The flavor of earth in wine of Campanie

Layers of colour in the sky before me: indigo, peach, salmon. In the rear-view mirror, the gold was catching fire. As I drove down through the lonely, Mistral-chilled vines of Babeau-Bouldoux towards nearby St-Chinian, I was thinking about what Christine Deleuze of Clos Bagatelle had just said. ‘When you came to visit 10 years ago,’ she reminded me, ‘you said we needed to wait another decade for a market breakthrough. Today you’ve said we need to wait another decade or two. So when, exactly, wil ...

I first contributed to Decanter back in November 1988; the hundreds of columns and articles I’ve written since constitute a journey of discovery. I squirm, though, if I’m described as a ‘wine expert’. Whatever wine knowledge we acquire quickly cools, congeals and crusts over, like custard or gravy, as the years pass. The wine world expands at a clip. Every vintage rewrites history. It’s the chance to share discoveries – not just about wines, but about people, places and the act of drinking itsel ...

Approved by the INV viticultural institute on 1 July, Balcarce is the fourth GI to be named in the province of Buenos Aires. The province was largely abandoned as a winemaking region in the 1930s following a law permitting wine to be made only in the Andean Cuyo region, but is is slowly making a name for itself once again with cool climate vintages. Encompassing coast, prairie and the Tandilia mountains, Balcarce is located 37 miles from the Atlantic Ocean and has until recently been known for p ...