Hatch-Mansfield

Hatch Mansfield are an agency who handle the wines of some very prominent producers in the UK. They sell their wines to the trade, acting exclusively for producers in France, Chile, New Zealand and the USA. Their site contains excellent information on the wineries they represent, right down to large tasting notes files that can be downloaded for a multitude of wines. There's also a clickable map of the UK which will list local retailers carrying Hatch Mansfield's lines, but this is not an ecommerce site, so you can't buy. Navigation is via the panel on the left, which is available on all screens.




SPECIAL FEATURES




The Wine List Wineries are listed down the left hand edge of the screen. Hatch Mansfield represents some good names: Champagne Taittinger and Louis Jadot of Burgundy Chile's Errazuriz, Caliterra and Seña, Villa Maria and Esk Valley Estate from New Zealand and from the US, Domaine Carneros and St Francis. Taking Jadot as a typical example of the information provided, clicking their link reveals a thorough profile of the company with photos of the winery and the estate's owners. On the right is a little panel of buttons: Wines contains an overview of Jadot's products, their wine-making philosophy and a list of their wines. Click any one for a label image, more information and the chance to download an Adobe Acrobat file containing extensive tasting notes (you will need an Acrobat reader for this; a download link is provided). Vineyard gives extremely comprehensive details of Jadot's vineyard holdings and their geography. Winery tells the story of winemaking at the estate in pictures and text. Image Files contains scores of very high-quality images of the estate and their wines. Finally, WWW Link will take you straight to Jadot's own website. In all, these producer profiles represent a fantastic resource.




OTHER FEATURES


In Your Store allows you to identify local stockists. The News section carries stories concerning the producers within their portfolio. Some of these are very interesting, such as the piece on Errazuriz who are carrying out trials to determine the most favourable way of maximising extraction of flavonoids from red grapes. This follows evidence published by Glasgow University that flavonoids in red wines have very beneficial health properties.