The flavor of plum in wine of Don Valley

The region’s trade share slumped to an historic low of 37.7% in 2021 after failing to keep pace with the broader market. It was the first time Bordeaux’s market share had ever fallen below 40%. At the time of writing, it has slipped to 32%, according to Liv-ex. The company divides its main index into a series of sub-indices. Over the past year, the Bordeaux sub-index increased by a modest 11.5%, compared to 43.8% for Burgundy and 51.2% for Champagne. The main challenger to Bordeaux’s throne is B ...

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 spirit was filled into a single ex-Sherry cask at the Speyside distillery in 1940, shortly before The Second World War forced The Macallan to close for the first time in its history. Bottled at 41.6% abv, only 288 decanters are available worldwide, featuring eye-catching packaging: a mouth-blown glass decanter sitting on a bronze sculpture of three hands, created by Scottish artist Saskia Robinson. The hands represent the distillery workers of 1940 who made the whisky; former Macallan chairm ...