A Game of Rhônes – Act Five: The Poor in Spirit
Health is the greatest of gifts, contentedness the best riches; trust is the best of relationships, Nirvana the highest happiness.
—The Dhammapada, verse 204 (trans....
A Game of Rhônes – Act Four: Letters to the Dead
…though at first it is very bitter to the taste, it afterwards becomes sweet as it ripens.
—Cicero on the grape, On Old Age (trans....
A Game of Rhônes – Act Three: The Pope's New Castle
Tranquility, wherein peoples prosper and the welfare of nations is preserved, must certainly be desirable to every state.
—Cassiodorus, quoted at the opening of Marsilius...
The Lafons in the Mâconnais
The name Lafon comes with its own arithmetic. A bottle of Domaine des Comtes Lafon Meursault Perrières is allocated by the case, priced for collectors and rarely opened young. The...
Drinking the Stars
There is now an official ‘Day’ for just about anything conceivable. Champagne, the drink applied liberally to everything else worth celebrating, surely deserves a day of its own.
Californian wine blogger Chris Oggenfuss...
Hippolyte’s Hectare -- Vieux Télégraphe
Darren Gall · 19 October 2026
High Ground
La Crau does not look like promising land. The plateau stands at about 130 metres on the south-eastern edge of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, where the communes...
Domaine Robert Groffier Père & Fils
Darren Gall · Vindochine
There is a small Burgundian irony in Morey-Saint-Denis. The Groffier cellars sit in the middle of the village, next door to Clos de Tart, yet the...
The Code and the Côte
How Napoleon’s Civil Code shaped Burgundy's vineyards, and how one family in Vosne-Romanée has lived with it for almost two centuries.
Alphonse Gros was born in 1804 in Chaux, a...
