The Winery Paul et Nina Boyer of Bordeaux

Livio Mazzarello, 62, was found guilty of money laundering and evading excise duty and VAT on an ‘industrial scale’ in July 2017. He had been selling cases of wine under the counter for cash at The Italian Wine Company in Neasden, northwest London. This fraud allowed the company to dodge VAT and duty on millions of bottles of wine, which were sold wholesale to UK retailers. The total loss to HMRC, the UK’s tax authority, reached £46,579,257.32 between June 2008 and March 2013, according to court ...

‘New’ is the second most popular word in any sales catalogue. (The first is ‘Free’.) We scribblers can’t resist it: it guarantees copy of one sort or another. Even in the slowly evolving world of wine, where the main ethos of the product is historical continuity, ‘new’ sells. To someone like me with a strong sense of history, not to mention conservative tastes, it can be a bit unsettling. It’s not really change that bothers me. There is always room for improvement. What can irritate me is change ...

Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon ‘space vines’ that were fired into orbit alongside bottles of Petrus 2000 have been nurtured alongside their ‘daughter’ plants in western France, said researchers in an update on the project. ‘The first “space grapes” are now visible on the canes just a few months after the replanting phase that occurred in February 2022,’ said Space Cargo Unlimited, the start-up leading the project. A total of 320 vine canes spent more than a year on the Int ...