By Leslie Gevirtz

NEW YORK |
Tue Mar 20, 2012 5:02am EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) – In a bid to reverse a decade-long slide in sales, some producers of Port wine have gone pink.

They have given the sweet red or amber colored Portuguese fortified wine, which is traditionally sipped as an accompaniment to the cheese course or dessert, a makeover with a lighter rosé version that is 20 percent alcohol.

“It’s port without rules,” Adrian Bridge, chief executive of Taylor-Fladgate in Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal, said of his rosé, Croft Pink.

His 320-year-old, family-owned port house, which also has the Fonseca and Croft brands, was the first to make a rosé port in 2005 though others, including smaller producers Poças and Krohn, have followed suit.

Croft Pink, first sold in Holland, Canada and Britain, was marketed in Texas last fall before its 2012 roll out to the rest of the United States.

“One restaurant was going through three bottles a day – that’s an awful lot of port,” Bridge said.

He discovered that rather than sipping the drink, the bartender at the restaurant was pouring the bottles into a slushy machine to make icy drinks.

“They were selling it as slushies, sort of ice cream for adults,” he explained. “This is definitely not your father’s port.”

Port takes its name from Oporto, the seaport where, since the 17th Century, British ships have brought back barrels to a thirsty nation.

The British were so fond of the drink that families sent their sons to Portugal to become wine merchants and port producers.

There are many types of port including vintage, tawny, ruby and white. While some are aged for years in wood, or for decades in bottles, ruby port is aged for most of its three years in stainless steel or concrete vats. By port standards, it is young and meant to be drunk upon release.

Rosé port is a ruby that has had light contact with the grape skins giving the wine its color. It tastes fruity and has aromas of grapefruit, berries and honey.

Like all port, the rosé is fortified with a neutral grape spirit, which means it is about 20 percent alcohol. By comparison, most table wines are between 12 percent and 15 percent alcohol.

But unlike port, sales of rosés in 2009 and 2010 increased by 14 percent and 22 percent, according to the Wines of Provence, a trade association that represents the French region synonymous with the wine.

But in 2011 rosé sales dipped by about six percent.

Despite the slide, Bridge thinks more consumers will buy his pink port.

“Rosés still make up 15 percent of the wine market and rosés are zero percent of port,” he said. “We’re having a lot of success with it and you know why? It’s sweet, it’s high alcohol, and it’s really simple.”

(Reporting By Leslie Gevirtz)

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By Ethan Bilby

LONDON |
Tue Mar 20, 2012 1:26pm EDT

LONDON (Reuters) – Greeted by a fanfare of trumpets and guarded by men in plumed helmets, Britain’s Queen Elizabeth celebrated 60 years on the throne with an address to parliament in the medieval hall where one of her distant predecessors was sentenced to death.

The 85-year-old Queen addressed both the Lords and the Commons in Westminster Hall, an honor reserved only for monarchs and the most illustrious visitors. Since World War Two, Charles de Gaulle, Nelson Mandela, Pope Benedict and Barack Obama are the only non-royals to have enjoyed the privilege.

The hall is the oldest part of the sprawling riverside Palace of Westminster that houses parliament. Its magnificent hammer-beam roof, the largest medieval timber roof in Northern Europe, has survived fires and bombings that destroyed other parts of the palace many times over the centuries.

“Since my accession, I have been a regular visitor to the Palace of Westminster and, at the last count, have had the pleasurable duty of treating with 12 prime ministers,” said the Queen, 85, drawing laughter from an audience that included the latest three: Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron.

In one of her previous addresses, for her Silver Jubilee in 1977, the Queen caused controversy by pointedly commenting on the benefits of union for all parts of her kingdom — seen as a veiled warning against too much devolution of powers to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

With Scottish nationalism as lively as ever and a referendum on independence in the pipeline, the Queen chose to steer clear of politics for her Diamond Jubilee.

“The happy relationship I have enjoyed with parliament has extended well beyond the more than three and a half thousand bills I have signed into law,” said the Queen, who was wearing a pale yellow coat and matching hat.

BLACK ROD

Relations between monarchs and lawmakers were not always so smooth.

