Winery Vall de PintesHors D'Âge Banyuls Grand Cru

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...