Winery Carl KrumbakFitou

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 ...

Bordeaux will produce the least wine in six years in the 2023 harvest, after Merlot grapes in particular were ravaged by downy mildew, according to data from the French agriculture ministry. By contrast, Burgundy and the Loire Valley are heading for vintages that are likely to be among the biggest of the past decade. While overall French wine production is forecast to fall 2% to 45 million hectoliters, close to the five-year average, various growing areas had contrasting fortunes, the French agr ...

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 ...