The flavor of unripe pear 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 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 ...

Bordeaux wine sales to the US reached a new record in 2021, jumping 67% to €349m ($390m), the Bordeaux wine council (CIVB) announced this week. A freeze on additional import tariffs and buyers’ thirst for highly-rated recent vintages helped Bordeaux to a ‘spectacular recovery’ in terms of shipments to the US, it said. Exports rose by 24% in volume last year to 247,000 hectolitres, equivalent to 33 million bottles. While reds dominate, the US has also become the biggest market for Bordeaux white ...