Today begins our weekly wine news, we will have the biggest news stories from around the world regarding wine in all forms, take a look!
Jean-Baptiste Lécaillon of Louis Roederer has been working with upcoming Bordeaux oenologist Axel Marchal on a groundbreaking new project on oak ageing that has flowed out of that simple question of sweetness without sugar.
He has just taken delivery of three new oak vats in his cellars in Reims that will be used with Chardonnay grapes for Louis Roederer Cristal and Blanc de Blancs. The inside of the vats have seen only the lightest of toastings to limit their aromatic imprint on the crisp minerality of the Chardonnay.
But what the new vats should do instead is to subtly impart a series of taste molecules.
The two most dominant of these, first discovered during Marchal’s PhD research project, are called Quercotriterpenoside I and II (or QTT). These vats are the first worldwide to be guaranteed to contain these molecules in every stave, as each one has been examined and approved by Marchal prior to delivery.
Continue the story at Decanter Magazine
Scott Andrews, director of Capital Bordeaux Investments Limited, has been banned from acting as a UK director for 11 years after running a wine investment scam.
25 year-old Andrews was the sole director of Capital Bordeaux Investments Limited that took at least £60,000 from investors but bought no wine. Andrews failed to keep proper records so more money may have been stolen from investors. Clients were told that their wines were stored at London City Bond’s warehouse in Tilbury, but Capital Bordeaux Investments had no account with LCB. Furthermore, fine wine is stored at LCB’s Vinothèque warehouse in Burton-on-Trent.Clients were also told that Capital Bordeaux Investments Limited could sell wine bought from other wine investment companies but were persuaded to buy wine to start an account.
Continue the story at Decanter Magazine
Taking time out from penning the theories of relativity, Albert Einstein came up with this immortal saying: “Once you stop learning, you start dying.”
But can Einstein’s bon mots and other famous quotations regarding the importance of expanding one’s horizons be extrapolated to wine? They absolutely can. No matter how much wine one tastes, no matter how honed one’s palate might become, there are valuable lessons to be learned from trying different wines from different regions or countries than what we know (and like) best.
Putting this point to the test, I recently undertook an exercise in which I uncorked or snapped the screwcaps on some of my Wine Enthusiast colleagues’ recommended wines in order to: 1) escape from my “day job” of tasting almost exclusively Spanish, Argentinean and Chilean wines, which I’ve been doing at this magazine for the past 15 years; and 2) glean some knowledge of the qualities and characteristics of wines from countries I’m not as up on, places like Australia, Germany and even the United States.
Continue the story at WineEnthusiast
