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Marcus, You spent only 2 hrs on your weakness and 23 on your strength! Please, from now on concentrate on vocab, use Quizlet (why haven't you done, especially because you didn't like Excel!) and WORK with the vocabulary.
Documentation and reflection seem OK.

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Wine label design and personality preferences of m

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Message on a bottle the wine label's influence

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World's first wine theme park in Bordeaux

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As we salute the French for providing the world with the best quality wine, we can now bow down to them for providing a wine lovers' dream like no other.

Your dreams of being surrounded by bottles and bottles, 14,000 to be exact, have just come true with the world's first ever wine theme park in Bordeaux, France.

La Cité du Vin, The City of Wine, is an €80 million complex dedicated to all things wine. Before roller coaster fanatics jump out of their seats, this theme park-meets-museum is not a place of vertical drops but a destination of tastings, wine tours, exhibits and of course, a huge wine bar.

The theme park stores 800 varieties of wine, from 70 different countries, which are all available for tasting.

With 20 themed areas, some of the highlights of the park include The Belvedere lookout providing visitors incredible 360-degree views from 35m up, a wine culture library and for those who want a little more thrill, there is a simulated boat ride you can go on showing what it was once like to be a voyaging wine merchant.

According to the architects, the twisted metal structured building adjacent to the Garonne River is supposed to portray wine swirling around in a glass, making for a totally immersable wine experience.

The park seems to be an adult's Disneyland, minus the steep entrance costs, where tickets start at just $37 and include a glass of wine. The kids can even embark on your wine adventure with a range of grape juices selected for them.

Start packing your bags as this wine shrine is definitely one for the bucket list.

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World's first wine theme park in Bordeaux, France

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As we salute the French for providing the world with the best quality wine, we can now bow down to them for providing a wine lovers' dream like no other. Your dreams of being surrounded by bottles and bottles, 14,000 to be exact, have just come true with the world's first ever wine theme park in Bordeaux, France.

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Probe into Bordeaux wine labels causes concern

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Officials from the regional office dealing with fraud and consumer protection, Direccte, have been investigating whether some Bordeaux wine labels mislead consumers by using the 'brand name' of a château when the wine inside the bottle has not been produced solely by that estate or the grapes come from beyond its borders.

There has been a particular focus on wines that use the prefix 'Bordeaux de' plus the name of a specific château, according to an industry memo, dated 22 June 2018 and issued by Direccte and France's national appellation body, INAO. The probe was also looking at whether appellation names had been misused, the memo said.

A spokesperson for INAO declined to comment beyond the contents of the note, citing that the issue was ongoing.

In some cases, wines are produced by a merchant house and not sourced from vineyards owned by the estate named on the label, or made by the property's winemaking team; even if estate has advised on selection and cellar methods.

While there is no suggestion that anyone has intentionally acted illegally, a ruling on whether a label is likely to mislead consumers could be up to the interpretation of a judge.

'Each case is unique, so there's no rule,' Yann Le Goaster, director of leading Bordeaux wine union the Fédération des Grands Vins de Bordeaux (FGVB), told Decanter.com. The FGVB has been advising estates how to minimise risks.

A worst-case scenario could see brand owners fined €300,000 and face up to two years in prison, according to an article written by Le Goaster and warning producers to exercise caution, published in trade magazine L'Union Girondine.

Test cases might help merchants and estates to better understand the parameters. 'We are waiting for a decision [in court],' said Le Goaster.

Local newspaper reported recently that some businesses have already been visited by Direccte officials.

It also said that Château Maucaillou in Moulis-en-Médoc had changed the name of its 'Bordeaux de Maucaillou' wine to 'B par Maucaillou' in order to head-off any concerns. When contacted by Decanter.com, the estate declined to comment on the issue or the reasons behind the name change.

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Probe into Bordeaux wine labels causes concern - Decanter

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Officials from the regional office dealing with fraud and consumer protection, Direccte, have been investigating whether some Bordeaux wine labels mislead consumers by using the 'brand name' of a château when the wine inside the bottle has not been produced solely by that estate or the grapes come from beyond its borders.

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Chef's Table: France | Netflix Official Site

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Sample the bold new flavors of France with chefs who are pushing the boundaries of fine dining and reinventing a rich culinary tradition. Watch trailers & learn more.

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Chefs Table France - Adeline Grattard

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Chef's Table: France | Netflix Official Site

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Sample the bold new flavors of France with chefs who are pushing the boundaries of fine dining and reinventing a rich culinary tradition. Watch trailers & learn more.

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Chef's Table

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In this Emmy-nominated series, meet culinary stars around the world who are redefining gourmet food with innovative dishes and tantalizing desserts. Watch trailers & learn more.

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Fresh China tariffs a worry for US wine producers

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Fresh China tariffs a worry for US wine producers

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China said today (13 May) that it would raise import tariffs on thousands of US products, predominantly in the agriculture sector, from 1 June in retaliation for fresh US tariffs announced late last week.

Wine will be among the products targeted, confirmed the California-based Wine Institute.

It said, 'Effective June 1, China will add another 15% tariff on US wine imports to their country. The additional 15% tariff is on top of a previous 15% tariff increase implemented in April 2018 and another 10% increase in September 2018. When compounded, the new total tax and tariff rate will be 91%.'

'This is the third Chinese tariff increase on US wine in the past 14 months, and with each additional round, it becomes more and more difficult to compete in the fastest-growing wine market in the world,' said Robert Koch, president and CEO of Wine Institute.

He said that the California brand remained strong in China, but he warned of 'long-term market loss' if the dispute between the US and China is not resolved.

Some producers have already been hit hard following China's tariff rises on US wines in 2018.

US wine exports to China sank by nearly 25% in value in 2018, to $59.3m, with volumes down 13% - although China remained the fifth largest destination for US wines by value, according to figures from the Wine Institute.

Michael Honig, of Honig Vineyard and Winery, told Decanter.com late last week, 'Honig's sales to China have dropped from hundred[s] of cases to zero.'

There is a concern that US wineries could fall behind in the race to supply China's growing middle class.

'We are not only losing today, but will have a hard time gaining sales back as other parts of the wine world take our store and restaurant placements,' said Honig.

Australia is one country poised to capitalise after China eliminated tariffs on Australian wines in January 2019 as part of a free trade deal between the two nations.

'Australia and Chile have preferential trade agreements that increase market access in China relative to other key suppliers,' wrote two academics in an article on wine supply for the US Agricultural and Applied Economics Association's Choices magazine in late 2018.

'The United States now faces the largest trade barrier for wine exports to China,' said assistant professor Amanda Countryman and professor Andrew Muhammad, of Colorado State University and the University of Tennessee respectively.

They said that US wineries' best chance of being competitive was to push a quality message.

The Wine Institute said in April this year that some of the $129.8m of US wines exported to Hong Kong in 2018 'are being re-exported to other countries, including Mainland China'.
Updated at 18:55 UK time on 14/05 with Wine Institute comments.

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Fresh China tariffs a worry for US wine producers - Decanter

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China said today (13 May) that it would raise import tariffs on thousands of US products, predominantly in the agriculture sector, from 1 June in retaliation for fresh US tariffs announced late last week. Wine will be among the products targeted, confirmed the California-based Wine Institute.

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How do red wine tannins affect taste?

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Red wine tannins are well known for causing a drying sensation in the mouth, as we're sure Decanter's Jane Anson would confirm after recently tasting hundreds of barrel samples of the young Bordeaux 2018 vintage.

But, why is this? And why might there be differences between red wine grape varieties?

While the quantity and character of red wine tannins can be affected by a range of factors, such as growing season climate, grape skin thickness and cellar techniques, new research has examined how they are perceived by drinkers.

Cabernet Sauvignon tannins are physically bigger, more numerous and contain more pigment than Pinot Noir tannins, said the researchers, writing in the latest edition of the US-based Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

After extracting and analysing tannins from a Cabernet Sauvignon and a Pinot Noir wine, the researchers also found that Cabernet tannins formed more protein aggregates in saliva.

They said that this builds on pre-existing research that shows wines can taste more astringent and cause a mouth-drying sensation when 'tannins and salivary proteins interact, aggregate and precipitate', said the researchers, from UC Davis in California.

But, tannins don't work alone and other characteristics in wine appeared to affect their powers, said the researchers, who used a trained sensory panel to look at this aspect.

'When the opposite type of tannin was put into Cabernet or Pinot wines, the panellists could not detect differences in dryness,' they said.

'So, for example, when Cabernet tannins were added to a Pinot wine, the drink appeared to have the same dryness as the original Pinot.'

Aromas in the wine probably influenced panellists' perception of its taste, said the researchers, whose work was partly funded by the American Vineyard Foundation.

As previously reported, most wine experts would also expect tannins in wine to soften with age. Tannins in a young red wine are seen as a key indicator of its ability to age, alongside fruit and acidity.
The Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry is published by the American Chemical Society.

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How do red wine tannins affect taste? Ask Decanter

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Red wine tannins are well known for causing a drying sensation in the mouth, as we're sure Decanter's Jane Anson would confirm after recently tasting hundreds of barrel samples of the young Bordeaux 2018 vintage. But, why is this? And why might there be differences between red wine grape varieties?

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decanted.

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This lyrical documentary spotlights the vineyard-rich region of Napa Valley, California, and the winemakers who call it home. Watch trailers & learn more.

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A dizzying chronicle of excess and deception dissects a fascinating case of fine-wine fraud and the con man who cheated investors out of millions. Watch trailers & learn more.

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Ornellaia's Winemaker Opens Up

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Ornellaia's Winemaker Opens Up | Wine-Searcher News & Features

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The man behind one of Italy's most revered wines, Axel Heinz is a force to be reckoned with. Read the latest wine news & features on wine-searcher

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Has wine gone bad?

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If you were lucky enough to dine at Noma, in Copenhagen, in 2011 - which had just been crowned as the "best restaurant in the world" - you might have been served one of its signature dishes: a single, raw, razor clam from the North Sea, in a foaming pool of aqueous parsley, topped with a dusting of horseradish snow. It was a technical and conceptual marvel intended to evoke the harsh Nordic coastline in winter.

