The Winery La Familia Lera of Castille-et-Léon

The fine wine market goes into autumn 2022 after a particularly strong period of gains, although there has been greater uncertainty about momentum in recent weeks. At Liv-ex, a global marketplace for the trade, the Liv-ex 100 index dipped 0.3% in July 2022 but had risen every month for two years prior to that. UK-based merchant Bordeaux Index recently reported prices on the market up by 10% in the first half of 2022, with Burgundy up 26% on average. Strong activity on the LiveTrade online tradin ...

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 ...

Annual domestic gas bills in the UK threaten to rival, in craziness, the price of a box of Bordeaux first growths. Those energy costs have sent the price of almost everything else ripping up after them. Is there, um, anything to be said for cheap wine? There is. First, though, we must sip the bitter harvest of alcohol taxes. These are high in the UK and higher still in Scandinavia, Australia, New Zealand and India; they tend to vary by state in the US and by province in Canada, and in general th ...