The throne where the Queen sat during Tuesday’s ceremony was within inches of the spot where one of her predecessors, King Charles I, was tried for tyranny and treason and sentenced to death in 1649.

Since then, Britain’s constitutional monarchy has weathered many storms before the palaces of Buckingham and Westminster settled into a cordial relationship.

Speakers of both houses, in traditional manner, heaped praised the queen’s dedication to her subjects at Tuesday’s ceremony.

The televised ceremony was precisely choreographed and involved officials with colorful uniforms and titles that have resisted the passage of time.

The Queen’s Body Guard of the Yeomen of the Guard marched up the aisle of Westminster Hall with their Renaissance hats and ruffs while the Body Guard of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen at Arms were also in attendance with their plumed helmets.

The Lord Speaker entered in procession with her Principal Doorkeeper as well as the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod, while the Queen was escorted by the Lord Great Chamberlain.

She was greeted by a fanfare from the State Trumpeters of the Household Cavalry, perched on a balcony overlooking the hall, and presented with a newly made stained glass window showing her coat of arms, a gift from both houses.

(Writing by Estelle Shirbon)

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By Lisa Baertlein

LOS ANGELES |
Mon Mar 19, 2012 8:28pm EDT

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Starbucks Corp opened the first store in its new Evolution Fresh juice bar chain on Monday, its biggest move outside coffee aimed at boosting the company’s position in the $50 billion health food sector.

The juice bar business is, however, fragmented and intensely competitive and some analysts say the Evolution Fresh shops could have lower margins than Starbucks’ coffee shops.

With Starbucks yet to detail how many juice bars it plans to open, the popularity of its first shop, located in an upscale shopping area in Bellevue, Washington, an affluent city just east of Seattle, will be closely watched.

“Mixologists” at the new shop dispense a variety of juices – including apple, coconut water, carrot and beet – from taps to create “hand crafted” concoctions with names like “sweet burn” and “field of greens”. The 8-ounce drinks sell for $4.99 and the 16-ounce drinks are priced at $7.99.

The juice bar also sells bottled Evolution Fresh fruit and vegetable juices, smoothies and food, such as oatmeal, wraps, salads and soups. The menu includes vegan and vegetarian options and so-called super foods like kale and quinoa are well represented.

Fresh fruit and vegetable juices have gained in popularity in the United States with some health-conscious consumers using them as meal replacements, while others drink them as part of “cleansing” diets.

The world’s biggest coffee chain bought Evolution Fresh for $30 million in cash in November to get a piece of that business. At the time of the purchase, Starbucks Chief Executive Howard Schultz said successful independent juice bars have annual sales of well over $1 million per unit.

Analysts have said that is a bit less than an average U.S. Starbucks cafe but more than a typical store for rival Jamba Inc, a publicly held juice and smoothie chain that recently introduced new squeezed-to-order juice blends. That move from Jamba came months after Starbucks and McDonald’s Corp introduced their own smoothies.

“Starbucks is one of the savviest companies in terms of what they do, of probably any company,” said John Sicher, editor and publisher of Beverage Digest.

While Starbucks ranks among the nation’s best companies at marketing and Americans are willing to spend money on healthy beverages, he declined to predict whether consumers would embrace the concept.

Bernstein analyst Sara Senatore noted that some of Starbucks’ recent roll-outs – particularly its Via instant coffee and K-cups coffee refills for Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Inc’s popular Keurig one-cup brewers – have far exceeded analysts’ expectations.

“The lesson from those is not to underestimate Starbucks’ ability to execute a concept very, very well,” Senatore said.

The Evolution Fresh store opening comes just ahead of Starbucks’ annual shareholder meeting on Wednesday.

Investors in Seattle-based Starbucks have seen shares in the company soar since it restructured by slashing costs and closing nearly 1,000 stores around the world. The stock, which was trading at just under $10 in February 2009, was trading above $53 on Monday.

Starbucks’ purchase of Evolution Fresh was in line with its strategy to sell a broader range of products through its own cafes, grocery stores and other retail outlets.

Since purchasing the company, Starbucks has expanded distribution of its bottled juices beyond a handful of retailers that included Whole Foods Market Inc to more grocery sellers.

