Tell Does It Again

First Volans wine-tasting

Tell shoots the tasters Ale in black, Tell skips for joy Amanda, me, Richard Glass-scape

We have resurrected something that we used to do occasionally at SustainAbility: a blind wine-tasting. In the old days, when we are at the Knightsbridge office, we used to do it competitively, with Tell Muenzing (from Germany) championing European wines and Nick Robinson (from New Zealand) New World wines. This time, Tell did it on his own, with four reds and two whites.

Huge fun – and wonderful to look around the room and see colleagues from Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Singapore, UK and US. There’s a new book out, The Last Lingua Franca, by Nicholas Ostler (Allen lane), who argues that the shelf-life of English (or even ‘Globish’) as a global language may well be limited, with no global language needed by 2050 – thanks to machine translation and related factors. Fascinating thought, but in the meantime I remain keen to build organisations with diverse nationalities involved, to ensure both access to native speakers of key languages and a sensitivity to other cultures.