My name on the label is a guarantee of irreproachable quality, recognized around the world.
André Lurton

Immodest?  Moi?  But the maddening thing is, he’s right. Lurton is one of the big names of Bordeaux, and his wines are excellent.

The family’s empire began with François Lurton’s Château Bonnet.  In the 1920s François added the Margaux property Château Brane Cantenac. Then, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, his sons André and Lucien bought up many more vineyards, so that André himself now owns eleven châteaux in Bordeaux and his wider family owns properties in Languedoc, Corbieres, Spain, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay.  Family members also consult for two dozen other firms all over the world.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here is an idea for a parlour game. Each player must try to name the United States’ most unpleasant export. Chewing gum? Political correctness?  Agent Orange?  Nuclear bombs? With so many delights to choose from, hours of fun are guaranteed.

My own nominee would be the Phylloxera aphid. This vicious little American pest feeds on the roots of vines and quickly destroys them.  During the 1860s and 70s it ravaged Europe’s vineyards and almost wiped out the entire continent’s production.  The only vines that could resist its attentions were those native to North America.  But American grapes produced an inferior, nasty-smelling drink of no imaginable interest to wine lovers.  What was to be done? Read the rest of this entry »

Noah, the tiller of the soil, was the first to plant a vineyard. He drank of the wine and became drunk, and he uncovered himself within the tent.
Genesis 9:20-21

So the first man to grow wine was also the first flasher. Best not to linger on this unhappy coincidence; of greater interest to me is where Noah is alleged to have carried out his planting, drinking, etc.: the southern Tigris-Euphrates valley, in what is now eastern Turkey.

The Bible may well have got it right.  According to the experts, Turkey competes with Georgia as the most likely birthplace of wine. The country boasts over a thousand varieties of vine, and it was a vigorous winemaking nation from earliest antiquity until the 10th century AD, when Islam arrived.  Thereafter, Turkey and wine had very little to do with one another.  Read the rest of this entry »