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Garage Chateaux, small producers of great wines

London Cru has put the spotlight on a new trend, the urban wineries – garage wineries with small artisanal productions of excellent wines

Read for you by Donatella Cinelli Colombini

Forget about the granddads vinifying their friends’ grapes in demijohns. Here we are not talking about simple every day wines for families. The garage winery is the place where great wine lover’s dreams come true: this is a person who spends whole nights on wine blogs, who travels hundreds of miles to take part in exclusive wine tastings, who as a present requests a bottle of Petrus for their 40th birthday and puts their snap taken at Romanée Conti on their home page. In other words one who wishes to make the perfect wine with his own hands but cannot buy a winery worth 10 million euro.

So that is why our wine lover builds his cellar beneath his home, and fills it with

all the best apparatus: he buys excellent grapes, one or two egg shaped cuvee (decidedly up-to-the-minute) for vinifying, and the barriques or tonneaux of the best brands for the ageing… maybe a pump, but nothing more….a small amount of technology and a lot of manual skills required. The results are often very good and allow our amateur wine maker to give 800 bottles of his wine to his friends.

What is sustainable wine?

The sustainable wine objective must be reached soon and is environmental, social and economic. It is complex and spans from biodiversity to the correct use of resources.

Read for you by Donatella Cinelli Colombini

<<Wine can become a new frontier for sustainability because the consumers ask us for this and our sense of responsibility towards the younger generations>> says Domenico Zonin President of the Unione Italiana Vini. But what is a sustainable vineyard like? The reply given by the legislators and more importantly by the scientific world are vague, and unfortunately as often happens, delayed. What emerges from the last SIMEI in Milan, where the subject of sustainability had an important role, is that the reduction of phytochemicals is essential but not sufficient. The objective of making all, or most of , the wine production sustainable requires also its being shared by the commercial network. In other words the increase in costs and the reduction in yield has an impact on prices of the wines , and there is a need for specialized stores such as the American BEVmax or Whole foods. A real paladin for wine making sustainability is Ettore Capri, Farming chemistry professor at the Università di Piacenza and guiding the VIVA Sustainable Wine <<the

consumers ask for sustainable products which testify respect, for example, regarding child labour, the workers health and of everyone else , of the local economy and of the traditions>> (Corriere Vinicolo 2013 n°46)
With such an interdisciplinary subject there are many many contributions but unfortunately they progress with no coordination: Julien Blanc with the Carbon4 and the calculation of the emissions, Joel Rochard pinpoints water and biodiversity, Lucrezia Lamastra criticizes the indicators in use in viticulture, VIVA starts off from air, water, Vineyard and territory to define le good practices with particular attention to farming chemicals..

Screw cap .Gianluca Morino interviewed for you

Screw caps in wine bottles: for many in Italy this is still taboo. Gianluca Morino, producer from Nizza Monferrato, has been interviewed and he has a different opinion.

Seen for you by Bonella Ciacci

I discover by chance, after following him on Twitter and Facebook, that Gianluca Morino, wine producer from Castel Boglione (AT), 43 years old, with a passion for Barbera and Brachetto, is a convinced sustainers of screw caps or Stelvin, and he uses them. As I come from an area in Tuscany where great wines are made such as Brunello di Montalcino and Vino Nobile di Montepulciano, where just pronouncing the name of this bottles closure is heresy, I get curious, and from this curiosity comes my interview for the producer from Piemonte, another land of great Italian red wines, who challenges tradition.
Gianluca Morino is president of the Associazione Produttori della Barbera d’Asti superiore Nizza. He is an impassioned innovator, he believes in the importance of all that is digital for the economic development of farming estates; he divulges values and beauty of his territory, with the help of the web he is getting wine lovers, journalists and importers from al lover the world to get to know Barbera and Nizza, In 2011 he created #barbera2; in 2013 he created the round table #digitalbarbera.

Bonella Ciacci – In the world of wine producers you are an innovator, you have changed the way wine and a winery are talked about, and even regarding the subject of corks, you seem

to be in step with times. When did you begin to use screw caps?
Gianluca Morino – I have always believed strongly that wine needs to conquer the position that is its due. And to do this thee is a need for innovation in communication to invert the route. I began using the screw cap 2 years ago for a range of three red wines called Vera, in honour of my daughter Veronica. A Dolcetto, a Merlot and a Barbera vinified in steel to exalt the fruit and drinkability that I wish to prepare for the tables of my consumers. It’s for this reason that I have chosen the screw cap, to be sure to have well safe all the work and all the investments that go into producing a wine.
It is not possible to imagine the rotation of a bottle of wine and for how long the consumer will keep it in his cellar before drinking it. In this aspect I am more than sure, because I am firmly convinced that the screw cap is perfect also for wines that must age in the bottle.

Live one year longer drinking a glass of red wine per day

The 2013 list of best wine brands around the world

Pavie,  Angelus, Pétrus, this is the world podium of wineries with the best commercial performances in 2013 according to Liv Ex

Read for you by Donatella Cinelli Colombini

This is the wine market for luxury bottles, the Liv Ex pare web site resembles that of a stock Exchange broker where at the top runs a script with the bottle quotations, dream bottles as if they were holdings. Fantastic! You see move across the screen Petrus 2009 at 12.343£, Lautor 2000 at 7.050, Margaux 1996 at 4.150 and Sassicaia 2010 at a modest 1.033 Pounds…basically supermarket prices!
As they do every year Liv Ex Power 100 proposes the list of the strongest brands, those that get greatest ratings that increase in price and in value in the most breathtaking way. An Olympus dominated by wines from Bordeaux where the first Italian is Masseto in 33rd position. This year the calculating system for the list changed and it has favoured the “second row” wines bringing up top Pavie, in second position Angelus and only in third Pétrus. 9 wineries from Bordeaux in the first 9 positions followed by the Australian Penfolds and Chapoutier from the Cotes du Rhone.

The 10 trends in 2014 regarding wine according to The Drinks Business

Millennials, wines from new territories, environmentalism, Chardonnay, direct line between producers and consumers, wine bloggers …this is 2014 seen from the UK

Read for you by Donatella Cinelli Colombini

On line The Drink Business is one of the best observations points for wine in the whole world: it supplies lists of all kinds, it has an immense database, it collects opinions, it awards prizes. Her you can find some of the most diverse things from the anti-Putin beer because of the law regarding homosexuality, to the news of a winery in New Zealand called Villa Maria buying new vineyards.
It has a daily newsletter which reaches 20.000 professional readers all over the world and a web site with1,2 million unique visitors per year. In other words without doubt they are opinion makers to be listened too carefully.
For this the 10 trends in the wine world for 2014 indicated by The Drinks Business must be considered not just regarding the UK but as global phenomena.

1. Discovering new wine regions around the world. The important brands will always be strongest but the desire for new wines increases, from area such as Hungary, Turkey or Basilicata.
2. The Millennials are tend-setters in the world of wine. A new way of consuming wine which unites conviviality to the discovery of a culture of the nation which produces that wine.
3. No more excess productions. There will be a substantial equilibrium between supply and demand, where the European nations will see consumption decreasing while in USA, China and in other great nations that are discovering wine the consumption will increase.