But almost more remarkable than the dish itself was the drink that accompanied it: a glass of cloudy, noticeably sour white wine from a virtually unknown vineyard in France's Loire Valley, which was available at the time for about £8 a bottle. It was certainly an odd choice for a £300 menu. This was a so-called natural wine - made without any pesticides, chemicals or preservatives - the product of a movement that has triggered the biggest conflict in the world of wine for a generation.

The rise of natural wine has seen these unusual bottles become a staple at many of the world's most acclaimed restaurants - Noma, Mugaritz in San Sebastian, Hibiscus in London - championed by sommeliers who believe that traditional wines have become too processed, and out of step with a food culture that prizes all things local. A recent study showed that 38% of wine lists in London now feature at least one organic, biodynamic or natural wine (the categories can overlap) - more than three times as many as in 2016. "Natural wines are in vogue," reported the Times last year. "The weird and wonderful flavours will assault your senses with all sorts of wacky scents and quirky flavours."

As natural wine has grown, it has made enemies. To its many detractors, it is a form of luddism, a sort of viticultural anti-vax movement that lauds the cidery, vinegary faults that science has spent the past century painstakingly eradicating. According to this view, natural wine is a cult intent on rolling back progress in favour of wine best suited to the tastes of Roman peasants. The Spectator has likened it to "flawed cider or rotten sherry" and the Observer to "an acrid, grim burst of acid that makes you want to cry".

Once you know what to look for, natural wines are easy to spot: they tend to be smellier, cloudier, juicier, more acidic and generally truer to the actual taste of grape than traditional wines. In a way, they represent a return to the core elements that made human beings fall in love with wine when we first began making it, around 6,000 years ago. Advocates of natural wine believe that nearly everything about the £130bn modern wine industry - from the way it is made, to the way critics police what counts as good or bad - is ethically, ecologically and aesthetically wrong. Their ambition is to strip away the artificial trappings that have developed in tandem with the industry's decades-long economic boom, and let wine be wine.

But among wine critics, there is a deep suspicion that the natural wine movement is intent on tearing down the norms and hierarchies that they have dedicated their lives to upholding. The haziness of what actually counts as natural wine is particularly maddening to such traditionalists. "There is no legal definition of natural wine," Michel Bettane, one of France's most influential wine critics, told me. "It exists because it proclaims itself so. It is a fantasy of marginal producers." Robert Parker, perhaps the world's most powerful wine critic, has called natural wine an "undefined scam".

For natural wine enthusiasts, though, the lack of strict rules is part of its appeal. At a recent natural wine fair in London, I encountered winemakers who farmed by the phases of the moon and didn't own computers; one man foraged his grapes from wild vines in the mountains of Georgia; there was a couple who were reviving an old Spanish technique of placing the wine in great clear glass demijohns outside to capture sunlight; others were ageing their wines in handmade clay pots, buried underground to keep them cool as their predecessors did in the days of ancient Rome.

Sebastien Riffault, from the Loire Valley, runs the 10-year-old trade body L'Association des Vins Naturels. He told me his basic technique was simply "making wine like in a previous century, with nothing added". This means using only organic grapes, picked by hand, and fermenting slowly with wild yeasts from the vineyard (most vintners use lab-grown yeasts, which Riffault says are engineered "like F1 cars, to speed through fermentation"). No antimicrobial chemicals are added to the wine, and everything is bottled - bits and all - without filtering. The result is that Riffault's sancerre comes out a deep amber colour and very sweet, tasting like crystallised honey and preserved lemons. It's excellent, but far from the "pale yellow" with "fresh citrus and white flowers" described in the French government's official guidelines for sancerre. "It's not for everyone. It's not made like fast food. But it's totally pure," Riffault told me.

Just 20 years ago Riffault and his contemporaries were ignored, but now they have a foothold in the mainstream, and their approach could transform wine as we know it. "We used to struggle" the Burgundy natural winemaker Philippe Pacalet says. "People weren't ready. But chefs change, sommeliers change, whole generations change," he went on. "Now they are ready."

t first glance, the idea that wine should be more natural seems absurd. Wine's own iconography, right down to the labels, suggests a placid world of rolling green hills, village harvests and vintners shuffling down to the cellar to check in on the mysterious process of fermentation. The grapes arrive in your glass transformed, but relatively unmolested.

Yet, as natural wine advocates point out, the way most wine is produced today looks nothing like this picture-postcard vision. Vineyards are soaked with pesticide and fertiliser to protect the grapes, which are a notoriously fragile crop. In 2000, a French government report notedthat vineyards used 3% of all agricultural land, but 20% of the total pesticides. In 2013, a study found traces of pesticides in 90% of wines available at French supermarkets.

In response to this, a small but growing number of vineyards have introduced organic farming. But what happens once the grapes have been harvested is less scrutinised, and, to natural wine enthusiasts, scarcely less horrifying. The modern winemaker has access to a vast armamentarium of interventions, from supercharged lab-grown yeast, to antimicrobials, antioxidants, acidity regulators and filtering gelatins, all the way up to industrial machines. Wine is regularly passed through electrical fields to prevent calcium and potassium crystals from forming, injected with various gases to aerate or protect it, or split into its constituent liquids by reverse osmosis and reconstituted with a more pleasing alcohol to juice ratio.

Natural winemakers believe that none of this is necessary. The basics of winemaking are, in fact, almost stupefyingly simple: all it involves is crushing together some ripe grapes. When the yeasts that live on the skin of the grape come into contact with the sweet juice inside, they begin gorging themselves on the sugars, releasing bubbles of carbon dioxide into the air and secreting alcohol into the mixture. This continues either until there is no more sugar, or the yeasts make the surrounding environment so alcoholic that even they cannot live in it. At this point, strictly speaking, you have wine. In the millennia since humans first undertook this process, winemaking has become a highly technical art, but the fundamental alchemy is unchanged. Fermentation is the indivisible step. Whatever precedes it is grape juice, and whatever follows it is wine.

"The yeasts are the key between the vines and the people," Pacalet told me, in a reverent tone. "You use the living system to express the information in the soil. If you use industrial techniques, even if it's a small operation, you're making an industrial product." Viewed in this quasi-spiritual way, the winemaker's job is to grow healthy grapes, tend to the fermentation, and intervene as little as possible.

In practice, this means going without the methods that have given modern winemakers so much control over their product. Even more radically, it means jettisoning the expectations of mainstream wine culture, which dictates that wine from a certain place should always taste a certain way, and that a winemaker works like a conductor, intervening to turn up or tamp down the various elements of the wine until it plays the tune the audience expects. "It is important a sancerre tastes like a sancerre, then we can start to determine levels of quality," says Ronan Sayburn, the head of wine at the private wine club and bar 67 Pall Mall.

In France, which remains the cultural and commercial centre of the wine world, the acceptable styles of winemaking aren't just a matter of history and convention; they are codified into law. For a wine to be labelled as from a particular region, it must adhere to strict guidelines about which grapes and production techniques can be used, and how the resulting wine should taste. This system of certification - the appellation d'origine contrôlée (AOC), or "protected designation of origin" - is enforced by inspectors and blind-tasting panels. Wines that fail to conform to these standards are labelled "vin de France", a generic designation that suggests low quality and makes them less attractive to buyers.

Some natural winemakers have rebelled against this legislation, which they believe only reinforces the dominant styles and methods that are ruining wine altogether. In 2003, the natural winemaker Olivier Cousin opted out of his local AOC, complaining in a letter that meeting their standards meant that "one must beat the grapes with machines, add sulphites, enzymes and yeast, sterilise and filter". When he refused to stop describing his wine as being from Anjou, he was actually prosecuted for labelling violations. In response, Cousin put on a good show, riding his draft horse up to the courtroom steps and bringing a barrel of his offending wine to share with passers-by. But he ended up changing the labels.

"The AOC are liars," Olivier's son Baptiste, who has taken over several of his father's vineyards, told me. "The local designations were created to protect small producers, but now they just enforce poor quality."

he expectations of how a wine from a certain region should taste go back hundreds of years, but the global industry that has been built atop them is largely a product of the past century. If natural wine is a backlash against anything, it is the idea that it is possible to square traditional methods of winemaking with the scale and demands of that market. There is a sense that alongside economic success, globalisation has slowly forced the wine world toward a dull, crowd-pleasing conformity.

France has long been the centre of the wine world, but until the mid-20th century most vineyards were small and worked mainly by hand. In the eyes of natural winemakers, the rot began in the decades after the second world war, as French vineyards modernised and the industry grew into a global economic behemoth. To these disillusioned observers, what seems like a story of technical and economic triumph is really the tragic tale of how wine lost its way.

Before the war, France had just 35,000 tractors; in the next two decades it would acquire more than a million, as well as access to US-made pesticides and fertilisers. At the same time, oenologists, people who study wine, looked to science to refine their product. Two men in particular, Emile Peynaud and Pascal Ribéreau-Gayon, worked tirelessly to first establish their subject's academic legitimacy, and then to build a bridge between the laboratory and the wine cellar. "In the past we made great wine by chance," Peynaud declared. The future would be more rigorous.

Peynaud helped standardise the way wine was made. His greatest, and simplest, achievement was to convince winemakers to pick higher-quality fruit and use more sterile equipment. But he also pioneered and popularised the use of laboratory-inspired tests for things such as pH, sugar, and alcohol, which gave a new scientific clarity to winemaking.

This modernisation process was an enormous success. By the end of the 1970s, France's wine exports totalled over $1bn, almost 10 times what they had been just two decades earlier, and more than those of its competitors Italy, Spain and Portugal combined. As the market expanded, other countries scrambled to emulate the French model. French technicians and consultants were hired by new world wineries to teach them the new science of oenology, and the classic French style. At one point Michel Rolland, the most influential of these itinerant advisors, had more than 100 clients around the world.

And so, even as more countries began producing wine, they all coloured within lines drawn by the French. Cabernet sauvignon and merlot, grapes associated with Bordeaux - long considered the king of French wine regions - were planted in new vineyards emerging everywhere from Chile to Canada. Even Italy, which had always been a distant second in terms of profit and prestige, scored hits at international competitions with bordeaux-style wines made with traditional French grapes grown in Tuscany.

