The Château Saint Sauveur of Ventoux of Rhone Valley

How’s the weather been this year? Awful. ‘La nature m’écoeure’, one of my wine-growing friends posted on Facebook on 8 April, having been out to look at the frost-crippled shoots on his vines that morning: ‘Nature disgusts me’. It takes a lot to make a wine-grower feel that. He wasn’t alone. Jeremiads echo around the northern hemisphere as 2021 closes. It’s been the year of all the miseries. None suffered more horribly than the growers of Germany’s Ahr valley, where floodwaters caused by the fou ...

A total of £72,600 was raised from 79 lots at the sixteenth DWWA wine auction hosted by Christie’s on 2 December – beating a record set in 2018. This total excludes Christie’s buyer’s premium. All proceeds will be added to funds raised by Decanter throughout the DWWA this year. Charities supported include The Drinks Trust, WaterAid, Cancer Research UK, Change Please, Decanter Apprenticeships and more. Over the past 12 months, Decanter has donated in excess of £100,000 to these charities. T ...

Colin Hay, a professor of political economy with a special interest in the Place de Bordeaux, considers the different ways of approaching en primeur purchasing, ahead of this year’s 2021 campaign. Buying en primeur wines is a rather strange and, arguably, arcane system of buying and selling in which the consumer purchases the wine typically in the early summer following the vintage even though it will not be bottled and delivered for a further 12-18 months. It is, in effect, a futures mark ...