The Winery Retumba of M&aacutelaga of Andalousie

How’s the weather been this year? Awful. ‘La nature m’écoeure’, one of my wine-growing friends posted on Facebook on 8 April, having been out to look at the frost-crippled shoots on his vines that morning: ‘Nature disgusts me’. It takes a lot to make a wine-grower feel that. He wasn’t alone. Jeremiads echo around the northern hemisphere as 2021 closes. It’s been the year of all the miseries. None suffered more horribly than the growers of Germany’s Ahr valley, where floodwaters caused by the fou ...

André Hugel was an 11th generation member of Famille Hugel, one of the region’s most influential and highly-regarded wine families. The Hugel family settled in the town of Riquewihr, located in the heart of Alsace, all the way back in 1639. André ran Famille Hugel along with his brothers, Jean and Georges, as it developed into one of the world’s top producers. It owns 30 hectares (ha) of prime plots in the Haut-Rhin area, half of which are classified as Grand Cru, and it buys grapes from a furth ...

Some Châteauneufs are more reliable than others. When I visit the region to taste the new vintage every year, Domaine de la Janasse’s cuvée Vieilles Vignes regularly features among the best. It’s a particularly dense and concentrated wine when young, and it always strikes me that, even for Châteauneuf, it’s a wine that needs extended ageing to show its best. I was keen to acquire a more complete understanding of how this cuvée develops, so I visited brother-and-sister team Isabelle and Christoph ...