With the very hot weather across Europe this week (even in the 30s in the UK) there follows the inevitable storms from as far apart as Domaine de Lauroux in Gascony in the deep Southwest to Champagne in the north east.
I continue to find Benoit Tarlant's video blog at Champagne Tarlant most entertaining and informative - and this week you can feel for him as he watches a torrential hail storm devastate his vines. It's in French, but you don't need to be a linguist to understand his anguish at watching the torrential rain wash away soil into treacherous muddy slurry, and then to see the resultant damage which the hail does to the vines, slicing through leaves and berries.
In the UK the wines of Champagne Tarlant are stocked by Verbeer Manor in Sussex.
According to www.spittoon.biz a storm of a different kind has afflicted the major Beaujolais producer, Georges Duboeuf. The self-styled "King of the Beaujolais" and supreme marketeer has been found guilty of fraud for "fiddling the country's strict grading and labelling system and mixing cheap, average and high-quality grapes from different vineyards to conceal a bad harvest in 2004". Not really the sort of publicity that Beaujolais needs, as its reputation has declined over recent years, largely due to the over-priced, over-hyped and often undrinkable Beaujolais Nouveau - it is not proper or even decent wine most of the time and was invented to improve the cashflow of greedy winemakers and negociants. This silly marketing gimmick obscures the fact that as well as nice juicy, jammy reds Beaujolais does also produce some really serious Gamay wines such as Chénas AC which deserve more attention. Personal favourites are the wines from Paul Beaudet and Pierre Ferraud. In the UK, www.nickdobsonwines.co.uk stocks an interesting and comprehensive range of Beaujolais and Maconnais wines.