From the 1980s onward, these kinds of bordeaux-esque wines - heavy, slightly sweet and highly alcoholic, made with the help of French consultants - came to dominate the global market. A new generation of critics loved them, especially the all-powerful Robert Parker, a self-styled "consumer advocate" who tasted 10,000 wines a year from his home office in Maryland, and whose recommendations could make or break a winemaker's year. (The British wine critic Hugh Johnson, in his memoirs, refers to Parker as a "dictator of taste" within an "imperial hegemony" for the extent to which he controlled the fortunes of the worldwide industry.)

The kinds of wine Parker and his peers championed became known as the international style. There was a hint of disdain in the phrase, the sense that a bland internationalism had severed the connection between a type of wine and the place where it is made. In truth, this criticism was hard to dispute. To take just one example, since the 1970s the acreage devoted to native grapes in Italy has declined by half, often replaced with traditionally French varieties.

By the early 1990s France was exporting more than $4bn worth of wine a year - still more than twice as much as Italy, and more than 10 times as much as its new competition from the US, Australia and all of South America. And when it came to style, everyone still followed the French. Today, even the cheapest red wine found in the US or Britain is in some ways a tribute to that victory, having likely been soaked with toasted wood chips to approximate the vanilla and spice aromas of a French barrel, and spiked with sugar and purple colorant to ape the velvety sweetness and inky shade of a good bordeaux.

In the 1990s, a quote attributed to the Bordeaux winemaker Bruno Prats began being repeated in the mainstream wine press and among wine investors like a sacred mantra: "There are no more bad vintages." The implication was that advances in farming and winemaking technology had all but conquered nature. In 2000, the late wine journalist Frank J Prial declared in the New York Times: "The fact of the matter is that in the cellar and the vineyard, the winemakers of the world have rendered the vintage chart [a historical record of which years are considered by critics to have been good or bad for winemaking] obsolete." Just as the end of the cold war led some to declare 'the end of history' a decade earlier, it seemed that mankind had arrived at the end of wine. There was nothing to do but accept the new reality.

hanks to the industry's embrace of technology, wine was more plentiful, profitable and predictable than ever. But in the 1980s, just as French wine was putting the finishing touches to its global conquest, stirrings of discontent began to be heard among winemakers.

The blueprint for what came to be known as natural wine comes from Beaujolais, a pretty region of soft green hills and stone cottages just below the slopes of Burgundy proper. In the 1950s, the area had started making "beaujolais nouveau", a cheap, easy-drinking wine that was produced quickly and released early in the season. It was a huge hit, and by the end of the 1970s Beaujolais - an area roughly the size of New York City - was producing more than 100m litres of wine a year, and exporting more bottles than Australia and the state of California combined.

Despite its commercial success, Beaujolais had become a dismal example of technical winemaking run amok. The New York Times complained about how producers would "'push' the vines" to twice the recommended yield, a process known locally as " faire pisser la vigne ", or "making the vine piss". To achieve the short production time, winemakers relied on lab-grown yeasts to jump-start the process, and big doses of sulphur to halt fermentation and stabilise the wine ahead of schedule.

A small group of local dissenters loathed this conveyor-belt style of production. They coalesced around a winemaker named Marcel Lapierre, who, upon his death in 2010, was widely eulogised as "the pope of natural wine". According to his friends, Lapierre complained that chemistry had destroyed the taste of Beaujolais, and that his contemporaries had "mortgaged their future" by producing low-quality wine at a frantic pace. He felt winemaking was being strangled by the demands of the market and the strictures of beaujolais AOC.

Lapierre was a radical - a friend of the Marxist theorist Guy Debord and the situationist poet Alice Becker-Ho - with no clear path to revolution. "We wanted to have a different life, to propose a different wine, one that respects ourselves and the people who drink it", Lapierre's nephew and fellow winemaker, Philippe Pacalet, told me.

What they seized upon was a heretical idea from an unlikely source. In 1980, Lapierre met Jules Chauvet, a tweedy local wine merchant, then in his 70s, who had been making small amounts of wine without additives for years. Chauvet, who had trained as a chemist and published widely on fermentation, believed that a healthy, diverse wild yeast from the same vineyard as the grapes produced the most complex, desirable bouquets in a wine. Sulphur dioxide is a potent antimicrobial, and Chauvet wrote that he considered it and other additives "poison" that restricted his beloved yeasts.

Chauvet's rules for winemaking followed from his obsession with fermentation and eliminating chemicals: the grapes had to be healthy and pesticide-free to cultivate the wild yeast; the winemaking had to be slow and extremely careful, as without preservatives any bit of rotten fruit or unclean equipment could wreck the whole process. "He gave us these rules, and the scientific background," Pacalet told me, describing Chauvet's techniques as "the foundation of natural wine".

It is difficult to overstate how ridiculous all this seemed at the time. In the 1980s, making wine without sulphur was like climbing a mountain without ropes. The French government had promoted and regulated its use since the 19th century, and modern oenologists thought it impossible to make wine without it. Sulphur offered control over fermentation and protected from bacterial spoilage. It was a panacea, the wine world's equivalent of penicillin.

The odds of making decent wine without any sulphur seemed slim, but Lapierre and his friends persisted. Lapierre's diaries recount bad harvests, temperamental yeasts causing entire vintages to go milky and sour, and nearly 15 years of experimentation - during which time Chauvet died, in 1989 - before he was consistently making good "low-intervention" wine, around 1992.

Having proved they could do the impossible, Lapierre and his friends achieved a strange success, a bit like a band that sustains a vital sound totally outside the geographic and cultural mainstream. Locally they were seen as eccentrics. The wine journalist Tim Atkin once wrote in the food magazine Saveur that there was "a lot of behind the hand sniggering" from their neighbours.

But Lapierre's band of natural winemakers cultivated a small, dedicated following in Paris and abroad who were willing to evangelise for them. "When I tasted it [in the 1990s] I almost levitated. My god, I thought, the spirit of Chauvet is still alive," the American wine importer Kermit Lynch told the magazine the Wine Spectator in 2010. The Japanese were also enthusiastic early converts - they were "the first big customers", Olivier Cousin told me. "They had good taste and they paid well."

Lapierre wasn't the only person to try making wine without sulphur - a number of isolated winemakers across France and Italy were experimenting in similar ways - but some combination of dedication, his personal skill as a winemaker, and the scientific imprimatur of Chauvet's process resonated. After years of toiling in obscurity, Lapierre's work was vindicated by the scores of other winemakers who used his prototype to form a loose movement, free themselves of convention, and become the barbarians at the gates of the wine world.

n the 1990s, as the natural wine scene made its way beyond Beaujolais, across France and Europe, it took on a gleefully anti-modern character. Many winemakers embraced hyper-localism, planting long out-of-fashion native grape varieties and adopting archaic production techniques. A group based in the Loire valley pushed mysticism to the forefront through an interest in biodynamic agriculture, invented almost a century earlier by the Austrian occult philosopher Rudolf Steiner (he of the controversial schools). This involved promoting biodiversity in the vineyard, but also burying cow horns and entrails to form cosmic antennas in the soil - "raying back whatever is life-giving and astral", according to Steiner.

For a long time, natural wine seemed destined to remain a shaggy subgenre. But starting in the late 2000s, something changed, and natural wine began popping up on menus in Brooklyn, in east London, and in the hipper quarters of Copenhagen and Stockholm. This new type of wine fitted perfectly with a wider revolution in taste, as vague terms such as "natural" and "artisanal" became bywords for sophistication, and consumers found themselves wanting to dine at farm-to-table restaurants and furnish their homes with reclaimed wood and industrial fittings. What had once been the passion of a hardcore group of eccentric winemakers in eastern France had, somehow, become cool.

London's wine cognoscenti started noticing the style around 2010, and didn't know what to make of it. "We were scratching our heads, because the definition was very vague. You could have a very good wine made in this way, then one which is just horrible - fizzing, bubbling, and smelly," Ronan Sayburn of 67 Pall Mall told me. The wine press tended to describe natural wine as if it were a minefield - with a few safe, conventional choices among a field of explosively bad bottles. "Don't make the mistake of thinking that just because a wine tastes different or unexpected that also means that it's good", the Telegraph's wine critic Victoria Moore wrote in 2011, in an article titled "Be wary at the Natural Wine Fair". David Harvey, of the London importer Raeburn Fine Wines, recalled that "many wine professionals and writers pooh-poohed the whole thing early on. They assumed because they knew conventional wines, they knew it all."

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Illustration by Pete Gamlen

In early 2011, as the natural wine insurgency was growing, Sayburn invited Doug Wregg of Les Caves de Pyrene, one of the largest natural wine importers in the UK, to give an account of the style to a coterie of the nation's wine elite at Vagabond, a small bar in west London. Among the 12 people attending were Isa Bal, the sommelier of Heston Blumenthal's restaurant The Fat Duck, and Jancis Robinson, the Financial Times' wine critic, who advises the Queen's cellars. The group included eight of the world's 170 Master Sommeliers, and three of its 289 Masters of Wine, graduates of gruelling professional programmes that can take decades to complete, and produce the grandmasters of the wine world.

"I sensed a lot of hostility in the room," Wregg recalled. Robinson, the FT critic, characterised the mood as "suspicious". Among the wines Wregg presented, there were a few hits. A thin, fresh Jura chardonnay by Jean-François Ganevat was well received. Less so a tangy, peppery and slightly sweaty-tasting sulphur-free gamay from the south-eastern Loire, which more than one person noted reeked of "VA", or volatile acidity - critical shorthand for a variety of acids that smell of vinegar.

It wasn't Wregg's most contentious tasting. ("I attended a lunch with him at [the London restaurant] Galvin that winter, where we got cloudy bottles that smelled like the arse-end of a farmyard," Jay Rayner, the Observer's restaurant critic, told me.) But the sceptics' main misgivings - that natural wines were hugely inconsistent, difficult to define and failed to line up with traditional styles - remained. "I feel like I left none the wiser," Sayburn said. "Some were good, some were horrible."

There was also a feeling among attendees that, like the paleo diet or probiotics, natural wine was at best a trend, and at worst a cult, one whose supporters were prone to feverish evangelism. Wregg, himself a true believer, was not best-suited to convincing them otherwise. "Talking natural wine with Doug is like talking to a Mormon about God," one of the attendees told me. Two others compared natural wine to the "emperor's new clothes".

