Winery Olivier BLa Deuxieme

The moves combine an evolution in management with a sense of continuity at Cheval Blanc, given new MD Pierre-Olivier Clouet has been technical director at the estate since 2008. Clouet initially joined Cheval Blanc as an intern in 2004, and was himself recruited by Pierre Lurton, who has managed the famous St-Emilion estate since the arrival of the Château’s current joint-owners, the Arnault and Frère families, in 1998. Lurton, who had also been director at Cheval Blanc since 1990, will now take ...

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 ...

Disconcerting: I couldn’t forget this bottle for days afterwards. Still can’t. Back in August, wine critic Lin Liu MW (together with her partner Philippe Lejeune of Château de Chambert in Cahors) came to dinner, en route to a short holiday in Provence. One of the bottles Lin brought for us to try together was the 2018 Les Rocheuses, Parcelles No 5 et 6, from Château Le Rey in Castillon Côtes de Bordeaux. It came in a slope-shouldered bottle, not a classic Bordeaux bottle. We tried it with some R ...