Now here’s a mad story to liven up the gap between Christmas and the New Year and it’s even on the BBC News interwebby site, so it’s probably true!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-20792058
We are told by Fiona Graham (Technology of Business Reporter, BBC) that “On a warm summer’s day in August, Danish wine merchant Sune Rosforth took delivery of 8,000 bottles of wine that had arrived from France.
Brigantine Tres Hombres; picture from BBC news website
From the offices of financial institutions flanking the quay, workers looked out at something that had not been seen in central Copenhagen for many years.
The ship that had brought the wine from the Breton port of Brest was a 32m-long brigantine, a twin-masted sailing ship, called the Tres Hombres.
Mr Rosforth’s company, Rosforth and Rosforth, supplies restaurants in Denmark with organic and biodynamic wines.
Moving wine in a more eco-friendly fashion was something he had been talking about for some time with an Anjou wine producer who was also a skipper, but the plan had originally been to use canal barges.”
“We wanted to keep the energy that the producers had already put in the wine, and not break the chain. And, I’m telling you… this wine just tasted amazing”, said Sune.
The article goes on to detail various projects currently running in the modern sail-power world including the Tokyo University Wind Challenger project (already described by this blog) along with vessels with carbon fibre sails or huge kites flown from the decks called “sky-sails”. Interesting reading.