The Château La Grosse Pierre of Bordeaux

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 ...

In Bordeaux it’s not unusual to walk through echoey corridors stacked floor to ceiling with bottles of older wines. But the culture in the northern Rhône is different. Most producers will squirrel away a few cases for special occasions, but winemakers usually sell through an entire vintage rather than hold a proportion back. It’s understandable. A Bordeaux estate is typically five times the size of a domaine in Côte-Rôtie. Older vignerons from around Ampuis still remember when selling their wine ...

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 ...