Decanter
Find out what s inside the fresh new look Decanter magazine.
ITALY SPECIAL
Italy at altitude Aldo Fiordelli scales the heights to discover the elegance and freshness of Italy’s ‘highest’ wines
Sting: wines of my life What wine means to the rock star and his wife Trudie, in Tuscany. By Emily O’Hare
Tuscany: the five best vintages for
drinking now With four top wines to try from each year. By Monty Waldin
Soave: my top 20 Time to revisit this Veneto classic, says Richard Baudains
Barbera Juicy, fruity, good with food – what’s not to love about Piedmont’s everyday red, asks Michaela Morris
Decanter How to buy a vineyard
A vineyard of one’s own is every wine lover’s fantasy, but what would it take to actually make it happen? Chris Mercer talks to real estate experts and takes a look at top properties
Bordeaux’s ‘hobby vineyards’
Eagle-eyed entrepreneurs in Bordeaux have seen opportunities to renovate properties with a view to meeting demand for so-called ‘hobby vineyards’, says estate agency VineyardsBordeaux. It’s a loose term, but a hobby vineyard owner probably doesn’t need to make a profit from the grapes or the wine, says Michael Baynes, executive partner and co-founder of Vineyards-Bordeaux, which is affiliated to Christie’s International Real Estate.
About Sauvignon Blanc
A king among white grapes, Sauvignon Blanc features prominently in France’s Loire Valley, where it is the primary white grape used in Sancerre and Pouilly-Fumé. In Bordeaux it is a main grape for dry white-wine production, as well as one of three grapes used to produce the famous
Botrytis cinerea-inflected Sauternes. And in New Zealand, it’s used by winemakers to produce grassy, aromatic white wines.
Sauvignon Blanc grapes are pale green in color which leads to equally light-colored wines. This grape buds late and ripens early, and thrives in climates with consistent sunshine and moderate heat. On the vine, it yields tight bunches of small berries that are highly susceptible to rot. It uniformly prefers cool climates, which temper it from over-ripening and keep its famously bracing acidity in check.
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When frosts arrived in French vineyards the week of April 5, initial reports suggested the entire 2021 vintage would be destroyed. Fortunately, it’s not as bad as that.
Overall, in France, about 30% of the 2021 crop was destroyed, according to still-early government estimates. Smaller but similar hits were reported in Italy, Germany and Spain. It’s possible a second, smaller crop will appear on some French vines, but frost will affect the 2021 and 2022 vintages. Some vines in France hit by frost in 2017 or 2018 were just beginning to recover.
Now, two weeks after the frost, the temperatures are above freezing, and the French government has announced a $1.2 billion emergency assistance program for vineyard and agriculture producers. The 2021 frost has not resulted in the overall crop and vineyard devastation of 1947, 1956, 1991, or even the destruction caused by rolling frosts in 2016, 2017 or 2019.