The Domaine Masson of Roussette de Savoie of Savoie

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 ...

Screaming Eagle, Harlan Estate, Mayacamas and Spottswoode are among the major names featured in the Napa Valley Library Wine Auction via Sotheby’s. More than 50 lots have been assembled for the sale, which began online this week and will culminate in a live auction on 5 February in New York. Organised in partnership with trade body Napa Valley Vintners, the auction includes vintages back to 1978 and wines have been sourced direct from winery cellars. One rare lot involves a magnum of each of Scr ...

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 ...