The Winery Gran Quinel of Bio-Bio Valley of South

In preparation for this column I tasted 46 reds in total, and – taking both quality and value into account – I can recommend 33 of them. Overall, the reds were less consistent than the whites, and although the lows were lower, the highs were higher. This tasting confirmed that it’s still possible to buy genuinely excellent northern Rhône reds for under £30 in the UK. That being said, it’s virtually impossible to find any Cornas, Côte-Rôtie or Hermitage for under £30 a bottle these days, but ther ...

Nowhere is the disparity in quality more evident this year than in Châteauneuf-du-Pape. A lot of Tradition bottlings were disappointingly lean and scrawny, but the best terroirs really shined, producing athletic, elegant wines of intensity and panache. Scroll down for tasting notes and scores for the top scoring Châteauneuf-du-Pape 2020 wines {"content":"PHA+PGEgaHJlZj0iaHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZGVjYW50ZXIuY29tL3dpbmUvZ3JhcGUtdmFyaWV0aWVzL2dyZW5hY2hlLWdhcm5hY2hhLyI+PHN0cm9uZz5HcmVuYWNoZTwv ...

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 ...