The Château de Grandchamp of Guyenne of South West

On the highest volcano in Europe, the magic number is 142: the contrade of Etna represented on a colourful new map just released by the Consorzio Tutela Vini Etna DOC. In the age of viticultural cartography, the Sicilian district has embraced ‘zoning’ to enhance every single nuance of its territory, mostly cultivated with Nerello Mascalese and Carricante. ‘This map establishes the full viticultural maturity of our district and underlines the attitude of its winemakers to team up,’ said Francesco ...

Do growers make wine – or do markets? Growers, of course. Yet markets define the scope of the grower’s creative efforts by what they reward or sanction. When markets are neglectful and unresponsive, there’s little the grower can do but conform. It’s a problem the world over. Here’s an example. The river Moselle/Mosel rises to the wet west of the Vosges mountains, then curves in a long green arc heading north through Epinal, Metz and (along the left bank) Luxembourg’s Grand Duchy, turning east at ...

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 ...