Winery TilleulChardonnay

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 ...

The focus of the symposium, unsurprisingly, was on the challenges posed by climate change. As if to illustrate the immediacy of the threat, the symposium took place during a heatwave, with temperatures of over 40°C  in Bordeaux and extreme weather events recorded across the coountry: parts of southwest France saw violent storms and winds of 112kph on the evening of 20 June, while vineyards across the Médoc and St-Emilion were damaged by hailstones ‘the size of golfballs’. As Olivier Bernard of D ...

In 1999, an unlikely love story was kindled. Baron Eric de Rothschild of Lafite-Rothschild felt a coup de coeur – a sudden passion – for a property in Languedoc’s Corbières: Château d’Aussières (170 hectares of vines amid 600ha of garrigue and mountain forest). The matchmaker was the French bank Crédit Agricole. ‘My father,’ says Saskia de Rothschild, Baron Eric’s 36-year-old daughter and today the president of Domaines Barons de Rothschild, ‘is very much someone who works in the spirit of intui ...