The Château Haut Bayon of Bordeaux

According to China’s General Administration of Customs, the seized goods consisted of more than 1,000 bottles of Penfolds from Australia and over 100 bottles of top-end Bordeaux wine, including first growth labels such as Château Lafite Rothschild and Château Margaux. The Chinese customs authorities discovered the cases of illegally imported bottles by checking the amount of wine declared on the offending company’s documents against the actual number of items being transported. The smuggled good ...

I first contributed to Decanter back in November 1988; the hundreds of columns and articles I’ve written since constitute a journey of discovery. I squirm, though, if I’m described as a ‘wine expert’. Whatever wine knowledge we acquire quickly cools, congeals and crusts over, like custard or gravy, as the years pass. The wine world expands at a clip. Every vintage rewrites history. It’s the chance to share discoveries – not just about wines, but about people, places and the act of drinking itsel ...

I was with some wine students in Chablis, visiting the affable Guillaume Michel of Domaine Louis Michel. The 2018 vintage in Chablis was prolific, though Guillaume’s team pruned the vines as hard as normal. Guillaume has a little more than a half-hectare of the smallest of the grands crus, Grenouilles (8.74ha in production in 2018, most of which is controlled by the cooperative La Chablisienne): delicious in 2018. And, after a year’s pruning and vine-tending, after hand-harvesting and scrupulous ...