Domaine CasabiancaLa Cuvée de Jean-Bernardin Casabianca Corse Rouge

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 ...

Rosé-tinted glasses aside, there is a reason – the modern economics of it mean that a €4 bottle of Côtes de Castillon or Montagne St-Emilion doesn’t translate into anything even comparable in price terms when on a UK shop shelf (assuming it could even get there). It’s the sad fact of commerciality. We taste hundreds of Bordeaux wines at every price point every year, to find those few gems that represent the best value for their quality. Even then, the volumes available might mean that a wine w ...

A little background first. The unstitching of France’s colonial empire in North Africa between 1956 and 1962 intensified political tensions on Corsica as well as giving rise to an ill-starred attempt by recently arrived French-Algerian wine farmers to turn Corsica’s eastern plains into a gigantic factory vineyard. Between 1960 and 2000, production rose four-fold – then collapsed. Away from the plains in the higher-quality appellation zones, meanwhile, an undiscerning tourist market combined with ...