60 to 90 millimeters of rain fell on Bordeaux in the last week of August 2025, rewriting a vintage critics had already written off. The wines came out saline and chalky — what Cheval Blanc’s Pierre-Olivier Clouet called “2010 without the alcohol.” James Suckling places the best 2025s at the level of 2019 and 2016. The May–June 2026 campaign that releases them is the one that decides whether En Primeur survives 2024’s collapse.
Bordeaux
A 15% tariff compounds at every tier of distribution. TERROIR examines how wine tariffs are reshaping prices, consumer habits, and the wines themselves.
The first time a wine chemist isolated the molecule responsible for the green-pepper aroma in Cabernet Franc, the gas chromatograph…
A small cellar in the middle of red-wine fermentation, two open-top fermenters side by side, both filled with the same…
Put two scoresheets side by side on the same desk. On the left, a tasting card with a row of…
On a morning in early 1961, somebody at the Institut National des Appellations d’Origine opened a copy of Sud Ouest…
A host pours a magnum of Champagne into a wide-bellied crystal decanter and sets it on the table to “let…
On January 11, 2024, Karen MacNeil published a short dispatch on WineSpeed under a deliberately flat headline: Bye Bye Big…
The ribeye arrives well-marbled and rested, and the diner who has read enough to know better than to default to…
