Cool Links

This is us sharing some information about businesses we like.  We sat down and thought about the businesses we know that do what they do extremely well.  We've got pretty high standards and at the time of writing this, we're only including businesses which provide a really good product or service and which we have experienced personally.  In time, we might slip in a few customers, too, and some good people who deserve a plug. 

Glass

Mark Hill Publishing is a small UK-based publishing company specialising in producing books and stand-alone catalogues (they call them bookalogues) on antiques, collectables and 20th century design.  We found them when they announced they were publishing ‘Hi Sklo Lo Sklo – From Masterpiece to Mass Produced’, the catalogue of a Czech glass exhibition mid-2008.  This is now available and we strongly recommend it to anyone interested in Czech glass.  If you have mystery pieces in your collection - quality glass that you can't pin down to a particular Scandinavian or Murano maker - you may find pictures of them in the pages of this book, as we have. 

Wine

Vino Fino

Obviously, this isn't going to be of interest to our customers from ourside New Zealand, but it's a good example of how to run a business like ours.  When Dave or Rex from Vino Fino say, this is the best South Australian shiraz under $15 (or whatever the type of wine or price range may be), their customers know they can trust them.

The other thing they've done, over the years, is educated their customers about wine, just as we're trying to educate our customers about glass.  Before we had kids and our social life came to a grinding halt, Viv and I went to their Tuesday night wine tasting every week for years, learning to discriminate between a good wine and a not-quite-so-good wine (and more particularly, trying to identify the $10 wines that were as good as the $20 wines, and so on).

Stonyridge Vineyard

"A vertical tasting did no more than confirm my view that Stephen White is making New Zealand's finest Cabernet-based red wines." - James Halliday, Wine Atlas of Australia and New Zealand

Steven White is a distant cousin of mine; I think we've met twice.  As the critics attest, he has created a fantastic winery.  Viv and I holidayed on Waiheke Island a few years ago, found ourselves staying next door to the vineyard, went next door and found a great dance party going on.  You're got to love businesses that are about living well and doing what they do really well, not just about making money.