Yet the very complaints critics level at natural wine are the same things that now ensure its success. In 2007, University of Toronto sociologists Josée Johnston and Shyon Baumann published a landmark paper arguing that as the influence of French "haute cuisine" declined through the 20th century, a more pragmatic, egalitarian, American-rooted tradition arose. Analysing thousands of press articles, they showed that the qualities of "authenticity" - including geographic specificity, simplicity and personal connection - dominated contemporary food writing. "Authenticity," they wrote, "is employed to provide distinction without overt snobbery."

The inconsistency, the impurity, the strong smells, the bits of stems and yeasts that sometimes make it into the bottle - all this signals to the consumer that natural wine is an alternative to the bland, monotonous "perfection" of commercial products, in the same way that slight asymmetries distinguish handmade furniture. Natural wine offers a nothing-to-hide-here image at odds with the stuffy culture of the traditional wine world. To many people for whom a restaurant wine list represents a hellish combination of a geography, history and chemistry test specially designed to make them feel stupid, there is something very appealing about upending the critical hierarchy, or at least being told it can be ignored.

"When you decide consistency is less important, you are more liberated in the way you taste. Instead of looking for faults, you take what the wine gives you," Wregg told me recently. We were at Terroirs, a Trafalgar Square wine bar that Les Caves opened in 2008, surrounded by mostly older patrons in Oxford shirts or suits, nearly all with a glass or bottle filled with something that would have been nearly unrecognisable as wine a decade ago.

Wregg is fastidious when describing soil types or winemaking practice, but tends to interpret the final product with a loose, anarchic air, like a seditious schoolteacher who knows the curriculum but urges students to doubt the validity of the system that created it. "Customers will tell me, 'Oh, the 2015 is not like the 2014', and I say 'Good', because, well, those are different years, and if the winemaker was farming honestly and not trying to manipulate the wine towards some idea of quality, it's always going to be different", he said. Once one accepts the premises of natural wine, he continued, "In a certain way, all bets are off. Everything is valid, everything is as good as everything else."

igid boundaries soften over time. Natural wine can't remain segregated in its own market for ever. There are natural winemakers who want to expand, and mainstream winemakers - struggling with what a 2016 industry report called the "long-term issue of youth recruitment" - eager to learn from natural wine's popularity with young people who are as interested in craft beer and spirits as they are in wine.

Isabelle Legeron, an influential sommelier and writer, told me her vision for the future of natural wine was "to move away from this image of beatniks in sandals who have no idea what they're doing". She would like more transparency and clearer standards about what actually goes in the product - something she thinks favours natural wine's chemical-free process. She also wants to cut out "bottles with naked lady pictures", an unfortunate hangover from the scene's crusty boys-club days.

When I spoke to Jay Rayner (no natural wine fan, to put it mildly) he drew a parallel between natural wine and the success of the organic food movement. Despite its enormous visibility, organic food still accounts for only a fraction of the total market, but its rise has provided a contrast and critique of the mainstream food world that could not be ignored. As a result, the mainstream has become a little bit more organic.

I caught a glimpse of this process late last year at Château Palmer, one of the world's most prestigious wineries. While natural winemakers often tend toward lighter, brighter wines for immediate drinking, Château Palmer makes dense, highly concentrated wines that won't age into their full potential for decades. It is wine for the yacht, the private jet and the futures market.

Yet in a sign of how natural wine's thinking is infiltrating the highest levels of the industry, Château Palmer's CEO Thomas Duroux has converted the estate, which is in Bordeaux, to biodynamic agriculture. This involves eliminating chemical fertilisers and pesticides, and applying Steiner's theories of biodiversity and herbal treatments in their place. In 2014, Duroux declared that "in 10 years all the serious classified growths [in Bordeaux] will go this way." When I visited, rather than the usual stark sight of thousands of vines in bare soil, there were rows of grapes boasting a healthy-looking blanket of leafy greens. Cows provided abundant natural fertiliser, and sheep for grazing between the vines waited in a nearby barn.

Sabrina Pernet, the head winemaker, assured me that the conversion wasn't just marketing. "Consumers want to drink more natural products. But it's not just a trend. There's no future in killing the Earth," she said. For the past few years, Château Palmer has also been experimenting with lowering the sulphur content in their wines. "The first time Thomas and I tried our wine without sulphur it was incredible", Pernet said. "It was so open, so expressive. Sulphur makes wine very closed."

If this seems like the familiar story of the market absorbing criticisms and turning them into new ways of making money, it's worth noting that some core elements of natural wine are likely to defy attempts at scaling up. Everyone at Palmer is quick to point out that they aren't going fully natural, just dialling back their additives as much as possible. "We can't make wine totally without sulphur. I don't want fizziness, I want it clean," said Duroux. And with 10,000 cases retailing at more than £2,000 each, unlike small-scale natural wine producers, they can't afford mistakes.

"This is a problem for the big estates," said Cyril Dubrey, a winemaker in the village of Martillac, about 50km south of Château Palmer. "You need to be OK with losing some barrels, or to simply accept the wine you made." Dubrey's wine is fresh and very acidic, with a slight dusty earthiness - a long way from the density and power of the Château Palmer wines. But it is very good, and true to his DIY operation; Dubrey's small vineyard butts up against the basketball nets and swimming pools of his neighbours' yards.

"You should be free in your head and heart," he said, with a calm satisfaction. He comes from a mainstream winemaking family, and studied oenology nearby. He has never regretted breaking with that tradition. "I'm proud of the wine that comes from this place. There is nothing added. The wine is free."

* Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here.
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If you were lucky enough to dine at Noma, in Copenhagen, in 2011 - which had just been crowned as the "best restaurant in the world" - you might have been served one of its signature dishes: a single, raw, razor clam from the North Sea, in a foaming pool of aqueous parsley, topped with a dusting of horseradish snow.

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First Notre Dame – now it’s the wine! Fire destroys TWO MILLION bottles of plonk at a warehouse in Bordeaux

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First Notre Dame - now it's the wine! Fire destroys TWO MILLION bottles of plonk at a warehouse in Bordeaux

The warehouse belongs to Sovex, which markets red, white and rose wines

The wine was stored in boxes on wooden pallets covered in flammable material

60 firefighters spent 15 hours fighting the blaze, but no injuries were reported

It came a day after the Notre Dame fire, which claimed cathedral's spire and roof

At least two million bottles of wine have been destroyed in a horror fire in South West France.

The blaze broke out on Tuesday in a warehouse north of Bordeaux belonging to Sovex, which markets a range of red, whites and roses.

Many of them were in boxes on wooden pallets that erupted in flames for so far unknown reasons.

Firefighters intervened very quickly at the scene of the disaster, which began around 3.30pm, and evacuated around 80 people working on the site.

'In total, two million bottles of alcohol were destroyed,' said an investigating source, who added that 60 firefighters spent 15 hours fighting the blaze.

A video posted on You Tube showed a Sovex worker shouting in panic as the fire intensified, and colleagues left the building.

Flames can be seen engulfing the wooden pallets near the ceiling of the warehouse, as pieces of debris were sent flying through the air.

The warehouse stored the wine in piles of boxes up to 35 feet high, and most were covered in flammable materials. Despite this, there were no injuries reported.

On Wednesday morning, company executives met with experts and insurers to estimate the loss, which is likely to be well past a sum equivalent to £10million.

Judicial police are also investigating the cause of the blaze, which charred half of the building in the Bordeaux suburb of Gironde.

It follows the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris the previous day, when the ancient place of worship lost its spire and roof.

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Fire destroys TWO MILLION bottles of wine at a warehouse in Bordeaux

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The warehouse belongs to Sovex, which markets red, white and rose wines The wine was stored in boxes on wooden pallets covered in flammable material 60 firefighters spent 15 hours fighting the blaze, but no injuries were reported It came a day after the Notre Dame fire, which claimed cathedral's spire and roof At least two million bottles of wine have been destroyed in a horror fire in South West France.

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How to Become TripAdvisor’s #1 Fake Restaurant

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Singapore Airlines expand Burgundy wine offering

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Singapore Airlines expand Burgundy wine offering

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The airline plans to introduce 47 wines from Burgundy for Premium Class customers, rotating them over an 18-month period, thanks to a new sourcing policy which sees its wine consultants visit vineyards to source 'small-batch' wines.

The three consultants - Oz Clarke, Jeannie Cho Lee MW and Michael Hill-Smith MW - have sourced a number of Grand Cru and Premier Cru labels from producers including Faiveley, Benjamin Leroux, Domaine d'Ardhuy and Domaine de Montille.

SIA said the new sourcing approach complemented the airline's traditional way of listing wines through tender requests.

'By expanding the range of labels that SIA offers on board, we are able to ensure a well-planned rotation of wines to keep the palates of our frequent flyers continually excited,' said Betty Wong, SIA's divisional vice president, inflight services and design.

'During our wine consultants' visits to the vineyards, we also actively sought out smaller maisons and domaines to bring them into the SIA family, thus allowing us to expand the depth and range of our offerings, and satisfy the rising demand for more exclusive Burgundy labels.'

In 2017, Hill Smith MW told Decanter.com about the process for choosing wines for the airline.

'We spend a week blind tasting close to 1,000 wines in their categories using international tasting standards. We might taste 80-100 bottles for Business Class Bordeaux.'

Singapore Airlines currently serves about 2m bottles of wine on board every year, across all passenger classes.

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Singapore Airlines expand Burgundy wine offering - Decanter

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The airline plans to introduce 47 wines from Burgundy for Premium Class customers, rotating them over an 18-month period, thanks to a new sourcing policy which sees its wine consultants visit vineyards to source 'small-batch' wines.

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Chinese media investor buys historic Bordeaux estate

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Chinese media investor buys historic Bordeaux estate

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Mr Chen, an Asian investor in telecoms, media and technology sectors, has bought Château de Cadillac-en-Fronsadais from the Australian Serisier family, said Vineyards-Bordeaux, which brokered the deal.

The AOC Bordeaux estate is based in Cadillac-en-Fronsadais north-west of Libourne and has been built up by the Serisiers since they acquired an historic house known as Château Cadillac in 2004.

The property traces its history back to the first Baron of Cadillac, created by King Edward II of England in 1307, said Vineyards-Bordeaux, which is an exclusive affiliate of Christie's International Real Estate.

