Wines made from Merlot grapes of Bullas

There’s no doubt that 2021 was a challenging vintage. Most explanatory statements or technical sheets handed out over the past few weeks have mentioned the unfavourable, oft disastrous weather conditions, the sometimes very low and disheartening yields and the slightly varied or unusual blends on offer in 2021. Difficulties faced by vignerons both inside and outside of the cellar have been explained in detail as has the raft of highly important decisions needed be made throughout the year, ...

Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon ‘space vines’ that were fired into orbit alongside bottles of Petrus 2000 have been nurtured alongside their ‘daughter’ plants in western France, said researchers in an update on the project. ‘The first “space grapes” are now visible on the canes just a few months after the replanting phase that occurred in February 2022,’ said Space Cargo Unlimited, the start-up leading the project. A total of 320 vine canes spent more than a year on the Int ...

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 ...