Wines made from Merlot grapes of Graves

The Tinazzi family, owners of the eponymous group with estates in Veneto and Puglia, has expanded to Tuscany with the acquisition, in early 2022, of a property in the Chianti Classico DOCG area. The Pian del Gallo estate includes 5.5 hectares of organically farmed vineyards and olive trees, as well as hospitality facilities. A fruitful quest The acquisition was not a sudden or impulsive decision, but rather the culmination of a long search for a Tuscan property to enrich the Tinazzi portfolio. G ...

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 ...

Bordeaux has a history of extraordinary women running vineyards. In Sauternes & Barsac Françoise-Joséphine d’Yquem was imprisoned twice during the French revolution but managed to save both her neck and Château d’Yquem, 1er Grand Cru Classé Supérieur Sauternes. She then dedicated herself to her property, and introduced the practice of ‘tries successives’ or multiple passes through the vineyard during harvest to collect botrytised grapes at maximum maturity, transforming the quality of wines ...