The deal is the latest in a long-running series of Bordeaux winery purchases by Asia-based investors, who have typically opted to buy into lesser-known appellations and areas.

Having started with three hectares of vines, the Serisiers spent several years acquiring neighbouring plots and launched their own wines in 2011.

Wines currently produced include 'Le Bout du Monde', which is a 100% Merlot from a vineyard of the same name, and 'Château Montrevel'.

As Decanter's Jane Anson reported last year, using the 'Cadillac' name proved tricky for the Serisiers, given the existence of a Château de Cadillac in Cadillac Côtes de Bordeaux.

After visiting the Serisiers last year, Anson reported, 'The wines have clear potential, and are particularly succulent in the 2015 and 2016 vintages, as you would expect, with my favourites being the liquorice-filled Montrevel 2015 and Le Bout du Monde 2016, with its prominent fruit and saline lick on the finish.'

Little was revealed about estate buyer 'Mr Chen', although Vineyards-Bordeaux said that he got in touch via Christie's auction house in China and was keen to continue investing in the property and its vineyards.

'It's a dream come true for me to become a part of such a privileged history and participate in my passion for wine through such high quality terroirs,' Vineyards-Bordeaux quote Chen as saying.

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Chinese media investor buys historic Bordeaux estate - Decanter

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Mr Chen, an Asian investor in telecoms, media and technology sectors, has bought Château de Cadillac-en-Fronsadais from the Australian Serisier family, said Vineyards-Bordeaux, which brokered the deal. The AOC Bordeaux estate is based in Cadillac-en-Fronsadais north-west of Libourne and has been built up by the Serisiers since they acquired an historic house known as Château Cadillac in 2004.

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Winter Semester

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Tasting notes

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Wine tasting
Knispel Sauvignon Blanc 2017
Hans Schwarz Baufränkisch 2013

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Fans rush to buy Game of Thrones Scotch whiskies

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Fans rush to buy Game of Thrones Scotch whiskies

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Strong early demand for the Game of Thrones-themed single malts, launched on pre-order by Diageo and broadcaster HBO, has seen at least two UK-based retailers sell out of initial stock in just a few hours.

Each of the Game of Thrones Scotch whiskies has been paired with a particular house from the seven kingdoms in the television series, plus also the Night's Watch guard, said Diageo.

It has launched the eight single malts, priced between £38 and £65 per bottle, in partnership with broadcaster HBO in several European countries, including the UK.

A spokesperson for the Whisky Exchange retailer said it had sold out of initial stocks. 'This was very popular with both whisky and Game of Thrones lovers, and sold out in just five hours,' said Dawn Davies MW, head buyer at The Whisky Exchange. 'It's great to see Diageo partner with Game of Thrones to get their malts out to a wider audience.'

Another retailer, Master of Malt, also sold out within hours of launching its pre-order offer - even though it restricted customers to one bottle per expression.

A spokesperson for the retailer told Decanter.com, 'The Game of Thrones Whisky Collection has been one of the most successful launches we've seen in recent times, with almost every line selling out on pre-order in less than two hours.'

Amazon was also selling the whiskies on pre-order in several European countries and still appeared to have stocks available by early Wednesday afternoon UK time.

Highlights include a Lagavulin 9 Year Old from Islay, a style renowned for its intense smoky and peaty style, which has been chosen to represent the rich House Lannister.

There is also an Oban Bay Reserve, paired with the Night's Watch, and a Talisker Select Reserve, paired with House Greyjoy.

The full list of Game of Thrones single malt Scotch whiskies and its corresponding house:

House Stark: Dalwhinnie Winter's Frost (suggested retail price: £48 for 70cl)

House Tully: Singleton of Glendullan Select (srp: £38)

House Targaryen: Cardhu Gold Reserve, (srp: £48)

House Lannister: Lagavulin 9 Year Old, (srp: £65)

The Night's Watch: Oban Bay Reserve, (srp: £65)

House Greyjoy: Talisker Select Reserve, (srp: £48)

House Baratheon: Royal Lochnagar 12 Year Old, (srp: £38)

House Tyrell: Clynelish Reserve, (srp: £48)

The first whiskies were due to be sent to fans from around 19 February, said Diageo, ahead of the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones in April.

Its launch follows the debut of 'White Walker', a Game of Thrones-inspired, blended Scotch within the Johnnie Walker brand.

There has also been a Game of Thrones wine range, which was tasted by our experts in 2017.
Updated 16/01/2019 at 13:45 UK time with extra comments from Master of Malt.

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Fans rush to buy Game of Thrones Scotch whiskies - Update - Decanter

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Strong early demand for the Game of Thrones-themed single malts, launched on pre-order by Diageo and broadcaster HBO, has seen at least two UK-based retailers sell out of initial stock in just a few hours.

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How good is the Game of Thrones wine?

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To celebrate the seventh season of Game of Thrones, we've tasted the show's official red wine released by the HBO network. See our rating below...

We all have a favourite, whether its the diminutive comedian and astute politican Tyrion Lannister, or the mother of dragons and empire builder Daenerys Targaryen. And there's no shortage of wine in Game of Thrones.

'Everything's better with some wine in the belly' - Tyrion Lannister

But can the official Game of Thrones wines live up to the quality of the characters and twisting plotlines? Are they worth drinking while you watch the latest season or can you dismiss them as a gimmick?

Broadcaster HBO has released a range of Game of Thrones wines themed around the hit show, all three of which come from sub-regions of California.

There's a Chardonnay from Central Coast, a red blend from Paso Robles and a Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa Valley.

First of all, these wines aren't at gimmicky prices; with the red blend and Chardonnay at $20 per bottle and the Cabernet at $50 - they are more House of Lannister than House of Frey.

With Bob Cabral as the winemaker, the Lannister price tag is hardly surprising. He's best known for making very fine Pinot Noir from Sonoma, especially at Williams Selyem.

Decanter 's tasting team got hold of the $20, 2014 vintage red blend from Paso, available across the US, and put it through its paces.

Rated: the Game of Thrones wine

Related content:

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Game of Thrones wine tasted: How good is it? - Decanter

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To celebrate the seventh season of Game of Thrones, we've tasted the show's official red wine released by the HBO network. See our rating below... We all have a favourite, whether its the diminutive comedian and astute politican Tyrion Lannister, or the mother of dragons and empire builder Daenerys Targaryen.

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'Game of Thrones' Dornish Wine Brought to Real Life by St.-Emilion Vintner

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'Game of Thrones' Dornish Wine Brought to Real Life by St.-Emilion Vintner

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Your Rosé May Be Late this Year: Wine and the Government Shutdown

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The battle in Washington is inflicting headaches and possible financial pain on wineries and importers

Benovia winery in the Russian River Valley was planning to label and release its first Blanc de Noirs sparkling wine this spring, but the partial government shutdown has put those plans on hold. Due to the lapse in funding, the government agency responsible for approving Benovia's wine labels, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), has shut its doors and suspended its approval process for new alcoholic beverages, leaving the winery in a bind.

"Until you have label approval they won't let you label and ship the wine," Benovia co-owner and winemaker Mike Sullivan told Wine Spectator. "It's sort of in limbo until the government opens up."

Similar stories are playing out across the country as wineries and breweries feel the sting of the shutdown. Without label approval, some winemakers may have to wait to bottle their wines currently sitting in tanks and barrels. Those delays could eventually mean financial consequences for winemakers and fewer choices for consumers on store shelves.

Spring releases are in limbo

During the shutdown, wineries may continue to send their labels to the TTB, but the labels won't be approved, a process that normally takes up to 36 days. That's creating headaches for winemakers since they are required to submit new labels, as well as existing labels that have been changed, to the TTB for a Certificate of Label Approval (COLA), in order to sell their wines.

Last year the TTB, which enforces laws regulating alcohol production, importation and distribution, processed more than 192,000 labels.

The good news for wine lovers is that the shutdown will only impact wines that require approval. Winemakers can change the vintage and other exempted information on a previously approved wine label without obtaining a COLA. That means many wineries such as Benovia will still be able to bottle and release the majority of their wines without any delays.

"For any wine that requires a COLA for a new label, it's extremely problematic," said Kent Humphrey of Eric Kent in Sonoma, who is awaiting approval on several labels. Like many wineries, Eric Kent releases some of its wines, including its rosé, in the spring, with a second set of releases in the fall. Humphrey didn't need a new COLA for his blush wine but he says one of the wineries he consults for is still waiting for its new rosé to be approved.

As the shutdown drags into its fifth week, winemakers are now facing a dilemma. Do they attempt to bottle and label the wines without approval and risk the TTB rejecting them? Or do they wait to bottle the wine and release them late, potentially impacting deals with restaurants and retail shops?

Ste. Michelle Wine Estates, the largest wine company in Washington State, hasn't seen any significant delays, according to Ryan Pennington, senior director of communications. But Pennington acknowledges that the shutdown could become a serious issue if it continues, ultimately affecting some of Ste. Michelle's planned new product launches.

But the greatest impact will be felt by small wineries; especially those that use custom-crush facilities and mobile bottling lines. It can cost more than $2 to bottle and label a case of wine. And wineries will have to find space to store the wine if they can't legally sell it. Bottling without approval or labels comes with risks. "If you are a small winery and you have a decent-sized lot [of wine] and have to label it a second time, you could be out $20,000," said Adam Lee, who makes the wines at Siduri, as well as his new Pinot Noir label, Clarice.

The shutdown will also affect imported wines. Imported wine labels have to be approved by the TTB before they can reach the market in the U.S. "We have 20 to 30 [labels] at the TTB that haven't been approved yet," said Gavin Speight, vice president of Old Bridge Cellars, which imports wines from Australia, France, Italy and New Zealand. "It's going to put us back a month or so on shipping."

Label approval is not the only issue facing winemakers. The shutdown could also delay new wineries from opening their doors since they require a permit from the TTB to operate their business.

How bad is it? That depends on how long it lasts.

How big of a financial impact the shutdown will have on the industry is still undetermined. "It's hard to quantify," said Michael Kaiser, vice president of WineAmerica. The trade association, which represents 600 wine producers around the country, is conducting an industry-wide survey on the shutdown and its impacts on wineries. Kaiser says that over 70 percent of respondents so far have indicated that they are waiting on label approval.

