The Winery Pierre Bach of Coteaux du Quercy of South West

It’s no easy task to establish a super-premium wine in an entirely new region, particularly when inviting potential retail partners or distributors to the vineyard involves journeying to a distant corner of the Himalayas in the outer reaches of the Yunnan province, southwestern China. For my journey, after four flights from Bordeaux to Shanghai, Chengdu then Shangri-La, it was a four-hour drive up through stunning mountain passes to the foothills (here, that means 2,200m above sea level) of the ...

Imagine you went to a restaurant and ordered what you thought was a modest Burgundy, but it tasted like a great Bordeaux. Would you be disappointed? Even if what I received was technically a better wine, I think I would be. After all, quality isn’t the overriding criteria when I select a bottle of wine to drink; most of all, I’m thirsting for a specific style. That’s why I’m sometimes wary when hearing about a change of direction in an appellation. Am I still going to find the wine I’m looking f ...

Layers of colour in the sky before me: indigo, peach, salmon. In the rear-view mirror, the gold was catching fire. As I drove down through the lonely, Mistral-chilled vines of Babeau-Bouldoux towards nearby St-Chinian, I was thinking about what Christine Deleuze of Clos Bagatelle had just said. ‘When you came to visit 10 years ago,’ she reminded me, ‘you said we needed to wait another decade for a market breakthrough. Today you’ve said we need to wait another decade or two. So when, exactly, wil ...