Wines made from Merlot grapes of Vipava

Total sales in the Premiere Napa Valley 2022 auction hit $2.1m, including the buyer’s premium, according to Sotheby’s, which co-hosted the event alongside trade body Napa Valley Vintners. All 109 lots were ‘one-of-a-kind’ cuvées from leading producers, created specifically for the Premiere Napa Valley 2022 auction. Wines were from the 2019, 2020 and 2021 vintages. Only trade buyers can take part in the annual sale, but restaurants, retailers and merchants purchasing lots will generally offer the ...

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 ...

My book The Complete Bordeaux, which has been revised every five years, is soon to be published in its fourth edition. This may seem like excessive haste, given the scope of the book, but it is astonishing how rapidly changes can take place in the region. Burgundy, in contrast, is relatively stable, since most properties are family-owned and tend to stay that way. But not so in Bordeaux, where there are ample opportunities for newcomers to acquire established properties, as they have been doing ...