Evolution Fresh bottled juices will be sold in Starbucks’ company-owned stores this year, replacing Naked Juice products from PepsiCo Inc.

Pepsi and Coca-Cola Co, owner of Odwalla, are big players in the $5 billion packaged juice category where Evolution Fresh competes.

San Bernardino, California-based Evolution Fresh was started by the founder of Naked Juice. It uses a heat-free, high-pressure pasteurization process. The company says that process retains more of the nutrients in the juice, compared with the conventional heat pasteurization used by some rivals in the refrigerated juice category.

Many independent juice bars do not pasteurize their made-to-order juices.

(Additional reporting by Martinne Geller in New York and Anthony Bolante in Seattle; Editing by Edwina Gibbs and Richard Chang)

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By Adam Tanner

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts |
Mon Mar 19, 2012 9:29pm EDT

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (Reuters) – Media executive Oscar Gomez Barbero gave a bleak assessment of his work-life balance.

“I feel compelled to be constantly in touch with my work, including weekends and holidays, but you learn to live with this situation,” said Barbero, the chief technology officer at Spanish and Portuguese-language media group Prisa.

“When you are part of the most important decision-making bodies of a company, there are no limits on dedication. I have little time for family or social activities.”

In recent years, many companies on Wall Street and beyond have embraced the mantra of flexible hours and work-life balance. Read any image-building column written by a top executive, and he or she is likely to stress the importance of getting to a child’s soccer game or concert.

The idea of flexibility and fewer total hours on the job has clear popular appeal. The 2007 book “The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich,” for example, became a huge best seller. But tales of short hours and relaxed work environments do not mesh with reality for many senior managers. The problem is that modern communications may allow less time in the office, but compel them to work around the clock, according to 10 executives in six countries interviewed as part of a larger Harvard Business School survey.

Some grimly predict that those seeking to get to or stay in the executive suite will have to be plugged in almost constantly.

Without a company publicist to cast a positive spin on corporate life, the executives spoke bluntly about how technology increasingly captures their off hours and fills their lives with stress. All subsequently gave their consent for Reuters to reprint their remarks, and two, including Barbero, agreed to have their names published.

“There is no getting away, not at all, no, not when you are in a higher position,” said Susanne Meinl, director of human resources at marketing firm Design Hotels AG in Germany. ”A call center agent, they just leave the office and go home and not bother about anything, but if you have a position with a lot of responsibility … 24/7 availability is a given, has always been and will always be.”

One Canadian executive described what some might see as a dream job: luxurious life on a Caribbean island, huge paycheck, high profile as a hedge fund manager. It wasn’t.

“In my 30s I worked 80 hours, 90 hours,” said the executive, who is now chief financial officer of a publicly traded Canadian company. “I had a young child and dedicated all of my time to my career, and this clearly was not a good way of living. And as a result of that, I went through a divorce.”

Of course, earning big money and being part of the 1 percent rather than the 99 percent does give the executives more choices, particularly concerning early retirement. ”For me the reward of this lifestyle is that I’ll be able to alter my lifestyle much earlier,” said a top official at a California biotechnology company.

One executive said his wife really enjoyed the upscale living his salary provided for the family, even if he was not around that much.

To be sure, all of those interviewed said they found their jobs interesting, and Design Hotels’ Meinl drew a stark contrast between the executive suite and a menial position elsewhere. Cashiers in a supermarket “will not burn out in the way someone burns out like me. I mean, they are bored and not appreciated.”

One top international airline executive said a tragedy — the loss of a child in the fifth month of his wife’s pregnancy — reinforced the need to balance work and home.

“The always-online kind of approach is, from my point of view, close to noise, close to pollution,” he said. ”In a top management job, how can you work strategically smart if you are embedded in noise?”

An executive who is afraid to delegate, he added, “should be prepared to get emails at night.”

For many executives, though, balance is elusive, and their jobs have become an endurance test.

A CEO of another biotech company says he works 11 or 12 hours a day and is always on call. ”Sometimes I stop and think whether or not I can continue with what I am doing with the level of stress that I have and then what always surprises me is that I am able to accommodate it and go to the next level of more stress,” he said.

He now regrets that he was not around much when his two teenage children were smaller, so he wants to do better with his 6-year-old.

