Winery BuffardPétillant Gazéifié

Tina Gellie, Content Manager and Regional Editor (Australia, South Africa, New Zealand & Canada) It was a big year of Decanter travel for me, heading to Napa and New York in June, South Africa in October and most recently a week each in Margaret River and South Australia. These trips have formed the basis of my festive selections. Christmas lunch on North Stradbroke Island (reunited with my family after four years, no thanks to Covid) always starts with oysters, followed by a bucket of prawn ...

As the summer season comes to a close and many wineries prepare for harvest, more than 400 active wildfires continue to burn in British Columbia, a handful of which the BC Wildfire Service designates ‘a potential threat to public safety’ in major cities, small towns and the vineyards in between. Sparked on 15th August, the season’s most destructive wildfire – the McDougall Creek Fire – had the province’s wine industry on its knees. Spreading over 12,000 hectares (30,000 acres), it initially thre ...

‘When I started producing wine, the wineries were all in a very bad condition,’ said Askaneli Brothers president Gocha Chkhaidze, recalling the poor state of the Georgian wine industry shortly after the country declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. ‘There was inadequate sanitation, a lack of know-how and old-fashioned bottling lines. People were unable to make wine sustainably, vineyards were not sufficiently cared for, agronomists were unskilled and used to harvest the maximu ...