Wines made from Grenache Blanc grapes of Languedoc-Roussillon

Traditional glass bottles still dominate, but there is also a rising focus on the environmental credentials and lifestyle advantages offered by quality wines in bag-in-box, cans, paper bottles, returnable glass bottles and other so-called alternative packaging formats. Leading wine writers in the UK recently signed an open letter spearheaded by the Wine Traders for Alternative Formats (WTAF) group, which said a greater focus on viable alternatives to traditional glass bottles could significantly ...

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 ...

Champagne Telmont, a Damery-based house that is part of the Rémy Cointreau group, has recently finished trials of an 800g Champagne bottle, made in partnership with glass manufacturer Verallia, that pushes the very lower weight limits of what is technologically possible for bottle-fermented wines. The lightest standard bottles currently available are 835g. Does shaving off a further 35g really make much difference to carbon emissions? Ludovic du Plessis, president of Champagne Telmont, thinks so ...