Welcome back to our weekly news blast, full of news from around the wine world!
The 10 crus of Beaujolais have instructed a series of working groups to identify and list individual climats by June next year, as they seek to emulate Burgundy by linking vineyards more closely to terroir.
The programme follows a four year study into the terroir across the Beaujolais crus of Brouilly, Côte de Brouilly, Regnié, Morgon, Chiroubles, Fleurie, Moulin à Vent, Chénas, Juliénas and Saint Amour that was published through a series of maps in 2014. The maps identified that the soils types of the Beaujolais crus are far more complex than previously thought. This lends weight to the idea of profiling and recording individual plots of vines, or climats, in a similar way to the Côte d’Or or Côte Chalonnaise in Burgundy.
Audrey Charton, president of the ODG des Crus du Beaujolais, said that this will be the first step towards asking for recognition of Premier Cru sites in the region, and that the climat list will be submitted for official recognition by French authorities in June 2016.
US police have begun selling off the lavish purchases of imprisoned wine fraudster Rudy Kurniawan in order to help repay millions of dollars that he owes to victims.
Rudy Kurniawan, who made cheap copies of some of the world’s finest and rarest wines in his Los Angeles kitchen, bought a range of luxury items with his profits. Fast cars were a particular penchant for the wine fraudster, also known as Dr Conti for his in-depth knowledge – and subsequent prolific counterfeiting – of Burgundy’s Domaine de la Romanée Conti wine estate.
US marshals will sell off three Kurniawan’s cars at auction on 29 October, including a 2008 Lamborghini Murciélago sports car with only 938 miles on the clock. The other cars to be auctioned, in Rancho Cucamonga, California, are a 2008 Land Rover Range Rover with 36,739 miles and a 2011 Mercedes Benz G-Class SUV with 866 miles on the clock. Prices estimates were not given.
Thousands of bottles of Kurniawan’s wine will also be sold off at a later date, the marshalls said. Those are the wines that were authenticated as genuine in Kurniawan’s cellar.
Winemakers in Priorat are pressuring Catalonia’s government to do more to replenish the Siurana river, claiming its absence has damaged local ecosystems.
Handmade signs dot roadsides in Priorat wine county stating in Catalan, ‘We want the Siurana River alive.’ The Siurana River snakes across Priorat until it reaches a diversion near the village of Poboleda. From this point on the riverbed is dry, because water is piped to the neighboring Baix Camp and stored in the Riudecanyes Resevoir.
It is another example of water politics affecting the wine world. Frustration and increasingly hot vintages have fired up a group of Priorat winemakers to create a new association comprised of members from affected villages.
‘From the 1980s onwards, the river has been dry for the vast majority of the year,’ said Jordi Aixalà, the group’s spokesperson who is also winemaker at his Aixalà Alcait winery and the former mayor of Torroja. ‘This lack of water has heavily increased the overall humidity in Priorat and has been detrimental to curb the rising temperatures in the region overall as we’re lacking this natural climactic regulation.’
