The flavor of plum in wine of Dalmatian Coast

According to China’s General Administration of Customs, the seized goods consisted of more than 1,000 bottles of Penfolds from Australia and over 100 bottles of top-end Bordeaux wine, including first growth labels such as Château Lafite Rothschild and Château Margaux. The Chinese customs authorities discovered the cases of illegally imported bottles by checking the amount of wine declared on the offending company’s documents against the actual number of items being transported. The smuggled good ...

Whisky is emphatically a product of place. The flavours in the glass conjure images of the spirit’s origin, from an Islay malt’s distinctive peat smoke to the exotic perfume of a Japanese blend. Traditionally, however, that local accent is lost when spirit is filled into cask. The vast majority of Scotch malts and blends, for example, are matured in oak sourced from thousands of miles away, and previously used to age bourbon or Sherry. Some whiskies might venture into more exotic territory. Thin ...

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 ...