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The tasting room at Haut-Brion; a sample being poured with the chateau visible through the doorwayWe drove south this morning under pale blue skies that have remained locked over Bordeaux all day. It seems that flights paths bisect one another somewhere over Bordeaux's southern suburbs, for the blu…

Something of the Scottish baronial style about Lascombes; little Scottish about the weather, however: blue skies over Margaux We have just now crawled back into the hotel at the exceedingly welcome end of a predictably tiring day. Our mettle has been tested; our stamina fully explored. We are weary…

Chateau Pontet-Canet floats between gravel drive and sky A pleasant introduction to the qualities of any given vintage is the first day of the en primeur tasting week in Bordeaux. It's a day of reasonably relaxed visits to those chateaux that don't deign to show their wines at the big combined Unio…

The little Dash 8 jolly-plane that had conveyed us from Southampton airport dropped through lumpen, bumpy clouds into Bergerac a little before 5pm yesterday. By the time we had picked up the hire car and driven to St Emilion it had started to rain in earnest. There are many more tastings this year t…

Above a panning shot taken from the ruined castle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, the shaking of the camera not the result of Grenache withdrawal, rather the instability caused to anything larger than a medium-small invertebrate by the mistral, that muscular wind that is funnelled through the narrow g…