Wines made from Riesling grapes of Italy

It was the 5th of March and the second week of Russia’s war of aggression on Ukraine. That morning, Mykhailo and Georgiy Molchanov, the father and son team of the Slivino winery in the Mykolaiv Oblast in Southern Ukraine went out to prune their vineyard. Lodged in one row of the vines was an unexploded Russian missile from a ‘Grad’ launcher. Meaning ‘hail’ in Russian, the name refers to the BM-21 systems that indiscriminately launch up to 20 of these missiles at once, something that has become a ...

Higher growing season temperatures over the next 20 years are likely to further increase the UK’s potential for wine production, according to new modelling on ‘near-term’ climate change impact on the sector. Yet wineries also need flexibility to adapt to challenges, said the study, published in the Oeno One journal and part of a wider project on climate resilience in UK wine. Conditions seen in the excellent 2018 vintage are set to become more common in several areas, including East ...

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 ...