Winery Vinçon-ZerrerBlanc de Noir Feinherb

It’s quite an admission to make, and the blushes rise to my cheeks as I make it, that when I wrote my first books on wine (up to and including my The World Atlas of Wine, first edition 1971) I was convinced, and told my readers, that the clear and constant differences between the communes of Bordeaux, and their châteaux, were first and foremost the consequences of their different soils, ranging from the light, fast-draining openness of gravel in Graves to a heavier mix with clay in St-Estèphe. ...

China was previously Australia’s leading export market, with sales worth $1.2 billion in the year to September 2020. However, Beijing then imposed a 212% tariff on imported wine from Australia as a retaliatory measure after Canberra called for an international investigation into China’s handling of the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan. Trade minister Simon Birmingham called it ‘a very distressing time for many hundreds of Australian wine producers, who have built in good faith a sound market in China’ ...

‘When I started producing wine, the wineries were all in a very bad condition,’ said Askaneli Brothers president Gocha Chkhaidze, recalling the poor state of the Georgian wine industry shortly after the country declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. ‘There was inadequate sanitation, a lack of know-how and old-fashioned bottling lines. People were unable to make wine sustainably, vineyards were not sufficiently cared for, agronomists were unskilled and used to harvest the maximu ...