standards Agency makes it pretty difficult to lodge a complaint, preferring businesses to sort these things out amicably between themselves - something which is likely to happen just after pigs learn to fly. So the consumer really has no protection from these scamsters. These best price guarantees really aren’t worth the pixels it takes to write them! I strongly advise all consumers to shop around on Google for the best deal.

It’s not just a few dodgy independent retailers either, often it’s brand names we trust. For example the much sought after Boekenhoutskloof The Chocolate Block 2008 is retailing at Oddbins at £21.99 or again at www.goodwineonline.co.uk for a realistic £16.49! Do you want to pay Oddbins an extra £66 per case for exactly the same wine? I recommend ‘voting with your feet’ in these cases.

Just a quick word of caution about price comparison sites too. Most of them charge companies to have their products listed, such as wine-searcher.co.uk or supermarketwine.com. Most companies don’t subscribe to them so they only offer a comparison of a small number of suppliers. The vast majority of times you’re likely to find the wine cheaper yourself just by ‘googling’ it. 

So if you want to make sure you’re not being ripped off, do a little research. It only takes a a few seconds to type the wine into Google and hit the ‘shopping’ tab. If you want to check further just search ‘pages from the uk’ and compare a few prices. As we can see from the example above there are plenty of unscrupulous people with flashy websites queing up to fleece the unwary winelover!