Wine, beer and spirits groups are now taking their case to Capitol Hill. Kaiser is meeting with members of Congress to voice the association's concerns. "This is getting some notice," he said.

Even after the shutdown ends, winemakers will have to wait for the TTB to work through its backlog of labels. That could delay approval by months. "We need to get past this," said Lee. "It is hurting business in ways that's not currently being thought of."

With no end to the government shutdown in sight, winemakers will have to decide what their next steps will be. Some winemakers are already devising strategies for potential future shutdowns. For some that would mean submitting their labels months in advance of bottling. "It will make me think about label approval in a different way," said Sullivan.
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Your Rosé May Be Late this Year: Wine and the Government Shutdown | News | News & Features | Wine Spectator

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The battle in Washington is inflicting headaches and possible financial pain on wineries and importers Benovia winery in the Russian River Valley was planning to label and release its first Blanc de Noirs sparkling wine this spring, but the partial government shutdown has put those plans on hold.

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Global Wine Auctions Exceed $479 Million in 2018

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Live and online sales climbed sharply; red Burgundy continued to dominate the collectible marketplace

While 2018 was a volatile year for Wall Street, it was a winning year for wine auctions. Bidders paid record prices for a host of rarities ranging from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti Romanée-Conti 1945 to Sassicaia 1985 to The Macallan 60-year-old Whisky 1926.

In 2018, worldwide wine-auction totals (culled from sales conducted in the U.S., U.K., Geneva, Hong Kong and Shanghai markets, plus online sales) rose an impressive 26 percent to $479.7 million, up from $381.7 million in 2017, and narrowly eclipsing the previous global record of $478 million in 2011. The last quarter of 2018 more than matched the impressive performances in the first half and third quarter of the year.

Sales in the U.S. climbed nearly 20 percent over 2017 to $222 million. The combined London and Geneva markets rose 12 percent to $46.4 million. Hong Kong and Shanghai soared 40 percent to $137.2 million. Online totals rose a hefty 30 percent to $74.9 million, signaling the increased popularity of digital bidding.

Among the major auction houses, Acker Merrall & Condit led the pack with $105.2 million in overall sales, followed by Sotheby's at $98.1 million and Zachys at $80.7 million. Hart Davis Hart realized $67.9 million in live auction sales, a record for them, and another $9.2 million in auctions on their mobile app, the highest combined domestic tally. For the eighth year in a row, the firm sold 100 percent of the lots on offer.

Want to get the latest news on collectible wines and the auction market? Sign up for Wine Spectator's free Collecting e-mail newsletter and get a new top-rated wine review, collecting Q&As and more, delivered straight to your inbox every other week!

What was driving the auction market? "I think the interest in the Burgundy market has brought the demand, as more people realize how great and rare these wines are, and the high prices have brought supply," said Jamie Ritchie, worldwide head of Sotheby's Wine, in an email. "People who purchase Burgundy generally buy it with the intention of drinking it, so they pay even closer attention to provenance and condition, which also gets reflected across the entire market, making mature Bordeaux and other wines more valuable."

Jeff Zacharia, president of Zachys, concurred. "In 2017, we sold more Burgundy [by value] than Bordeaux for the first time ever, and that trend continued in 2018. What's more, all of our top 10 wines in 2018 were Burgundy."

A year of records

The year's top selling bottle was not a wine, but a whiskey. At Christie's London last November, a lot of the exceedingly rare The Macallan 1926 60-Year-Old whisky, presented in a unique bottle painted by Irish artist Michael Dillon, sold for more than $1.5 million. It was the fourth bottle of The Macallan 1926 to go on the block in 2018, with the others selling for between $843,299 to $1.2 million.

Making major headlines at a Sotheby's New York in October were two extremely scarce 750ml bottles of DRC Romanée-Conti 1945 (only 600 bottles were made), which shattered all previous records for wine lots. They sold for a staggering $558,000 and $496,000 respectively, far exceeding the prior top wine price of $310,700 paid for a jeroboam of Château Mouton-Rothschild 1945 at Sotheby's in 2007.

The first bottle of '45 DRC went to an anonymous bidder from Asia. The second was snapped up by veteran American collector and real-estate investor Rob Rosania. For a large part, provenance accounted for the stratospheric prices. All the wines in the sale were consigned from the personal cellar of famed Beaune viticulteur Robert Drouhin, whose family was a one-time distributor of DRC. The auction brought in a total of $7.3 million, more than five times the high estimate.

Not just Burgundy booms

Case lots of DRC sold at a premium throughout the year. At Christie's London last October, a dozen bottles of DRC Romanée-Conti 1988 brought a record $379,008 against a pre-sale high estimate of $250,000.

Rarely seen DRCs were offered in full force at Acker Merrall & Condit's "Time Capsule" auction in November, consigned by an unnamed East Coast collector. A 12-bottle lot of DRC Romanée-Conti 1980, selling for $235,600, was followed by a dozen bottles of the 1982 at $173,600.

Zachys October sale "The Vault III" topped $20 million, the highest individual tally of the year. The auction set new records for bottles from G. Roumier, Armand Rousseau and Jean-Louis Chave. But it was Zachys' Holiday Sale in late November that established an American first for the most expensive California wine ever sold: A six-liter bottle of the celebrated Heitz Martha's Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon 1974, one of only three made, sold for $96,330 against a top estimate of $80,000.

Hart Davis Hart's "Celebration of Bordeaux" auction in November showed Bordeaux still sells too. The firm offered 1,461 lots of Bordeaux, which brought in more than $5.3 million in sales against a pre-sale estimate of $3.7 million to $5.5 million. The auction was choc-a-bloc with treasures: six magnums of Château Pétrus 2006 that sold for $28,680 (the pre-sale estimate was $16,000-24,000); six bottles of Château Léoville Las Cases 1986 which brought in $4,182 (estimate $1,600-2,400); and a double-magnum of Château Trotanoy 1982 which realized $4,541 (estimate $1,900-2,800).

Fortified wines and pre-Prohibition whiskey are becoming frequent components of wine auctions. Although expensive, they boast a longer shelf life than table wine, once opened. In December at the joint Christie's and Wally's New York sale, a 5-gallon demijohn of Old Sercial Madeira 1846 from The Liberty Hall Museum Collection of Historic Madeira sold for $39,200. A bottle of Lenox Madeira 1798 fetched $15,925 against an estimate of $6,000-8,000. Twelve quarts of pre-Prohibition Old Crow Bourbon 1912 sold for $22,050 against an estimate of $8,500-$10,000.

Stock market jitters have prompted many auction-goers to question the future of collectible wine in 2019. A bullish John Kapon, CEO of Acker Merrall & Condit, believes that history has proven any decreases in wine values are merely short-term hiccups, and that the world's finest and rarest wines continue to be not only great beverages, but also great assets. "The [wine] market remains firm, active and healthy, and we expect another banner year," he said in an email.

Sotheby's Jamie Ritchie sounded a more cautious note. "In the short term the wine market tends to remain strong, but in the longer term it reacts to the financial markets and would be affected by uncertainty and volatility," he said.

A classic wine remains a classic wine regardless of price. The question remains at what point it becomes a buy or a sell.
Click here for a full-sized PDF version of this chart.

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Global Wine Auction Market Exceeds $479 Million in 2018 | Collecting News | Collecting | Wine Spectator

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While 2018 was a volatile year for Wall Street, it was a winning year for wine auctions. Bidders paid record prices for a host of rarities ranging from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti Romanée-Conti 1945 to The Macallan 60-year-old Whisky 1926.

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Napa And Bordeaux Share A Talented Winemaker

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Both Château Margaux of Bordeaux and Inglenook Vineyard of Napa Valley in California share a winemaking advisor whose cross-continent experience provides advantages to both estates.

In 2011, after 21 years spent working under the mentorship of Paul Pontallier at Château Margaux, Philippe Bascaules was offered-and accepted-the General Manager position at Inglenook in California-owned by film director Francis Ford Coppola. In 2016, after Pontallier passed away, Bascaules agreed to return to Margaux as Managing Director.

A native of southern France, Bascaules studied in Bordeaux and Montpellier, and also spent a year working in Beaujolais before he began at Margaux.

"I wanted to come back to France one day, so it was a great opportunity. And I still continue to work with Inglenook," Bascaules said when we met at Château Margaux earlier this month. Owner Corinne Mentzelopoulos had provided him with the latitude to continue providing input to Inglenook, which he visits a half dozen times a year.

Differences in cultures and practices between Napa and Bordeaux provided Bascaules with powerful insights regarding winemaking, as well as attitudes toward life.

Consider the slightly dry topic of irrigation.

Unlike in California, irrigating wine grapes is illegal in Bordeaux. Because Bordeaux has more rain than Napa-an average of 1.6 inches (40 millimeters) versus 0.1 inches (2.5 millimeters) for the month of August, for example-there is a potential problem of having too much rain during the growing season. Vines are planted at high densities of about 4,000 per acre (10,000 per hectare) in order to absorb water and then evaporate moisture, drying the soil and creating an artificial water stress that improves the quality of wine grapes. In Napa, where the sun blasts from May through September, inadequate soil moisture can be counteracted through irrigation. From working in both climates, Bascaules learned that irrigation in California vineyards could be reduced by lowering vine densities, adding cover crops (planting non-vine vegetation between vine rows) or by using higher canopies.

"Depending on the soil, we can play with these parameters to change the level of the stress. But this has to be decided at the beginning of the season," he added.

Whereas the concept of terroir is key to French winemaking (the sum total of natural factors, such as sunlight, soil and even wind) Napa vineyards can be more apt to place a premium on the role of winemakers when considering the quality of their wines. Bascaules shunned such attention, craving instead to work closely with vine workers to teach them vineyard techniques.

"When I came to California, one thing was to focus efforts on recognizing the job of vineyard workers, to highlight the quality of their job, to walk in the vineyard and talk with workers. Because they know the vineyard better than I do. Each task they take on has an importance, an effect on the final product. Everybody talks about terroir. But I think it's more difficult to really create a team with workers. This is what I wanted to achieve."

This can be challenging where the movement of seasonal labor stays in flux and language and culture differences often exist. Another problem with this approach is that finding grape pickers is growing more difficult in California, often resulting in fewer employees having to work faster-reducing opportunities for any one-on-one training interactions.

