By JANE ANSON

As has been widely reported, Château Mouton Rothschild last week confirmed that its wine label for the 2008 vintage has been produced by a Chinese artist — namely Xu Lei, artistic director of Today Art Museum, Beijing’s leading contemporary art gallery, and a graduate from the prestigious Nanjing Academy of Fine Arts.

I wrote the story for DECANTER magazine but thought I would go into a little more detail about how the artists are selected, and why Mouton is very much not jumping on the ‘must get to China’ bandwagon’. Read More

By JANE ANSON

I was enormously lucky over the past two days to attend two of the sessions from the Masters of Wine Symposium, which has been held in Bordeaux since Thursday. Even my brief visits have shown just what a fantastic event it has been, and I am looking forward to being able to view the videos of all the panel discussions of the www.mwsymposium.com website in two weeks.
Read more

By JANE ANSON

Last week at Vinexpo Hong Kong was exhausting, excellent and illuminating.

It was the fourth time that Vinexpo Asia-Pacific had taken place in Hong Kong, and received nearly 900 exhibitors from over 32 countries (with no doubt that France was the major presence, and Bordeaux the majority of that). Around 12,000 people visited the wine fair over three days, an increase of around 40% since Vinexpo Hong Kong 2008. Of the visitors, 42% of the visitors were from Hong Kong and Macao, 58% from the rest of Asia, primarily China, then Taiwan, Japan, Korea and Singapore. Read More

By JANE ANSON

Very interesting visit yesterday to Direct Wine‘s new cellars in Castillon-la-Bataille, a pretty town along the Dordogne river, not far from Tony Laithwaite’s own property, Château Clarière-Laithwaite, in AOC « Castillon-Côtes de Bordeaux ».

Reflecting its location, this is called Le Chai au Quai (the winery on the river), and is due to fully open in early June, when it will become a great wine tourist destination for the region (and a good addition to his nearby restaurant, Le Comptoir de Gênes, which I wrote about a few weeks ago). Read More

By JANE ANSON

This got a good response on Twitter this morning (and it is Earth Day after all! ), so I thought I’d put a more in-depth account of the new initiative here.

Launched by the Saint-Émilion tourist board, a new wine tourism circuit starts today that allows visitors to get to know more about Saint-Émilion’s bio-diversity project, and to meet winemakers who are specifically working with organic or biodynamic agriculture. Read More

By JANE ANSON
Many congratulations to Wink Lorch, publisher of Wine Travel Guides, that was today named Website of the Week in the Daily Mail, by journalist Fred Mawer.

He says: ‘I reckon the guides are as authoritative and detailed as anything you’re likely to find on the web.
I had a good browse of the guide to St-Émilion in the Bordeaux region, and it’s packed with brilliant information.
It picks out local producers that I could visit, giving contact details, cost of tastings, what their wine is like, and the general ambiance of the chateaus’.Read more

By JANE ANSON

WANT TO SELL YOUR WINE IN NEW YORK?
The week of meetings ended yesterday with a great tasting and dinner at the Roger Smith Hotel on Lexington, where we had a mix of journalists through the Wine Media Guild and some really great consumers through the site Cork’d (owned by Gary Vaynerchuk, a kind of Facebook of wine). They should be reviewing the wines on the site over the next few days.
The last wine trade meeting of the week had been with Millesima USA, a retail store that is part of the Millésima wine merchant business in Bordeaux itself. Millésima is the only licensed retail outlet of a French wine company in the US, and has a great range of both Bordeaux and non-Bordeaux wines, located on the Upper East Side. The director over here is Roger Bomrich, one of the first masters of wine in the US. I’m going to repeat here pretty much in full what he said, because it was just so interesting and helpful for the winemakers, and gave a great overview of the routes into the US. Read More