Jefford on Monday
Wine Pride: Is France coming out?
[Andrew Jefford] France badly needs a dose of Wine Pride. It might, just might, be on the way back for 2015.
In praise of the avant-garde
[Andrew Jefford] Every wine culture needs an avant-garde, a revolutionary fringe or a dissident rump.
A tale of three continents
[Andrew Jefford] Like all entrepreneurs, Maltus isn’t shy about embracing opportunity; any opportunity.
Chardonnay songs
[Andrew Jefford] Chardonnay sings in many of these places in South Africa, producing balanced and drinkable wines which have completed their phenolic journey in evident serenity.
Cape Enigma
[Andrew Jefford] South Africa’s not a nation with a red-wine vocation which happens to make a lot of white wine, thanks to the varietal legacy of its brandy-drinking past. Instead, its white-wine aptitude may well outweigh that of its reds.
Kissing the wind
[Andrew Jefford] For truth to landscape, you could say that Limoux is the most typical appellation of the South of France. It’s just that no one else apart from the Limouxins troubles to make wine in the lonely, airy confines.
Changing tastes, failing powers
[Andrew Jefford] The general question about how one’s tastes in wine evolve over a lifetime is harder to answer. I asked some friends and colleagues about this, and discovered that everyone’s tastes had changed – but never in exactly the same direction.
Monsieur Bertrand’s dream
[Andrew Jefford] Forceful, ebullient, ruddy, hale, perhaps abrasive: that’s what you’d expect of a former rugby international turned wine merchant.
France’s No-Fly Zone
[Andrew Jefford] The case for using slightly bulkier drones to make spray treatments seems irresistible. How, though, will it be possible in a country which has decided to ban all aerial treatment of its crops?
Dodging the bullets
[Andrew Jefford] Bizarre is perhaps the word which best sums up the 2014 growing season in the Northern Hemisphere.