It’s not an enormous amount of money, so let’s hope our tax money is spent wisely. Fedejerez don’t have their own website at the moment, just a placeholder, but they are responsible for the Ten Star Tapas (Sherry Institute) website in the UK. This get-up seems to be looked after by PR company Jackie Cooper (JCPR). I found the link by old-fashioned sleuthing, matching the address on the TST About Us page to companies at 91 New Cavendish St. The mention of sherry under Campaign Stories (coming soon…) on the JCPR site was the missing link. I bet a London PR company doesn’t come cheap. Somehow I don’t think Fedejerez is a major account if they can’t be bothered to tell the story.

The TST site, itself blog-ish, links to a real blog called Raisin the Flor. I love the name (PR companies are good at some things). The posts are by someone called Petra Barran. I wonder how Petra fits into this equation, especially since she seems to be driving her Choc Star van around the country? Petra’s own blog is a lot more entertaining, by the way. Perhaps Petra is paid to blog about sherry once a month (seems to be the rate). With two comments in total across the whole blog, I don’t get the feeling a community is building around it. They (I assume JCPR in this case) have not even bothered to update the “About” page and the original WordPress guff remains. Wierdly, there is a Raisin the Flor isomer with one sneaky post from Petra along with a couple by “sherrylover”. This is certainly one PR company who don’t seem to get Web 2.o, although to be fair the have managed to get TST onto the first page of Google (.co.uk) when you search for “sherry”.

I’d be fascinated to know how many hits the TST site gets, as there is some interesting stuff on it. For example: You can download a list of sherry-food pairings by Heston Blumenthal here, or read about an exclusive tasting evening for Telegraph readers. What happens if you hit on this site but generally take the Guardian? Do you just go anyway and pretend to be a Telegraph reader?  I bet most of the people who turn up for the tastings would have seen it in the Torygraph Food supplement anyway. So is our tax money going to be spent on commission to PR companies for generating unnecessary content? If these tastings are exclusive we should be reading about them afterwards anyway, salivating as we think about what we missed and considering whether we should switch to the Telegraph in future.

One thing I find astounding: On JCPR’s own website they have a fantastic film (no doubt cost a penny or two) languishing, hidden away, available to no-one except those in the know – or those with too much time on their hands. The guy who made the video, Christian Banfield, put it up on YouTube, but at 312 views (12/12/08), it’s not exactly going viral. I guess he’s not a PR man – or maybe he is?

One last thing for pedants. See what happens when you search for “sherry wine” in Google Trends. Interesting to note the long term downward trend in searches, and also the tick up just before Christmas every year, mirroring sales. But look what has happening this year, look at that measly little blip. My early prediction for the 2008 Christmas sherry “campaign” is that things will fall off a cliff.