The Winery Premiere Fleur of Languedoc-Roussillon

National production from France’s wine harvest in 2023 has been estimated between 44 million and 47 million hectolitres this year, up from 45.4 million hectolitres in 2022. That would be in line with, or exceed, the five-year average. France appears to be doing better than Italy and Spain, which expect below-average volumes. Still, the French agriculture ministry emphasised the preliminary nature of its forecast, citing uncertainty around damage from downy mildew in Bordeaux and southwest ...

Many wine styles can seem perplexing at first: imagine the first bottle of Barolo if you only know Barossa Shiraz, or the first bottle of Jura Savagnin if you were brought up on California Chardonnay. With time, thought and repeated tasting, though, comes understanding. You learn each wine’s syntax and lexicon, its hints and inferences. You grasp the ways in which each style communicates. Its beauty dawns, then grows. Rosé wine sales grew 23% worldwide between 2002 and 2019. Its fuel has come fr ...

I’d like to say we took advantage of the lockdown and its related commotion to do a stock-take, explore new avenues, turn over intriguing stones, widen and deepen our drinking, taking careful notes as we went. Sadly, no. I won’t say we got stuck in a rut, but we did tend to stick with comfort wines – and “comfort”, in our case, means familiar. Regular readers of this quarterly column can probably guess the labels on the resulting empties. We have a wider range of comfort foods, I’m afraid, than ...