The Château de Franciment of Unknow region

Annual domestic gas bills in the UK threaten to rival, in craziness, the price of a box of Bordeaux first growths. Those energy costs have sent the price of almost everything else ripping up after them. Is there, um, anything to be said for cheap wine? There is. First, though, we must sip the bitter harvest of alcohol taxes. These are high in the UK and higher still in Scandinavia, Australia, New Zealand and India; they tend to vary by state in the US and by province in Canada, and in general th ...

‘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 ...

The prestige attached to winning at the Decanter World Wine Awards (DWWA) means that being awarded a Bronze medal for some wineries will mean huge celebrations in China, Japan, India, or Thailand. Since the competition began in 2004, I have often reminded judges on my panel about this – whether they are journalists, sommeliers, educators, Masters of Wine or Master Sommeliers. Scroll down for new tasting notes and scores on Jia Bei Lan vintages: from the Chinese wine label that won big at DWWA 20 ...