FTPB - News

FTPB News n° 12 - 20 June 2008

As you will see in the June issue of FTPB News, there have been many stories in a wide range of fields that we have covered in the past few months, from the arts and crafts to farming, engineering and high technology, with forays into several other sectors of industry, including the wine trade.

We continue to work closely with our partners and sister organisations – more particularly the Trade Commission of the French Embassy in London, but also in Dublin. As they organised events in the food & drink sector, this gave us the opportunity to invite journalists along and, let’s face it, there are worse ways to spend one’s working day than sampling among the best wines and the finest foods in the world...

The London Wine Fair at EXCEL remains a rallying point for the whole industry – and not only French producers, obviously – and, this year, we helped two regions of France get their production better know: Alsace and Picardy.

Alsace has first-class white wines and the stand put in place by the Chamber of Commerce & Industry of Strasbourg gave them pride of place. The region also has an independent brewery (Météor), which was represented at the London Wine Fair and intends to develop sales in the UK.

For its part, AREX, the development agency of the Picardy region, benefited from our assistance in promoting its champagne wines. It is a little-known fact, but the vast region of Picardy stretches from the North of France all the way to the border of the region of Champagne, and there are producers of champagne in the Vallée de la Marne whose estates are actually located within the borders of Picardy, on the edge of the region of Champagne. One of them, Jean Comyn, has discovered that his domaine sports a historic Scottish connection, leading to valuable sales across Scotland!

French expertise, however, extends to other areas, as underlined in a range of press releases issued on behalf of the Invest in France Agency, from nanotechnology and mobile telephony to clinical trials and video-games.

FTPB continues to organise press trips on a regular basis and we may yet have a few more in the autumn that we can suggest to you. In early June, Kate Ambler, FTPB’s Press Officer, took a delegation of six journalists – four British and two Danes – to Corsica, so that they may learn more about the quality food & drink products typical of the island.

The client organisations, in Corsica, were the Chamber of Commerce & Industry (CCI) of Bastia and the CCI of Ajaccio, within the framework of the plan for promoting the region of Corsica that has been set up by the island’s regional authorities. In the UK, the trip was put in place together with our partners, the French Chamber of Commerce in Great Britain (CCFGB), who sent 10 British-based buyers on a fact-finding mission, alongside the members of the trade press from the UK and Denmark that we had contacted.

Local wine and Pietra beer were on the menu, and it was reported to me that large volumes of both were consumed in the course of the press trip by our six reporters, who appear to have taken their sampling duties very seriously indeed, to a degree and with a professional dedication that their Corsican hosts found most impressive – amazing even. Happily, no one was lost in action.

Last but not least, as our current Project Manager, Yann Calvez, is getting ready to leave the press bureau at the end of his two-year contract (end of June), the new Project Manager is in the process of taking over, and her name is Estelle Atayi. Estelle, who comes from the Paris Region, is learning her new role fast and is excited at the thought of living in London for the next couple of years at least.

I hope you will enjoy reading this latest issue of FTPB News, and that you will have an enjoyable break at some stage or other during the coming summer months. The next issue of our bulletin will come out in the early part of September.

Philip Jolly, Managing Director, FTPB

Art & Design

Agriculture & Food

Electronic & Engineering

Leisure, Sport & Tourism

Art & Design

Marie-Antoinette inspires Philippe Cécile with unique embroidery

Philippe Cécile, an embroiderer and textile restorer, opened his workshop in Burgundy to visitors from 1 June 2008 in order to showcase his work, which is inspired by the 18th century and, in particular, by Marie-Antoinette (who was the wife of Louis XVI of France).