When Bascaules returned to France he found that more château owners were utilizing biodynamic practices. Although not an advocate of biodynamic techniques himself, he witnessed how the spread of these practices was making winemakers more receptive to the fact that it was possible to produce good wine with fewer pesticides.

"I recognized this was good-to show us that we were moving in the wrong direction, and that we have to change."

He also realized that even traditional farming techniques have become less harmful to the environment. Research and data management have improved wine quality . They have also reduced pesticides.

For example, three decades ago Château Margaux wine typically included a blend of 65% Cabernet Sauvignon and 25% Merlot grapes (with the remaining inputs being Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot). Today, Margaux may include 90% Cabernet Sauvignon and only 5% Merlot. This Merlot is no longer added to counteract astringency of the Cabernet Sauvignon, but primarily to add complexity.

"Today we make much better Cabernet Sauvignon. The average quality is much higher. Why? Better viticulture. The yields are lower than before. This helps to provide better ripeness, and we can also protect grapes better. We also have better knowledge on the development of parasites-insects or fungus. So we use less pesticide than before, but at the right moment. Now we don't use anti-botrytis [a fungus that is a plant parasite], which was unthinkable 20 years ago. Why? I think because the yield is lower, because we pay more attention to each vine and we know better how to aerate grapes. So we don't need to use as many pesticides today."

When Bascaules left Bordeaux for Napa in 2011, the château was then bottling a new, third level wine known as Margaux du Château Margaux. The adoption of this additional tier necessitated greater complexity in vineyard management.

"It changed completely the way to harvest," Bascaules explained. Vine parcels were further subdivided into separate tiers of quality. One unforeseen benefit of this subdivision was that it allowed the unexpected discovery of some first quality grapes.

Additionally, more and smaller fermentation tanks were used to produce a greater range of juices-allowing wine to be blended more precisely than before.

In a tasting room at Château Margaux, Bascaules and I sampled three wines: a 2009 Pavillon Rouge du Château Margaux ("A great vintage, one of my favorites. All the components of the flavors of the perfume are at the same level of intensity"), a Château Margaux 2004 ("Although 2004 is not generally considered a great year, we think this is a very impressive wine, very concentrated. Maybe a little bit austere when young, but now 10 years later it's very refined on the palate. One of the best vintages to taste") and a Château Margaux 2015 ("It's young. Just bottled in August, but already very well balanced").

As we sipped, Bascaules told how Napa provided surprises when he first arrived.

"Napa is a wonderful place. You are able to make many different wines. I had to adapt to the people, the country, the language. And the wines, the vines-everything was so new, but very exciting. What is different in Napa is the open mind of people. Prohibition made winemaking and viticulture in Napa very inconsistent, and now there are different visions and different techniques. There is still no collective vision on the identity of Napa wines. When you taste old wines from the 1950's and '60's, they are very, very different than the wines made today. At Inglenook one of the goals was maybe to go back to this past, to make wines less alcoholic, with more freshness, less extraction."

"In Napa we don't need to copy Bordeaux. It takes time to know exactly who you are. At first you are tempted just to copy what you admire-perhaps Bordeaux, Burgundy. But to copy is not the best solution. You have to find yourself."

These are sage words, coming from a man who has returned home, yet still maintains his impact on wines produced a continent away.

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Napa And Bordeaux Share A Talented Winemaker

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Both Château Margaux of Bordeaux and Inglenook Vineyard of Napa Valley in California share a winemaking advisor whose cross-continent experience provides advantages to both estates. In 2011, after 21 years spent working under the mentorship of Paul Pontallier at Château Margaux, Philippe Bascaules was offered-and accepted-the General Manager position at Inglenook in California-owned by film director Francis Ford Coppola.

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Bordeaux’s new generation of winemakers

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30-somethings who have grown up on a family estate, inspired by their parent's know-how, as well as passion for wine, are taking over the running of the winery, breathing a new life into their family's tradition of winemaking - an essential ingredient in the regeneration of the Bordeaux wine world.

Many who were born into the winemaking industry went off to study or travel in their early twenties, only to return with new-found expertise and knowledge, and an appetite to take over the running of their parents' estates, in order to push them into the 21st century. It's a family affair, but the new generation is bringing energy and fresh ideas into the vineyards.

Mélanie Barton-Satorius is one such case. Winemaking is in her blood - her mother Lilian shares Châteaux Langoa & Léoville Barton with her father Anthony Barton. Their history of winemaking dates back to 1725 with the arrival of their ancestor, Thomas Barton who left his native Ireland for France. Lillian and her husband Michael Sartorius acquired Château Mauvesin Barton in 2011, with the aim of leaving a 'remarkable property' to their children. After studying viniculture and oenology, followed by a degree in the science of winegrowing in Burgundy, Mélanie returned to Bordeaux to implement the skills and knowledge that she'd gained whilst away studying. Her aim, besides producing great wine, is to rejuvenate the château, and while quality is the focus of her activities - for example, she wants to reduce the weeding on the property and 'work the soil more' - renovating the estate's wine cellars with new available technology is at the top of her list: "For a young oenologist, it's thrilling to be at the outset of a winegrowing adventure".

Huges Mallet, is a thirty-something winegrower at Château Haut Macô in the Côtes-de-Bourg region, on Bordeaux's Right Bank. Having already worked on his family's vineyard for the past 10 years, he's the fourth generation winemaker to take over the management of the estate. An essential part of his new role, along with his sister Anne, has been a focus on marketing and oenotourism, which has already garnered a good reputation for the château with people wanting to know more about the process: "people have less contact with the rural world than they used to and wine tells them a story!" And offering a range of fruity wines to be drunk young (alongside the traditional wine that the Château has been creating for decades), has also been a key part of his new role in the winery, helping to debunk the notion that Bordeaux wines aren't to be drunk now.

It's this sense of family or community that is a key theme for Bordeaux's new generation of winemakers. Take for example Bordeaux Oxygène, an association set up by childhood, school and university friends who have either grown up amongst the vines on their family's estate or who are working in some way within the wine industry. They have come together through their common passion for wine, to create an association based on friendship, aiming to protect Bordeaux's identity, know-how and tradition. At the same time they want to open doors, welcome new ideas and in their words, 'blow the dust off the wine world'.

Arômes de Jeunesse is another such group born out of friendship and more importantly a common interest in wine. Created in Saint-Émilion in 2012, the group arranges events, such as wine tastings and trips around the Bordeaux region: "We organize fun evenings in Bordeaux to make it easier to discover our wines, to share impressions, to give practical tips... But the atmosphere is casual and definitely spontaneous." Just as it should be - drinking wine is about enjoying not only the taste, but also a shared experience with friends and family. The group whose ages range between 25 and 35 say they are "committed to making Bordeaux wine accessible by creating opportunities for discovery" - a vital role in lifting the region's oft perceived stuffy reputation.

These are just a few of the people striving to move the Bordeaux wine world in a new direction. They've all sprung from a common denominator, which is not only a love for the wine, but to also protect the region's traditions and know-how, while at the same time making it more accessible and open to new ideas - invaluable for the future of the industry.

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Bordeaux's new generation of winemakers | Official website Bordeaux.com

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30-somethings who have grown up on a family estate, inspired by their parent's know-how, as well as passion for wine, are taking over the running of the winery, breathing a new life into their family's tradition of winemaking - an essential ingredient in the regeneration of the Bordeaux wine world....

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Jefford on Monday: Letter to a young wine tast

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Jefford on Monday: Letter to a young wine tast

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After three decades of wine tasting, Andrew Jefford passes on some of what he's learned.

Dear Taster,

So, you're off; you've begun. You've discovered wine's fascination. You're thirsty for flavours, knowledge, understanding. I remember the early days well: the intensity of those primeval wine sensations; the excitement of new discoveries; the perplexity of expensive disappointments, and the sense of frustration afterwards. The more you read, the more inadequate you feel; progress, limited by funds, has to be slow.

Then comes the first large trade tasting or consumer wine show, and the senseless jangle of aromas and flavours as you roam around the hall. How should you make sense of so many competing sensations? How can you disentangle the threads? You try to taste as much as possible, yet the more the flavours pile on to each other, the more confusion reigns.

Relax; understanding will come. The speed depends on exposure; those working professionally in wine can move more quickly than those who can only taste with after-hours enthusiasm. But over the next few decades you'll have ample opportunity to create your own palate, which is an interesting sort of 'lifetime achievement'. You will, in other words, learn what sort of wines are typical of hundreds of different wine locations, and you'll discover what you like, and what you don't. Distinguishing the purchases you treasure, five or ten years down the line, from those you regret is the most telling revelation of all.

Note, by the way, what a joy it is to possess a palate: to be able to smell and to taste the world. This is akin to the joy of having legs: to be able to walk and run through the world. In other words, it's a gift the young take for granted - but both palate and legs need wise use and training to stay in shape, and to restrict the use of both prematurely, via excess or neglect, is a tragedy.

Why, though, are you tasting? We all taste for personal pleasure, of course, but if you're tasting in any kind of professional capacity, you'll always be tasting on behalf of others. Sommeliers taste to help diners get the most out of a meal-time experience. Wine buyers or sales staff taste to find wines which will bring their customers maximum pleasure at minimum price or - in the case of fine wines or classic wines - at a fair price. Wine critics taste to discern and articulate quality within a peer group. Wine writers or bloggers taste to convey the beauty and diversity of the wine world.

Whatever the role, in other words, professional tasters need to keep their palates as broad as possible, to be open to all forms of beauty. Any meeting with those you serve will quickly reveal just how widely palates differ.

The main axes of difference seem to me to be sensitivity to - and like or dislike of - sweetness, acidity, warmth and a palpable textural presence in wine. The responses provoked by certain sorts of aroma can also vary widely, as does judgment concerning the desirability and importance of fruit flavours as opposed to other sorts of flavour.

One of biggest challenges in wine tasting, in fact, is knowing where to draw the line between the need to be open to many forms of excellence and the duty to be critical of what you might perceive to be winemaking failings or errors. Your internal tasting hierarchy of values is of course 'right' - for you and your palate. But not for others with a different sort of palate.

