Comtés Rhodaniens is a regional PGI title that covers the red, white and rosé wines of a large area along the Rhône River in Southeastern France. The PGI catchment area includes the wine regions of Savoie and the Northern Rhône, as well as Part of Beaujolais. The PGI is most often used for wines produced in Vineyards outside the boundaries of the many AOC-level appellations: from Vin de Savoie to Côte-Rôtie and Hermitage. The territory of the Rhone Counties covers parts of nine separate departments on the way to the Rhône.
Beginning on the southern shores of Lake Geneva, the boundaries of the PGI extend south beyond Lyon to the prestigious wine regions of the northern Rhône Valley. The permitted vineyard area also includes the thin strip of farmland between the Rhône and Loire rivers in the Loire department (although the famous vineyards of the Loire Valley are hundreds of kilometres to the north). As this is the Comtés Rhodaniens, it is not surprising that the Terroir here is very varied. The continental peaks of the Alps in the northern part of the region give way to the mountains of the lower Massif Central in the south, which have a warmer and drier MediterraneanClimate, due to their proximity to the coast.
Cultivated for a very long time in Savoie, it is not the black form of mondeuse blanche and Mondeuse grise is a natural mutation of mondeuse noire. According to Thierry Lacombe (I.N.R.A./Montpellier), the latter is the result of a natural intraspecific crossing between the black tressot and the white mondeuse. Mondeuse grise and Mondeuse noire are both registered in the official catalogue of wine grape varieties, list A1.
How’s the weather been this year? Awful. ‘La nature m’écoeure’, one of my wine-growing friends posted on Facebook on 8 April, having been out to look at the frost-crippled shoots on his vines that morning: ‘Nature disgusts me’. It takes a lot to make a wine-grower feel that. He wasn’t alone. Jeremiads echo around the northern hemisphere as 2021 closes. It’s been the year of all the miseries. None suffered more horribly than the growers of Germany’s Ahr valley, where floodwaters caused by the fou ...
Emmanuelle Verset is the sixth generation to make wine in her family, and represents the E in Domaine A&E Verset. The A is for Alain, her father. She took over from him in 2016 at the age of 24, and is one of the few female winemakers in Cornas. The Verset name runs deep in this part of the Rhône. You might have heard of Noël Verset (1919 – 2015), whose bottles are highly sought-after today – Noël was Alain’s uncle. Scroll down to see Matt Walls tasting notes and scores for six Domaine A& ...
The unnamed collector is set to receive 440 bottles of single malt in total from ‘Cask No. 3’ – 88 each year over the next five years, giving her a vertical series of 1975 Ardbegs bottled at 46, 47, 48, 49 and 50 years old by 2026. The sum paid equates to more than £36,000 per bottle, and is more than 16 times the record amount paid at auction for a single cask of whisky – set in April this year, when a private buyer from the US paid £915,500 (hammer price) for a 1988 Macallan cask. However, pri ...
