The Domaine du Chant de l'Âme of Terrasses du Larzac of Languedoc-Roussillon

The dark days began when I learned from a visiting Canadian friend about the death of one of the kindest, most gentle and most skilful Pinot winemakers I’ve known, Paul Pender of Tawse Winery. He died in a senseless and tragic act of violence on the evening of 3 February, outside his Lake Erie cottage. A stranger, subsequently charged with his murder, had (it seems) knocked on his door, asking for help. Paul’s sudden, untimely loss has left his family, and the broader Canadian wine community, di ...

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 ...

The Champagne houses, part of the family-owned EPI Group, announced their B Corp certification after scoring 91.9 points in the assessment by B Lab, a non-profit network founded in 2006 with the aim of improving corporate performance in the spheres of social and environmental issues, plus accountability and transparency. The certification involves an assessment of the social and environmental impact of each brand through more than 200 questions concerning governance, employees, communities and t ...