Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's Friday the 4th of October.

We're pretty much in the prime season for wine making, I believe. But my guest today,

who's someone you will greatly enjoy hearing from, will know better than I do. She is, of course,

the great wine expert, Gillie Golden.

Gillie, welcome. Simon, lovely to be with you. Are we pretty much at peak wine making now

across Europe? We certainly are. It's actually one of these lovely things that is very climate

dependent. So although we're at the peak time, theoretically, some

people are delaying a bit, especially in the UK with the harvest of the grapes, because it's so

reliant on having dry, dry weather, we've been having so much rain. They're going to wait

till the grapes have relaxed a bit, dried out, sun's come out, getting maximum sweetness in the

grape before they harvest. But between now and November for Europe is really the harvest season.

Because this is a travel podcast, not a wine podcast, I'm really interested in the travel aspects.

And I hope will give people a first for knowledge and for

tasting some of those wines talk us through the great locations i guess in europe maybe even in the

UK for tours of wine estates and actually tasting the wines where are the greatest places to be

in terms of being a wine

tourist? I think that was a bit mean of you to say even the UK. I mean, you're absolutely at the

apex of things happening in the UK right now. Whereas we were absolutely non-starters, we are now

the place to watch. I mean if someone was to say

where is the hippest place to go and look at wine, it would be in the UK because it's

not same old, same old, it's all on with the new. Lots of wonderful vineyards to visit. People

used to see off the thought of tourists coming to their winery and say, Hey, will you show us around? They didn't like it at all.

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