The flavor of fennel in wine of Wallonie

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 ...

The arrival of Covid and the ensuing lockdown restrictions had serious repercussions in the hospitality sector and severely disrupted supply chains, particularly in the drinks sector. Champagne, one of the world’s most recognisable and exported wines, was severely hit by travelling restrictions – which initially impacted the luxury sector Champagne dominates – and the closing of on-trade outlets. The 2020 slump As a result, in 2020, Champagne sales plummeted; a 10% decrease year-on-year in March ...

The US still comes top on the list of which countries drink the most wine overall, according to to preliminary figures released this week by the International Organisation of Vine & Wine (OIV).  Wine consumption in the US crept up by 0.7% in 2021, to 33.1 million hectolitres (3.31 billion litres), the OIV said in a report on the state of the industry. World wine consumption grew by the same margin, to hit 236 million hectolitres (mhl), or 23.6bn litres, although trends varied by nation. That ...