The Château La Penelle of South West

There’s been a focus on making wine production less energy intensive as well as environmentally friendly in order to address climate change. The efforts continue but, as is the case for electric cars where it’s the battery technology that needs innovating, it’s in wine bottles where we’re seeing rapid change. It comes in a two-pronged attack to reduce energy use in manufacturing and then an even bigger emphasis on reducing bottle weight for shipping to reduce fuel usage and thus CO2 production. ...

Philippe Schaus, chairman and chief executive of the Moët Hennessy division of LVMH, called Joseph Phelps Vineyards ‘an iconic name and an iconic winery’. Joseph Phelps founded his eponymous winery on a 260ha former cattle ranch in Napa Valley in 1973. He turned it into one of California’s most prominent producers, famed for its flagship Insignia – a Bordeaux-style blend – and its pioneering use of Rhône varieties, which kick-started the ‘Rhône Rangers’ movement in the Golden State. The founder’ ...

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 ...