Greetings from Koh Phangan, Thailand!
I'm here today with a longtime friend of mine, Matthew See, a Toronto restaurateur and hospitality professional extraordinaire who I'm pleased to announce will be hosting a number of tours for Wheel & Anchor, in a brand new category of food-and-wine themed programs that we're calling Wheel & Anchor Taste.
Gordon & Matthew getting ready to mix up some mocktails
I'll reveal more about these programs once we're through the holiday hustle and bustle, but in a nutshell they will be programs that focus on the pleasures for the palate from countries and regions around the world.
All of our taste programs will of course be curated according to member interest, and they won't be just one winery after another as some food and wine tours can end up as. Instead the flavours and cuisines of our destinations will shape the programming, to create the kind of moments where we bond with those we break bread with, and deepen our understanding of the stories told by the cuisine of a region.
Matthew has had a passion for food, drink, and hospitality that has led him to open his own restaurants in Toronto, and he's always investigating the places he visits for new culinary inspiration and insight.
I've known Matthew since he was knee-high to a grasshopper, and I'm delighted to have a true hospitality professional and food aficionado like himself to help curate these programs.
Apart from his passion for food, he's also a hell of a mixologist, and since we have had the chance to spend some time together here in Thailand, I asked him if he could create for us the first in a series of signature Wheel & Anchor cocktails and mocktails.
The finished product...but it needs a name...?
Events are a big part of what we do to connect travellers, where food and wine are vehicles for creating conversations and sharing stories. Wine in particular tends feature rather heavily in our programming, but we both have members who don't drink, and all of us have nights when a few drinks just aren't in the cards.
So to this end, it is our intention to create our own menu of mocktails that we can bring to our events (and on tour!) that can be whipped up by bartenders the world over, so that we always have a tasty non-alcoholic treat on hand for our community.
To that end, Matthew went out to the local market while here in Koh Phangan and pulled together the first signature drink for the menu:
As mentioned in the video, this drink will need a name, and I'd like to throw that out to you! If you have a suggestion, please send an email to either myself or Veronica and we'll choose one in next week's newsletter!
Until then, cheers from Thailand!
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