The Winery Terra Ruinae of Languedoc of Languedoc-Roussillon

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 ...

I was with some wine students in Chablis, visiting the affable Guillaume Michel of Domaine Louis Michel. The 2018 vintage in Chablis was prolific, though Guillaume’s team pruned the vines as hard as normal. Guillaume has a little more than a half-hectare of the smallest of the grands crus, Grenouilles (8.74ha in production in 2018, most of which is controlled by the cooperative La Chablisienne): delicious in 2018. And, after a year’s pruning and vine-tending, after hand-harvesting and scrupulous ...

Surely there has been no greater ambassador for Bordeaux and its wines than Jean-Michel Cazes (1935-2023), who has died at the age of 88 after a lengthy illness. He never believed the region, however prestigious, should rest on its laurels, and he was foremost among those who roamed the world promoting its wines and its culture. Home base for Cazes was Château Lynch-Bages, fifth classified growth in Pauillac. It had been acquired by the family in 1939, and they also owned Ormes de Pez in St-Este ...