Wines made from Cannonau grapes

Along Sonoma Coast’s Bodega Highway, morning fog in summer can feel as wet as a rainstorm. The area is populated by redwoods, trees that feed on such moisture to create a microclimate of cool, damp air. Their needles gather humidity, dripping it onto the ground below over the course of the day. Vineyards in this southwest section of Sonoma County grow tucked within the forest, enjoying an extended growing season compared to outlying areas. The trees moderate the heat and reduce the impact of dro ...

Colin Hay, a professor of political economy with a special interest in the Place de Bordeaux, considers the different ways of approaching en primeur purchasing, ahead of this year’s 2021 campaign. Buying en primeur wines is a rather strange and, arguably, arcane system of buying and selling in which the consumer purchases the wine typically in the early summer following the vintage even though it will not be bottled and delivered for a further 12-18 months. It is, in effect, a futures mark ...

The lengthy process arriving to this point has been rife with controversy as this new DO overlaps with what has since 1998 been the named Rioja Alavesa subzone within the greater DOCa Rioja. This subzone has been part of DOCa Rioja, regarded as Spain’s pioneering denomination of origin, since its original creation as a DO nearly a century ago in 1925. The core of the issue is that nearly all of DOCa Rioja falls administratively within the Spanish autonomous region of La Rioja, with the exception ...