This is the longer, more windy version of the 'About Us' - the one before the creatives at By All Means got their talented little hands on it...
Guy and I get asked about wine a lot. Specifically, how do you get to the point where you can confidently buy wine you'll love for yourself. People struggle in bottle shops - there's a lot of information, a lot of choice, and a lot of foreign labels that don't make it obvious what's in the bottle.
The answer is pretty straight forward: you need to drink a lot. Like, heaps. In full tasting mode, we're looking at upwards of 50 wines a week. We're not drinking the whole bottle - we're swirling, swishing, sipping, spitting, and then cataloguing the good stuff, ready to be presented to you.
Another part of being able to confidently buy wine for yourself is being OK with not liking stuff. We often buy things and go 'nah, not for me'. Knowing what you don't like helps to frame what you do like.
The final key component in figuring out your flavour is the vocabulary; wine lingo is subjective, confusing, ever-changing, and often riddled with snobbery. None of that makes it easy to grasp.
We realise that drinking lots of different wine with great breadth probably isn't a reality for you. And you may only have a few drinks a week which you don't want to waste on a sub-par bottle. You also probably don't have the time 'in industry' to have picked up the necessary language to accurately describe what you're after to your wine steward, either.
Like So is a wine service with just the good bits that's easy to get your head around, and that offers a bit of uber-palatable info along the way.
We're not going to delve too much into soil composition, rain shadows, or brix levels - we'll keep it light and conversational. We'll give you vocabulary to impress at the dinner table rather than the cellar door.
The goal of Like So is to get you drinking better wine, from better producers, with greater appreciation for what's in the glass. We want to remove the stress and the gamble of bottle shops and give you good booze that you can rely on.
Sorry - I completely forgot to mention who Guy and I are. Ahh... I'll get to that later.