Winery Éric TexierCôtes du Rhône-Villages Laudun

Josh Jensen was famed for producing elegant, silky Pinot Noirs at Calera Wine Company on the Central Coast.  Leading wine critic Robert Parker Jr once described Calera – the company that Jensen founded in 1971 – as ‘California’s Romanée-Conti.’ Jensen completed undergraduate studies at Yale, but his love of fine wine blossomed while completing an MA in social anthropology at Oxford University in the UK. He was a key member of the rowing crew at both universities, but he still found time to devel ...

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 ...

Whenever I visit Domaine Richaud, just outside the village of Cairanne, the winemaking team remind me of friends I made at free parties in the 1990s in fields and disused warehouses. I’m not talking dreadlocks and dogs on strings, but there’s always an anarchic frisson in the air. You get the impression they know how to enjoy themselves. Perhaps it’s to be expected, given the radical furrow Marcel Richaud has ploughed. He’s approaching 70 now, but still thrums with pent-up energy, his ice-blue e ...