The Winery Terre des Lauzeraies of Côtes-du-Rhône-Villages of Rhone Valley

Discover the great wines of the Rhône!  Following popular demand, Decanter will be heading back to the Rhône Valley with its regional expert, Matt Walls. Given that this year’s trip was a huge success with five-star feedback, we couldn’t wait to get the next one planned.  While next year’s trip will feature some new vineyards both iconic and lesser known, there will be plenty of opportunity to enjoy lunch in the vineyards, talk candidly with the winemakers and go into the cellars of some of the ...

Colin Hay, a professor of political economy with a special interest in the Place de Bordeaux, considers the different ways of approaching en primeur purchasing, ahead of this year’s 2021 campaign. Buying en primeur wines is a rather strange and, arguably, arcane system of buying and selling in which the consumer purchases the wine typically in the early summer following the vintage even though it will not be bottled and delivered for a further 12-18 months. It is, in effect, a futures mark ...

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 ...