The Winery Mas Autanel of Languedoc of Languedoc-Roussillon

The Roussillon is home to a range of wine styles, at varying price points. Sweet fortified wines (vin doux naturel) used to dominate production, with still dry wines (vin sec) in the minority. In the last 30 years, however, this has completely changed, and vin sec now makes up the majority (80%) of the Roussillon’s output. The recent Wines of Roussillon tasting, held in London, not only highlighted many good quality dry wines being produced, but also cemented the idea that Roussillon whites are ...

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 ...

Following a recent modification of EU rules, member states are now allowed to employ resistant varieties in the production of wines with protected denominations of origin (PDO). The decision, published last week in the Official Journal of the European Union, is part of a wider revision of previous regulations that established common quality schemes, organisation of the market, definitions, descriptions, presentations, and labelling of European agricultural products and foodstuffs. Before the ann ...