It's always pretty manic here at Whitmore & White, but last week has to rate as one of our busiest yet! The usual busyness in the stores, combined with a few firsts - including a 1^st birthday! So what's been going on I hear you cry! Well, if you follow our social media you will have had a taste of what we've been up to. Here's a quick summary€¦ On Thursday night we hosted one of our biggest events yet, a gin tasting for 100 people. This was a fantastic event for a worthy charity, and what better way to raise money than to drink gin?? Hosted by two of our fabulous team, Simon and Tom, we tried six different gins, all with a bespoke garnish. The night was a huge success, so if you're looking to organise something similar for your business or organisation then take a look at what we can offer on our Corporate Events page. As if one event wasn't enough for Thursday night, we we're also at the launch for the Chester duck race. This is a great annual event in aid of the Countess of Chester Babygrow Appeal, where businesses like us have to dress up rather large rubber ducks and then race them down the River Dee. We always say that in our business you never know what you will be doing from one day to the next, and decorating a giant rubber duck as a cheese board is definitely a first for us! We did our best, and "Cheese & Quackers" was born! If you want to see how he fares in the race, then head down to the River Dee by The Groves in Chester on the 16^th September. After a late night on Thursday, Friday saw us hosting Wirral Radio in store as part of 1^st Birthday celebrations in West Kirby. Wirral Radio broadcast from the store when we first opened, so it seemed only fitting to get them back again to help us celebrate! It's hard to believe that it's been a year already. It feels like we've been there forever and some of our regulars already refer to us as a West Kirby institution! We have had an amazing first year, and have enjoyed every minute of it. We have some fantastic regular customers, and new faces are coming through the door all the time. We've tried to be a fabulous place to shop, eat, drink and socialise, and we hope we've achieved this. Rest assured though that we won't be resting on our laurels! We are always looking to be better and different, and the next exciting development will be a classic cocktail menu introduced by our new king of the bar, Piers. If you regularly frequent the speakeasies of West Kirby then you may already know Piers, and all we can say is that we are thrilled to have him onboard!! If you want to see him in action then you need to head over on a Friday or Saturday night for drinks! By now you'd think we'd have had enough, but no, we're made of sterner stuff! Still two more events to go, this time in Heswall, starting with our South American Wine Tasting on Friday, and swiftly followed by our first ever pop-up wine dinner on Saturday night! We've never attempted anything like this before, but I think we can safely say it was a huge success. We partnered with the amazing Nova Restaurant in Heswall to host a six course dinner, with matching wines, for 14 guests. All of this was done in store, so all in all a truly unique experience. The food served by Nova was absolutely stunning, and was paired with fantastic wines from the Colombo winery in New Zealand. We were lucky enough to have Bapstist Sieber, winemaker from Colombo, with us on the night to talk us through the wines which made for a very interesting (and delicious) evening. This was the first of many similar events we have planned for Heswall (as well as the other stores), so keep your eyes on the events page for details of the next one! On top of all this we relaunched our (ahem) renamed gin last week. The more eagle-eyed of our customers will have noticed that our gin disappeared shortly after we launched it. We won't go into too much detail as to why it was renamed, let's just say we lost a David and Goliath battle. So now we have "Whitmore Gin', the same fantastic small batch gin as before, but now under our name. We're thrilled to have it back, and even happier with the new name! Our gin is available in all three store and online! So that was our week, I think we could all do with a lie down€¦ Hope to see you soon!