The Château Cassan d'Esteuil of Médoc of Bordeaux

For the first time ever, Decanter is offering readers and wine lovers alike the chance to see behind the scenes of our renowned panel tastings and experience first hand what it means to taste like an expert. Decanter’s panel tastings are one of the most rigorous exercises in blind tasting, where a panel of three experts taste and score up to 100 wines a day, based on criteria set by the Decanter editorial team. We’re delighted to announced that this autumn will see the start of our n ...

Decanter hosted its first tasting for the monthly event series Taste with the Experts last month at its very own Tasting Suite in London’s Paddington. Host Andy Howard MW guided 12 guests through an exclusive blind tasting of the Médoc Grand Cru Classé 2017, often described as a ‘forgotten vintage’ but one that produced a wonderful array of wines that are already approachable and more than deserve their place on tables and in cellars. The event was a very special evening giving Decan ...

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 ...