We sold everything in our auction, but if you live in Australia, or are willing to pay shipping costs for some extraordinary opportunities, you have another chance, BoozeMonkey’s Wine for Haiti project.
Beset by publicity problems since launching the Australian wing of Wine For Haiti in February, Marc Jardine (BoozeMonkey) and Ross Anderson (Empire Wine) have turned to auction house Grays Online to help sell the A$65,000-worth of wine donated to the appeal (US$60,000).
“From the moment we announced the appeal, the response from the winemakers was phenomenal,” comments Jardine. “And watching the donations snowball was very exciting. But there have been times over the past few weeks where I would have happily taken a baseball bat to some of the news editors I spoke to: with over 220,000 people already confirmed dead in Haiti, with food and medical supplies in short supply, and with no running water or sanitation, I was told time and again by the Aussie media that they weren’t interested in Haiti as a story, or in the charity appeal to help save people’s lives.”
“We tried everywhere,” says Empire’s Ross Anderson, “including all the national and local newspapers, magazines, radio and TV stations… but we got no traction at all. We spoke to the Red Crossa about it too, and they admitted that they had given up promoting their Haiti aid efforts in Australia because they hadn’t managed to get anywhere either. It was very frustrating. We tried our best to generate publicity on the internet too of course, but that alone just wasn’t enough to make a success of the auction so we spoke to Grays because they have a database of over half a million customers.”
The auction is live now and will close on Thursday 25th March at graysonline.