Winery Francois DiligentCarte Blanche Brut Champagne

Champagne Telmont, a Damery-based house that is part of the Rémy Cointreau group, has recently finished trials of an 800g Champagne bottle, made in partnership with glass manufacturer Verallia, that pushes the very lower weight limits of what is technologically possible for bottle-fermented wines. The lightest standard bottles currently available are 835g. Does shaving off a further 35g really make much difference to carbon emissions? Ludovic du Plessis, president of Champagne Telmont, thinks so ...

The focus of the symposium, unsurprisingly, was on the challenges posed by climate change. As if to illustrate the immediacy of the threat, the symposium took place during a heatwave, with temperatures of over 40°C  in Bordeaux and extreme weather events recorded across the coountry: parts of southwest France saw violent storms and winds of 112kph on the evening of 20 June, while vineyards across the Médoc and St-Emilion were damaged by hailstones ‘the size of golfballs’. As Olivier Bernard of D ...

In 2019, the Familia Torres president teamed up with Katie Jackson – the senior vice president of corporate social responsibility at Jackson Family Wines in California – to create a group called International Wineries for Climate Action (IWCA). They aimed to recruit the world’s most environmentally-committed wineries, who would work collaboratively on schemes designed to reduce carbon emissions. The group now consists of 41 wineries, representing 10 countries across the globe, but Torres wants t ...