The flavor of candied ginger in wine of Lower Volga

It was the 5th of March and the second week of Russia’s war of aggression on Ukraine. That morning, Mykhailo and Georgiy Molchanov, the father and son team of the Slivino winery in the Mykolaiv Oblast in Southern Ukraine went out to prune their vineyard. Lodged in one row of the vines was an unexploded Russian missile from a ‘Grad’ launcher. Meaning ‘hail’ in Russian, the name refers to the BM-21 systems that indiscriminately launch up to 20 of these missiles at once, something that has become a ...

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 ...

There’s a reason why heavily-applied perfume ranks highly on most wine lovers’ list of pet peeves. It overpowers your senses, conceals aromas and distorts your perception of a wine. In professional tastings and wine exams the wearing of perfume is banned, if not thoroughly frowned upon. You just don’t do it. What then, if we applied the same logic to music, controlling the sounds we hear, or don’t hear, while tasting wine? There’s no doubt that a chaotic environment can clog your synapses, makin ...