The Winery Halle aux Vins of Crémant d'Alsace of Alsace

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 ...

French national appellation authority (INAO) representative Alexis Sannier told decanter.com that a committee had ‘validated’ in September their ‘admissibility as premier cru climats and commissioned a group of experts to determine their delimitation’. Official recognition for 2024 ‘seems realistic’, he said. The request for the four climats – Les Mûres in Pouilly-Loché and Les Quarts, Les Longeays, and Les Pétaux in Pouilly-Vinzelles, which account for about one-third of 84 hectares from the tw ...

Starting with the 2021 vintage, non-late harvest Alsace Riesling must be ‘dry’, as defined by EU regulations, according to a proposed decree agreed by a two-thirds majority of the Alsace Winegrowers’ Association (AVA). Winemakers backed the plan at a vote in Colmar last week, although it requires approval from France’s appellation body, INAO. The move comes in addition to the introduction of a standardised way of communicating sweetness levels on Alsace AOC still wines. As per EU rul ...