The Winery Cyrus of Languedoc-Roussillon

When you have an idea that, in your first flush of inspiration, you think deserves to get beyond the breakfast table, you run straight into the modern dilemma. Is it a Tweet? Is it one for Facebook or Instagram? Should you just try it out on your nearest and dearest, or is there a book in it? A slim volume, or does it need several tomes to expound its profundity? My trade being what it is, and royalties being as modest as they are these days, I’ve rather given up on books. Writing new ones, that ...

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 ...

The largest-ever year for entries, an incredible 18,244 wines were judged at the 2022 Decanter World Wine Awards – with just 163 wines awarded a Platinum medal. ‘Winning a Platinum medal is something really exceptional’ said Decanter World Wine Awards Co-Chair Sarah Jane Evans MW. ‘Platinum is like the stratospheric level’ she commented, ‘so it’s really saying to the winemaker: this is a great wine.’ Making up just 0.87% of the total wines tasted at the 2022 c ...