A New Year and Threshers has risen from the dead. It will be saved along with Bottoms Up after the break up of First Quench. A miracle indeed. An interesting move by new owners SEP Properties. They plan to make Threshers the new Majestic online and franchise Bottoms Up as the brand replacement for off licences Threshers, Victoria Wine and The Local.

So the High Street will not look so bleak, but will at the same time retain the slightly dull homogeneity. There will appear to be less choice, where in fact there was originally only the branded illusion of choice.

Not the only New Year Lazarus, as we have seen another tired old brand just escaping a coup. Gordon Brown slipping like an eel from the grasp of conspirators in the Cabinet.

It certainly has been a lively start to 2010 (Happy New Year by the way).

The snow just keeps on coming, adding more coal to the fires of the global warming sceptics (governments that refuse to act through short-term self interest). By the way what exactly did we get from the climate change Copenhagen conference?...Nothing it would appear, well nothing 'legally binding'. At least Obama tried to salvage something I suppose.

Irrespective of that, things look bleak if you are to believe the latest science on natural methane emissions (like CO2 except 20 times worse). Scary stuff.

The reactionary nature of both media camps to the climate change argument is all about current 'weather' to aid their cause. It is worth remembering that the' inconvenient truth' is in the climate trends over several decades, not a flurry of snow in the winter.

So bearing in mind our unpredictable weather how did the UK do with its 2009 vintage?

If you look back to last years grape harvest in the UK, near perfect conditions (helped along by a longer warmer Autumn than usual) are just being reported to have produced an amazing vintage.

One of the 3 million odd bottles produced could be yours (if you are quick when they go on sale that is). It only equates to one bottle for every 20 of us in the UK. Hardly a glut. More like a drought. Not bad though for our very limited wine growing regions. If global warming takes hold these will be sure to increase, unless our small island is mostly under water with rising sea levels.

How do you now find this UK wine. Well apparently you do not....technology does it for you. 2009 saw an explosion in all sorts of wine related iPhone apps, from manually searching databases in the 'Cloud', to the recent Tesco label recognition app for those of you who (like me) do not like typing on a small screen.

The iPhone 'seeing' a label and pulling out wine notes for you is the practical tiny beginnings of what's know as AR or Augmented Reality, where technology blends into the real world. I incidentally consider myself a bit of an outcast with my Blackberry and its very limited app store. It is however in my opinion a far superior phone and 'email catcher'. I could buy an iPod Touch for apps, or maybe the wise thing is to save my cash until the Apple Slate is released

I could probably cope with the big keys on that screen.

So here we are at the beginning of a new decade, marking for me four whole years of wine blogging. I am still surprisingly clueless, and still find wine fascinating stuff. It is also still a major constant in my life, so I continue to feel obliged to scribble about it.

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