Hail in Bordeaux - the video
June 3rd 2009, by GQ
Never mind the recession, the strong euro, the weak pound, increased duty costs and global over-supply of cheap, industrial wine. It’s back to nature, and sometimes nature can be cruel.
Thanks for watching. You can leave a comment here, or join the debate (with scores of comments on this video) over at blog.bauduc.com.
Bordeaux Champions
June 1st 2009, by GQ
A few hours after Chelsea beat Everton 2-1 at Wembley to win the FA Cup, Bordeaux became Champions of the French league on saturday night by winning away at Caen 0-1. Les Girondins pipped Marsailles to the title, and some 80,000 had gathered in front of the big screen in the city centre, in la Place des Quinconces, to witness the thrilling finale.
Bordeaux were last champions in 1999, the year we arrived here. It’s also good to see a direct wine connection, in that the Président, Jean-Louis Triaud, is the owner of two châteaux in Saint-Julien - the little-known, classified growth Château St-Pierre and the unclassified but better known Château Gloria.
The Hand of God
May 13th 2009, by GQ
Clatter, clatter, clatter. The worst sound in the world for a winegrower.
In the middle of the night, at 3.30 in the morning on 13th May, we were battered by a hailstorm. And when violent winds accompany the sound of hail, we know it’s very bad news. Parts of Bordeaux were hit the night before, on Monday 11th, and we’d had a smattering of peanut-sized hail too. Our vineyard manager Daniel joked yesterday that if we’d been included in that storm, with hailstones the size of new potatoes, we should change our métiers, or jobs. I don’t think he was expecting lightning to literally strike twice.
On close inspection first thing this morning, this is by far the worst we’ve seen here. We lost 50% of the crop on 24 June 2003, and last year we had frost in April that wiped out much of our sauvignon blanc.
Robert Parker: ‘This Jihad’, ‘Extremists’ and ‘Blobbers’
April 28th 2009, by GQ
It’s all been going off in wine cyberspace, with the world’s most powerful wine critic, Robert Parker, in a bit of a black hole. Tyler Colman, as reported in his wine blog drvino.com last week, questioned Parker if his team on The Wine Advocate had accepted hospitality from the wine trade. It turns out that they have and, although this is hardly a heinous crime, it conflicts with Parker’s own well publicized, lofty standards.
However, instead of simply putting the record straight and squashing the story, Parker hit out at bloggers and others in the forum on his website, which in turn is controlled with a heavy hand by one of the alleged guilty parties, Mark Squires.