The Winery Cantine Bondonor of Colli di Luni of Ligurie

At 8.23 metres tall (27ft), a three-sided pyramid made from 54,740 Champagne coupes has officially set a new Guinness World Record for the ‘largest drinking glass pyramid’. A specialist team spent five days between Christmas and New Year delicately constructing the wine glass tower at luxury Dubai resort Atlantis, The Palm, which announced the news. It said the attempt was co-organised by Moët & Chandon, as part of Champagne house’s ‘Effervescence’ event series. Guinness Wo ...

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 ...

Described by Courvoisier as ‘daring’, ‘visionary’ and ‘a first-of-its-kind collaboration’, Courvoisier Mizunara was created by the house’s recently-retired maître de chai, Patrice Pinet, and Shinji Fukuyo, chief blender of Japanese whisky maker Suntory. The project dates back to 2015, when the president of Suntory visited Courvoisier at Jarnac shortly after Suntory took over Beam Global, the Cognac house’s then owner, in a deal worth US$16bn. Pinet expressed an interest in experimenting with miz ...