The Château Combe des Bois of Monbazillac of South West

Every year the hospitality industry holds its breath as the revised line up of the Michelin Guide is announced. A star won – or lost – is often a pivotal moment in the consolidation of a venue’s name and the reputation of the chef, sommelier and restaurateurs behind it. Yesterday, February 16th, the Michelin Stars were unveiled for this year’s Michelin Great Britain & Ireland Guide, with 19 restaurants having been newly awarded a star, bringing the total number of one starred restaurants in ...

The 0.27% of entries awarded Best in Show at this year’s Decanter World Wine Awards reflect the inspiring world of wine and quest for quality among winemakers globally, with 50 wines expressing the best of their categories. An all-time record for wines tasted at the world’s largest wine competition, it’s quite possible that Decanter World Wine Awards 2022 marks the largest-ever wine competition to be held in history. And of the record-breaking 18,244 wines tasted, just 50 were ...

Layers of colour in the sky before me: indigo, peach, salmon. In the rear-view mirror, the gold was catching fire. As I drove down through the lonely, Mistral-chilled vines of Babeau-Bouldoux towards nearby St-Chinian, I was thinking about what Christine Deleuze of Clos Bagatelle had just said. ‘When you came to visit 10 years ago,’ she reminded me, ‘you said we needed to wait another decade for a market breakthrough. Today you’ve said we need to wait another decade or two. So when, exactly, wil ...