As France’s most famous wine region faces challenging times, its chateaux are behaving like true leaders, reports Julien Yung Mameaux. Bordeaux wine prices are adjusting – for the better. Culminating on decades of nearly immaculate reputation, two vintages broke records when wine critic Robert Parker Jr. gave perfect 100-points ratings to fifteen chateaux in 2009 and ten in 2010; prices jumped by 20 per cent and 12 per cent respectively. But as the world caught the Bordeaux fever, a tough era was ushered with the 2011 and 2012 vintages, performing below expectations. With stock piling up and a demanding client ... Read More »

Leave your brain aside, follow your instinct. Here a subject that is often omitted when dwelling on wines and spirits: animals. While men and women certainly have their part to play, the fauna may well be a serious contender to who’s got the greatest influence on a wine. Let’s face it: animals are much more around vineyards than we are. While you are quietly asleep or simply in the city, nocturnal and diurnal creatures are either stamping on the soils around the vines or even nesting on the leaves nearby the grapes. Such is the work of Mother Nature and ... Read More »

A little wooden signboard in the grass on the left seems to withstand the passing of time to say you’ve arrived at the right place. Two majestic gates slowly open in front of you and offer you a passage to a travel back in time. Nothing breathes more history, authenticity, tradition, and you move forward just as if you are seduced by an invisible siren of the past. Perfectly anchored in the Middle Age with many marks of that era preciously kept throughout the village, Il Borro has and continues to confidently build on its ancestral character to offer privileged ... Read More »