The flavor of charcoal in wine of Wallonie

Launched at London fine wine club 67 Pall Mall on 28 March, the Regenerative Viticulture Foundation (RVF) is the brainchild of Stephen Cronk, owner of Maison Mirabeau in Provence. Cronk, who has seen extreme weather events ranging from exceptional frosts to the worst forest fires in living memory in the three years he has owned Mirabeau, feels that one of the most important ways we can fight climate change is through ‘unlearning’ current approaches to land stewardship. ‘This is a critical moment ...

Bordeaux wine sales to the US reached a new record in 2021, jumping 67% to €349m ($390m), the Bordeaux wine council (CIVB) announced this week. A freeze on additional import tariffs and buyers’ thirst for highly-rated recent vintages helped Bordeaux to a ‘spectacular recovery’ in terms of shipments to the US, it said. Exports rose by 24% in volume last year to 247,000 hectolitres, equivalent to 33 million bottles. While reds dominate, the US has also become the biggest market for Bordeaux white ...

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 ...