The flavor of tree fruit in wine of Wallonie

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 ...

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 ...

Champagne is a protected denomination of origin (PDO) in the EU, just like Parmigiano Reggiano, Kalamata olive oil from Greece and paprika from Murcia in Spain. Belgian officials determined that Miller High Life’s century-old motto represents an infringement of the PDO, and they ruled that the cans were therefore illicit goods. Workers at a plant in Ypres destroyed the batch, sending out a clear warning to the world that the Champagne brand is not to be messed with. ‘The Comité Champagne helps t ...