“All of a sudden I have turned around and my kids are no longer living at home, they are in college and then I have a little one at home,” he said.

Why then does he devote so much time and effort to his job?

“It’s not an objective; it is not something I want to do,” he said. “I think that people today expect that you are available and going to be available at all times, and if you don’t return an email within an hour, or even minutes, then people think that you are not paying attention to them.

“I feel like if I take a vacation, it is not going to be a vacation because I am going to be working all the time.”

The balance shifts even more toward the company and away from “my time” as a manager gets higher up the ladder, the executives say. If anything, most interviewed expected demands on their time to increase in the years to come.

“Technology has created an expectation that you are connected,” said Meinl, who enjoys yoga in her free time. “With the economy, there is definitely more expectation for employees to deliver now … Work-life balance will become harder.” Those who use personal time for work will be the great economic winners as technology advances, the California biotech executive said.

“I hate to say it,” he said, “but I think the technology is just enabling the people who are really hungry for success to climb quicker, further, and your middle America, your blue-collar worker, (for whom) technology is a convenience to just enjoy life a little bit better, is not going to benefit from it economically.

“The problem is just going to get worse and worse, where you have got a small group of people who are just leveraging technology to be 24/7, you know, anywhere on the planet and that will make them more productive people, but it will separate them even further from the rest of society.

“I can see a scenario where you have people who have every five minutes of their lives planned out and technology on the fly and data coming to them left and right, and I can see where most people would look at that and say ‘Oh my God, that’s awful.’”

(Adam Tanner is a Reuters correspondent on a 2011-12 Nieman fellowship at Harvard.)

(Editing by Martin Howell and Lisa Von Ahn)

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By Sui-Lee Wee

BEIJING |
Mon Mar 19, 2012 6:35am EDT

BEIJING (Reuters) – For nearly two hours on Sunday, dissident artist Ai Weiwei was able to maintain a Twitter-like microblog account, briefly raising hopes the Chinese government had relaxed some of its tight control over online expression.

Ai’s first microblog post said: “Testing. Ai Weiwei. March 18, 2012.”

Ai’s account on Sina, the operator of China’s most popular microblogging platform, drew 10,680 followers in that brief period, he told Reuters on Monday, including the jubliant-sounding comment: “The moment has come. The skies have changed in China.”

Shortly afterwards, however, the account was inaccessible, apparently deleted by government censors.

Ai is a prominent social critic who was detained without charge last year for 81 days until his conditional release in late June. He said he used his social security number to register the microblog account after discovering that his name was unexpectedly no longer blocked.

“The controls are very strong,” Ai told Reuters by telephone. “They (the government) are very insecure, they are not ready for any kind of change.”

It was unclear what caused the crack in China’s “Great Firewall” as microblog operators such as Sina comply with government orders and monitor content, blocking and removing comments deemed unacceptable or too sensitive.

Repeated calls to Sina went unanswered.

China heavily filters the Internet and blocks foreign social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter, fearing that unfettered access would lead to instability.

The deletion of Ai’s microblog, or weibo in Chinese, came after new regulations went into effect on Friday requiring Beijing-based microbloggers to register using their real identities.

Officials said the new rules are meant to curb rumors, vulgarities and pornography, but many users say the restrictions are aimed at muzzling the often scathing and raucous microblog chatter in a country where the Internet offers a rare opportunity for open discussion.

Ai said his account was deleted just past midnight on Monday, replaced with a message that read: “Error. Invalid Weibo user”.

He said this was the first time he had succeeded in creating a weibo account. Ai is active on Twitter and has over 131,000 followers.

Since his release from detention, Ai has ignored efforts to silence him and has instead become a rallying point for dissidents and activists who have been harassed and arrested since a government crackdown on opponents began last year.

Ai is a vocal critic of the Communist Party, who has spoken out on everything from the award of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo to Internet curbs.

Even after Ai’s weibo account was deleted, some supporters held out hope.

“Ai Weiwei, when can you speak up on Weibo?” a user called Arizona_Hal wrote on Sina’s microblogging website, where users could still search for the artist’s name on Monday.

(Editing by Don Durfee and Miral Fahmy)

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