Wines made from Alvarinho grapes of Australia

According to lifestyle and happiness guru Gretchen Rubin, you ‘bring your own weather to a picnic’. Ms Rubin, I’d suggest, has never shivered under a tree watching raindrops turn her fish-paste sandwich to mush because the weather forecast was wrong. There are, it’s safe to say, picnics and Picnics. It’s a term that takes in everything from a rubber baguette in a French ‘Aire’ off the Autoroute du Soleil to a four-course spread while listening to opera at Glyndebourne. What’s definitely true is ...

The focus of the symposium, unsurprisingly, was on the challenges posed by climate change. As if to illustrate the immediacy of the threat, the symposium took place during a heatwave, with temperatures of over 40°C  in Bordeaux and extreme weather events recorded across the coountry: parts of southwest France saw violent storms and winds of 112kph on the evening of 20 June, while vineyards across the Médoc and St-Emilion were damaged by hailstones ‘the size of golfballs’. As Olivier Bernard of D ...

Torres is best known for producing wines across Spanish regions including Catalunya, Rioja and Ribera del Duero. It also has an international presence with Miguel Torres in Chile and Marimar in Sonoma, California, but for more than a decade it has been producing wines in Galicia too. This aspect of its portfolio started with the purchase of a 6ha vineyard in the Salnés subregion, producing the upmarket wine Blanco Granito based on Rías Baixas’ star variety, Albariño. The wine is made from a uniq ...