Wines made from Garanoir grapes - Page 3

France’s Ministry of Agriculture has announced several measures this week designed to help ease a ‘crisis in the wine sector’. An initial part of the the plan is to offer financial support to winemakers wishing to drain excess stocks via a new distillation scheme – an emergency measure that has been used at certain times in the past.  The Ministry said €40m of national state funding and another €40m of supplementary funds from the European Union would enable a crisis distillation pro ...

I’d like to say we took advantage of the lockdown and its related commotion to do a stock-take, explore new avenues, turn over intriguing stones, widen and deepen our drinking, taking careful notes as we went. Sadly, no. I won’t say we got stuck in a rut, but we did tend to stick with comfort wines – and “comfort”, in our case, means familiar. Regular readers of this quarterly column can probably guess the labels on the resulting empties. We have a wider range of comfort foods, I’m afraid, than ...

St Hilaire is the patron saint of Mareuil-sur-Aÿ, the pretty Champagne village which is famous for scoring 99 on the Echelle des Crus. (This classification of Champagne vineyards was developed in the mid-20th century as a means of setting the price of grapes grown through the villages of the Champagne wine region.) Prime territory That the village missed out on grand cru status by one point is generally agreed to be an injustice – all the more so as it is home not only to the superlative Clos de ...