The flavor of persimmon in wine of Bergland

I’d visited Kakheti, Kartli and Imereti before – Georgia’s dominant central wine-producing zones; but never the wild exterior. From the ice-crisped cemetery grass of the 11th-century church of St George, dominating the mountaintop village of Mravaldzali, we looked north across the mountains of the Greater Caucasus, Europe’s highest. The silence, and the vista, was daunting. Hundreds of dry, drab valleys lost themselves in as many snowy peaks. Russia lay beyond. There was, apparently, a way over: ...

Most of the Italian masterpieces of the Renaissance in the 15th and 16th centuries were carved out of marble. Since the 1980s, Italian viticulture has had its Renaissance in the form of wine, but not much was often thought about combining the two. ‘Man needs to realise his dreams,’ said Yannick Alléno, presenting Fuori Marmo 2019, a unique marble-aged Cabernet Sauvignon from the Costa Toscana IGT at his three-star Michelin restaurant, Pavillon Ledoyen, in Paris last week. The idea was born in 20 ...

Thieves continued to target some of the world’s most sought-after fine wines at the end of last year, with Austria’s Kracher Fine Wine and Norway’s Park 29 restaurant among the latest businesses to fall victim. Around 600 or 700 bottles of top-end wines were stolen at the end of November from Kracher Fine Wine, the merchant business that sits alongside highly regarded Kracher winery. ‘They knew exactly what they were looking for,’ director Gerhard Kracher told Decanter this week, adding some of ...