Resolving this challenge matters greatly for critics and wine writers, one of whose roles is to help shape the wine world of the future. It matters less (except in terms of personal anguish) for traders and sommeliers, who will sometimes find themselves buying and selling wines they don't like - because they know that such wines are exactly what some of their customers are looking for.

Related content:

At this point, respected young taster, I must introduce the notion of 'drinkability'. When we taste on behalf of others, we taste on behalf of drinkers, not of tasters. Wine is for drinking. Swallowing a glass of wine provides refined sensual stimulus; eases cares and brings joy; and aids digestion and physical health. How well does it perform? We all know that some bottles or decanters empty more quickly than others at table. To me, the ability to detect drinkability (present or eventual) as you taste is almost the cardinal virtue of a taster. Not simply to compute qualities, in other words, but to go beyond that and to empathise on behalf of the drinker, and to find those qualities which will satisfy most profoundly in drinking. This is difficult.

Let me put it a different way. It's easy to measure 'noise' when you taste, but it's much harder to hear music. Noise does not constitute fine wine; music does. You'll come across many noisy wines in your tasting lifetime, many bêtes de concours (prize-fighter wines) which are wonderful to taste but difficult to drink. You may discover this to your own cost, when you buy and cellar such wines.

This is why, in my opinion, a great taster needs to practice drinking as consciously (and as conscientiously) as he or she practices tasting. When a wine drinks well, analyse why. When you struggle to drink a wine, remember why, and use that in your tasting evaluations, even if it seems counterintuitive or unfashionable to do so.

Why does drinkability matter so much? It matters because it is a proof - perhaps the most important proof - of harmony, a cardinal aesthetic virtue.

Of course it's also useful to taste structurally and analytically, to weigh up and measure the building blocks or lineaments of aroma and flavour, since then you will come to see wines as they actually are, not as they mythically are. (Many wines thrive on myths.) Don't, though, take that structural vision of a wine and use it prescriptively. Great wine eludes formulation. Great wine can be high in acidity or low in acidity, high in tannin or low in tannin, high in alcohol or low in alcohol. (Alcohol is particularly tempting for the prescriptive, since it is printed on the label. Never look at that figure until you have tasted. Even then, only look if you feel that the harmony you hoped for might be missing.) The possibilities for harmony - trust me - are almost infinite.

Concentration of flavour, I now believe, is an over-rated virtue: it can very easily be artificially generated by acid-adjustment or by other forms of wine-making extremism. All of the greatest fine wines are great by virtue of disposition of flavour, not by virtue of accumulation of flavour.

The difference between a good simple wine and a fine wine does not lie in concentration but in what I would call grain: a kind of flavour-texture continuum (the wine-taster's equivalent of space-time). Perfection of grain is what you need to look for at the highest levels, not concentration. Allied, of course, to compelling aromatic refinement, perceived not just by the nose but in the mouth, too.

Blind tasting is the cause of extraordinary stress levels to many young wine tasters, in part because success in the top tier of wine exams is predicated on it, and in part because it is a familiar dinner-party game or trick to play on those who take an interest in wine. But you know what? Unless you want to pass those exams, actually guessing what a wine is doesn't matter at all. What matters is a clear assessment of what is in the glass. The true value of blind tasting is that it serves the wine without the myth. (And if you do want to pass the exams, the course work is there to help you acquire those necessary technical skills.)

Your life's work is your palate - but even more importantly, it's the architecture of your own mind. This, in the end, is more important than any measure of material success. You spend every minute of every day in your own mind, and if it is pleasant, well-ordered, diverse, curious, open and healthful place to pass that mass of time, then you'll stand a good chance of overcoming life's trials.

Tasting wine has a role to play in this. It teaches you to observe and listen to your senses, and to notice the fine detail of sensual presence and pleasure. Attention to detail is the basis of almost all skill and understanding, in every field, and our sensual being plays an important role in the constitution of the self.

As a drinker, you must learn the virtues of restraint - another useful lesson. Great drinkers don't drink more, but better. A great taster is not measured by the number of wines that he or she tastes per year, but by the level of understanding with which he or she tastes those wines.

Tasting wine, as I hinted earlier, means tasting the world, in all its beauty and diversity. It opens us up to the world. There are wine-tasting bigots, but they are few in number and modest in attainment. Tasting the world in this way is a great challenge, and a great education; you will still be learning at the point at which you take your last sip of wine on this earth, long after other journeys of discovery have finished. So ... keep it up. It's a great way to be human.

With best wishes,

Andrew

More Andrew Jefford columns:

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Jefford: Beginner's guide to tasting wine - Decanter

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After three decades of wine tasting, Andrew Jefford passes on some of what he's learned. Dear Taster, So, you're off; you've begun. You've discovered wine's fascination. You're thirsty for flavours, knowledge, understanding. I remember the early days well: the intensity of those primeval wine sensations; the excitement of new discoveries; the perplexity of expensive disappointments, and the sense of frustration afterwards.

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According to a 2016 study of the usage of 37,000 apps by analytics specialists Localytics, 62% of the apps downloaded by consumers will only be used 11 times. For a quarter of these people, that figure drops to just once.

My point? That anybody who looks at the tech world imagining that it will be in anything like the same shape tomorrow risks wasting a lot of effort and money. Vivino and Delectable are almost certainly big enough and successful enough to find homes within the big platforms. But the road ahead for all those food-and-wine matching/wine-to-suit-your-palate app s and their ilk, is going to get even rockier than it is today.
Robert Joseph

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According to a 2016 study of the usage of 37,000 apps by analytics specialists Localytics, 62% of the apps downloaded by consumers will only be used 11 times. For a quarter of these people, that figure drops to just once. My point?

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Provence rosé is regarded as the epitome of quality rosé, a style many winemakers aspire to. Following meteoric growth in recent years, its market position seems unassailable. However, in spring 2018 I heard, for the first time, murmurings of concern over competition.

The benchmark
Provence rosé, largely from the three appellations of Côtes de Provence, Coteaux Varois en Provence and Coteaux d'Aix-en-Provence, is generally pale pink, dry, with ripe fruit and fresh acidity. Australian importer and rosé specialist Felix Riley describes Provence rosé as the benchmark. "Few manage to capture the salinity or minerality of Provence," he said. "It is still the leading light [in Australia]. The style is well known, there are a number of established brands, and pricing for quality remains generally fair." Jeany Cronk of Mirabeau says the fact that the region produces a relatively similar style has worked to its advantage. "The consumer understands what they are getting, much like when they buy a bottle of Champagne."

Although Provence makes only 6% of the world's rosé, it leads the world market. As a result, it has become harder to sell rosés made in other styles, encouraging imitations, with less diversity of style. While more competitors are made in the paler style, this often comes at the expense of taste, creating nice-looking but insipid rosés.

The battleground for rosé is the US. The three main Provence appellations produced, in the small 2017 vintage, about 155m bottles, 90% of which was rosé. About 20% of the Provence vintage is exported, almost half to the US, by far Provence's main export market.

Consumption has grown rapidly in the US and half its rosé imports are French, with big players dominating. Paul Chevalier, of Whispering Angel's US distributor Shaw-Ross, sees further growth after sales doubled from 200,000 cases in 2016 to more than 400,000 in 2018. Gérard Bertrand from Languedoc is aiming for a similar result; he sold 3m bottles of rosé in the US in 2018 and hopes to double this over the next three years. Part of Bertrand's sales strategy is "to offer a diverse line-up" of rosés across a number of price points. His success shows that Provence origin is not essential.

Provence cannot easily make more rosé, as almost all its production is already rosé. Producers are responding by making higher-quality, higher-priced rosés, moving upmarket. Cronk predicts an increasing investment in quality: "The number of ambitious growers is on the up and there are more quality wines, using better winemaking technology ... Provence rosé is justifiably moving on from an everyday drink into the affordable luxury position. To justify higher prices, the quality has to be good."

Competitors emerge
If Provence rosé is regarded as the epitome of rosé production, which regions are rivals? Although US rosé production is growing fast, most is entry-level, leaving the higher-priced market - at least for now - largely to imports. In Sopexa's 2018 survey of wine professionals, 63% of respondents said Provence and Corsica were among their top three performers for rosé wine, with Languedoc close behind. Corsica, with its limited supply, is a minor threat. Languedoc already produces more rosé than Provence, and could increase production considerably, but most of its rosé is IGP, less highly valued than Provence rosé and sold at lower prices.

A slow growth in interest in different styles is perceptible. Regions like Anjou, with its contrasting style with high acidity and sugar, are seeing increased sales, admittedly with some wines a little paler and drier than traditionally. Specialist importers are buying rosés from Italy, Austria, Germany and Spain, but not in great volume. Darker rosés, such as Tavel and traditional Bandol rosés, have developed a niche market among sommeliers.

Provence is one of the few regions whose appellation requires a blend of varieties. But, as British writer Robert Joseph commented, marketing by varietal may grow: "People know and trust varietals, as long as the varietal character is evident." To offer varietals, Provence producers can make rosé under a variety of IGP denominations, but take-up of these has been small, perhaps as they lack appellation status, so are not promoted by the Provence Wine Council (the CIVP).

The success of Provence rosé has attracted competitors from elsewhere and encouraged consumers to explore other rosés. To maintain market leadership, Provence is attempting to move upmarket, increasing quality to justify higher prices. If competition leads to increased quality, the battle for market domination can only be good for consumers.
Elizabeth Gabay MW

This article first appeared in Issue 6, 2018 of Meininger's Wine Business International magazine.

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Provence rosé is regarded as the epitome of quality rosé, a style many winemakers aspire to. Following meteoric growth in recent years, its market position seems unassailable. However, in spring 2018 I heard, for the first time, murmurings of concern over competition.

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Die Fa. Schirnhofer liegt in der Ökoregion Kaindorf und wurde 1926 gegründet. Mit 340 MitarbeiterInnen wird ein Umsatz von rund 70 Millionen Euro erwirtschaftet und 17.000 Tonnen produziert. Im Portfolie befinden sich ca. 650 verschiedene Produkte: vom Markenfrischfleisch bis hin zu Wurst- und Schinkenprodukten.

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“Methods of sensory and hedonic analytics"

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Expectations influence sensory experience in a wine tasting

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Quizlet is a lightning fast way to learn vocabulary.