Menu for Hope: Donate for a Chance to Win a Private Wine Tour

As Christmas and the end of the year approaches, instead of writing about yet another wonderful restaurant meal or wine tour that I’ve been privileged to enjoy during the year, I’m offering you a chance to participate in Menu for Hope.

What is Menu for Hope?
Menu for Hope is an annual fundraising campaign hosted by group of food and wine bloggers around the world. Each participating blogger offers a tasty food or wine-related prize for the Menu for Hope raffle. Anyone around the world – and that means you too – can buy raffle tickets to bid on these prizes. For every $10 donated, you earn one virtual raffle ticket to bid on a prize of your choice.

This year the 5th campaign has chosen to work with the UN World Food Programme. The world’s largest food aid agency, working with over 1,000 other organizations in over 75 countries, in addition to providing food, the World Food Program helps hungry people to become self-reliant so that they escape hunger for good. Specifically the campaign will support the school lunch programme in Lesotho. The organisers chose to support the school lunch program because providing food for the children not only keeps them alive, but keeps them in school so that they learn the skills to feed themselves in the future. It is a model program in local procurement – buying food locally to support local farmers and the local economy. Instead of shipping surplus corn across the ocean, the WFP is buying directly from local subsistent farmers who practice conservation farming methods in Lesotho to feed the children there.

Last year nearly $100,000 was raised – please help do it again!

Wine Travel Guides Gift Subscription plus bonus Wine Tour
The main raffle prize on offer from me is a gold gift subscription to Wine Travel Guides (worth £49 or approximately $75 or €60) which lasts a whole year from activation. This will give you access to all the travel guides on the site. Today there are 46 comprehensive guides to the wine regions of France. By mid-January there will be a further seven guides covering Tuscany in Italy, Rioja in Spain and Mosel in Germany. Here is your chance to plan that trip to the wine regions of Europe with expert insider advice from 15 top-class wine and travel writers.

The bonus offer: If you can meet me in either the Jura or Savoie wine regions of France, I will personally drive you around the wine region for a day, meeting and tasting with some of my favourite wine growers and taking you out to lunch.

To bid for this prize, please use code: WB10
To view other enticing wine-related prizes, please see the Vinography blog.

How to Enter the Raffle, Bid and Donate
1. Choose a prize or prizes of your choice from our Menu for Hope at http://chezpim.com
2. Go to the donation site at http://www.firstgiving.com/menuforhope5 and make a donation.
3. Each $10 you donate will give you one raffle ticket toward a prize of your choice. Please specify which prize you’d like in the ‘Personal Message’ section in the donation form when confirming your donation. You must write-in how many tickets per prize, and please use the prize code.
For example, a donation of $50 can be 2 tickets for EU01 and 3 tickets for EU02. Please write 2xEU01, 3xEU02. Don’t forget if you want to bid on my prize you must use the code WB10 in just this way.
4. If your company matches your charity donation, please check the box and fill in the information so we could claim the corporate match.
5. Please allow us to see your email address so that we could contact you in case you win. Your email address will not be shared with anyone.

I’m proud to be associated with a group of fine bloggers all raising money for the UN World Food Programme via Menu for Hope. Please support this – it doesn’t matter where you are in the world, just use the secure firstgiving site to pay with your credit card and support the cause.

And … I look forward to offering one of you a Wine Travel Guides Gift Subscription and perhaps your very own private wine tour around the wonderful wine regions of Jura or Savoie.