English Sparkling wines were showcased on The Apprentice tonight as Lord Sugar tasked the candidates to come up with a campaign to promote sparkling wines.

Lord Sugar tells the candidates:
“In Britain last year we imported 35 million bottles of champagne, but lots of people have no idea how good our home-grown product is.

“English sparkling wine has won many awards and is far superior to some brands of champagne. It’s your job to raise awareness of English sparkling wine.”

With Phoenix two team members down, Lord Sugar decides to mix the teams up, asking them to pick a member of Sterling to join them. They quickly select Nick.

The teams had to create a new image for the English sparkling wine industry, design a website and online marketing campaign and then pitch their campaign to leading figures in the industry.

On Phoenix, Tom volunteers as Project Manager, despite also having taken on this role last week, due to the fact that he has expertise in the area and runs a wine company.

Meanwhile on Sterling, Ricky is picked as Project Manager, and he is more than aware of the fact that his rival, Tom, has much more experience in the field, admitting, “I have probably only drunk wine once or twice in the past, I hate the stuff.”

The team decides to pick a generic, easily identifiable, name for the wine, opting for Stephen’s suggestion of ‘Grandeur’. Nick Hewer is less than impressed with this, “one of Stephen’s few contributions was the word, Grandeur, as a generic name for English sparkling wines. It’s a French word….”

In the end, the industry experts that the teams had pitched to and also Lord Sugar, concluded that although Phoenix’s campaign didn’t do what Lord Sugar has asked, Sterling had messed up too badly and were the losing team.

Ricky decided to bring back in Stephen and Jenna to the boardroom, for their work on the advert.

 

Ricky confessed that he had agreed that the video could be a bit humorous but that he had expressed that he didn’t want it to be cheesy.

Jenna reiterated that she had made a mistake in taking the risk but Lord Sugar told her, “that’s an understatement Jenna.”

Lord Sugar then delivers his final verdict.

He said: “Stephen – when you’re in this boardroom, I think, you could talk the hind legs off a donkey. It’s like butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth and you’ve always got the right answer for everything.

“Ricky – I think there were big mistakes made here, I think that, whether you like it or not, it was with a defeatist attitude that you went into this task… because I don’t think the product had anything to do with it, the fact of the matter is that it could have been any product. That was bad project management on this occasion.

“Jenna – you work hard. You take sole responsibility for the disastrous video we have on this occasion here. It’s not just the disastrous video that worries me, everybody can make a mistake. I’ll tell you what worries me, you didn’t realise that this was a high quality product and you should not have been making a humourous video in the beginning.”

Concluding, Lord Sugar added: “It is with regret that I’m going to have to say, despite all the hard work, that Jenna, I’m sending you home – You’re Fired.”

As she is driven away in a black cab, Jenna reflected: “I think I would have made Lord Sugar a great business partner. I think he has missed out, but it has made me more determined to go ahead with my business idea and do it on my own. I am going to be successful and hopefully he may see that he did make a mistake firing me.”