The Winery Wild Diamond Vineyards of Lake County of California

How’s the weather been this year? Awful. ‘La nature m’écoeure’, one of my wine-growing friends posted on Facebook on 8 April, having been out to look at the frost-crippled shoots on his vines that morning: ‘Nature disgusts me’. It takes a lot to make a wine-grower feel that. He wasn’t alone. Jeremiads echo around the northern hemisphere as 2021 closes. It’s been the year of all the miseries. None suffered more horribly than the growers of Germany’s Ahr valley, where floodwaters caused by the fou ...

The prestige attached to winning at the Decanter World Wine Awards (DWWA) means that being awarded a Bronze medal for some wineries will mean huge celebrations in China, Japan, India, or Thailand. Since the competition began in 2004, I have often reminded judges on my panel about this – whether they are journalists, sommeliers, educators, Masters of Wine or Master Sommeliers. Scroll down for new tasting notes and scores on Jia Bei Lan vintages: from the Chinese wine label that won big at DWWA 20 ...

In recent years, more and more people have been paying attention to Uruguay’s wine scene thanks to the distinctive identity of its coastal regions, which are swept by winds from the Atlantic Ocean and the Río de la Plata. The country’s proximity to the ocean and one of the largest rivers on the planet means that the vintage effect is quite prominent here. Each harvest depends on the rainfall, sun and strength of the winds experienced that year. Today, Uruguay has around 5,966ha under vine distri ...