Wines made from Madeleine angevine grapes of Italy

To Kalon, a vineyard regarded as California’s crown jewel thanks to its enduring renown for producing world-class, top-scoring Cabernet Sauvignon, has secured its legendary status with organic certification. Blue-chip producers such as Robert Mondavi, Schrader Cellars, To Kalon Vineyard Company and Cliff Lede have all cemented their reputations on To Kalon fruit. But as iconic as they and this vineyard are, there is always room for improvement. The past three years have seen rigorous overhauls w ...

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 ...

While taller overall vines do exist in regions such as Galicia with their pergola training method, the roots of any vine usually top out at 37cm. It’s at this top point where the Vitis vinifera shoot is grafted in and continues to grow, giving us such grapes as Cabernet Sauvignon or Chardonnay. This is opposed to the rootstocks which are composed of various crosses of vines such as Vitis rupestris which aren’t used for wine production but are resistant to the root louse, phylloxera. This new tal ...