Muscat de Frontignan is an appellation for naturally Sweet wines from Frontignan-la Peyrade, a town on the Mediterranean coast in the Languedoc-roussillon">Languedoc-Roussillon region of southern France. The wines are made only from Muscat Blanc à Petits Grains. It is also used in the other Muscats of Languedoc (Muscat de Lunel, Muscat de Mireval and Muscat de Saint-Jean-de-Minervois). It is considered the best member of the Muscat family.
Although technically a white variety, some strains are pinkish or red-brown. The Color of the berries can also vary from year to year on the same Vine. The pinkish-fleshed variant is known as Frontignac in Australia, although the California wine Grape Frontignan is actually a Burger, known as Monbadon in France. The area has about 800 hectares of vineyards.
Grenache noir is a grape variety that originated in Spain. It produces a variety of grape specially used for the elaboration of wine. It is rare to find this grape to eat on our tables. This variety of grape is characterized by medium to large bunches, and grapes of medium size. Grenache noir can be found in many vineyards: South West, Cognac, Bordeaux, Provence & Corsica, Languedoc & Roussillon, Rhone Valley, Loire Valley, Savoie & Bugey, Beaujolais.
The focus of the symposium, unsurprisingly, was on the challenges posed by climate change. As if to illustrate the immediacy of the threat, the symposium took place during a heatwave, with temperatures of over 40°C in Bordeaux and extreme weather events recorded across the coountry: parts of southwest France saw violent storms and winds of 112kph on the evening of 20 June, while vineyards across the Médoc and St-Emilion were damaged by hailstones ‘the size of golfballs’. As Olivier Bernard of D ...
I’d like to say we took advantage of the lockdown and its related commotion to do a stock-take, explore new avenues, turn over intriguing stones, widen and deepen our drinking, taking careful notes as we went. Sadly, no. I won’t say we got stuck in a rut, but we did tend to stick with comfort wines – and “comfort”, in our case, means familiar. Regular readers of this quarterly column can probably guess the labels on the resulting empties. We have a wider range of comfort foods, I’m afraid, than ...
Many wine styles can seem perplexing at first: imagine the first bottle of Barolo if you only know Barossa Shiraz, or the first bottle of Jura Savagnin if you were brought up on California Chardonnay. With time, thought and repeated tasting, though, comes understanding. You learn each wine’s syntax and lexicon, its hints and inferences. You grasp the ways in which each style communicates. Its beauty dawns, then grows. Rosé wine sales grew 23% worldwide between 2002 and 2019. Its fuel has come fr ...
