Belgian Wine Wins Gold in France

It can be feast or famine in the niche that is weekly wine news and this week we had to contend with the former.

Stories that didn't make the cut this weekend include: the inaugural vinyeard marathon in Cahors; minor hail damage in the Loire (specifically around Chinon and southern Saumur); Swiss moves to re-invigorate the wine sector (and make it more sustainable) across the country; and a major new vineyard plantation (46,000 vines) in Baden – not the German region of the same name, but a town in Brittany, in northwestern France – with the aim of producing the first Breton Chardonnay.

It was a tricky selection but here are the gems that made the cut.

Never ones to pass up an opportunity to stick it to their neighbors, a Belgian consumer programme on RTBF (Radio-Télévision Belge de la Communauté Française) decided to take the cheapest (and worst) supermarket wine they could find, slap a fancy label on it, and enter it into wine competition across the border.

The wine in question took out a gold medal at the Gilbert et Gaillard wine competition – making headlines in France's neighbors (both Belgian and Swiss news outlets ran stories on this over seven days) although the stunt has so far only garnered a passing mention on a French radio station.

According to RTBF, a panel at the station organized a tasting of under €3 wines – mostly bottles made from blending wines from across the EU – and selected the worst – an "awful piquette" (piquette here being a French term used for a very poor wine, not the wine style).

"The [original] label was replaced by an attractive label in the colors of the [television] show," said the report. "The wine was renamed Le Château Colombier with the addition of a pretty pigeon."

While the original article in RTBF took pains to slam wine competitions in the UK ("There are Anglo-Saxon competitions that are just intended to make money... It's very expensive to register, postage is very expensive, all to get bogus medals," said Belgian sommelier, Eric Boschman), the show nonetheless decided to enter the wine in a competition nearer to home.

After paying €20 for chemical analysis of the wine (a stipulation of entry – "there, too, it's possible to cheat – you can send in whatever you want") and €50 submission, the wine was entered into the Gilbert et Gaillard competition, chosen because "they give out medals every three months".

The bottle of Le Château Colombier garnered 88 points, a gold medal and received the following tasting note: "Suave, edgy and rich palate with clean, youthful aromas that promise a nice complexity. Very interesting."

The RTBF piece went on to further call into question the nature of wine competitions – bringing up the example of RTBF journalist Sami Hosni who got himself onto a panel in Mâcon "in three clicks" and found himself among "1600 tasters who were not all wine professionals [...] on his table there were only retired amateurs".

It did, however, take a moment to praise the rigor of certain wine contests, namely the Concours Mondial de Bruxelles, on whose panel sits none other than Belgian wine expert and regular RTBF contributor, Eric Boschman.

A man from Brittany in northwestern France has taken out a gold medal for a wine-related gadget at French inventions competition, the Concours Lépine. Tegwen Naveos, who hails from Lorient, took the medal for his Beaucarnea invention which, when placed in the punt of a wine bottle, records the highest and lowest temperature the bottle has recorded throughout its life.

According to reports, the gadget contains no electric components and was designed with, and assembled by, a watchmaker. The two temperature extremes are immediately discernable and, according to Naveos himself, "irreversibly recorded and inviolable".

The gadget, which took a decade to develop, is further likely to have anti-wine fraud applications with an additional feature that the gadget will be in a different color for each successive vintage.

"It's also a way to fight against counterfeits, which are a stain on the wine market, especially on vintages with a lot of fake bottles but also a lot of real bottles with fake contents," he said.

Naveos, who runs online wine merchant website Pur Jus, which specializes in organic and natural wines from his base in Lorient, came upon the idea after on-selling bottles of Château Margaux to a client who proceeded to leave them in a car boot on a warm sunny day.

"I had cold sweats," he said. A patent is pending.

A bottle of celebrated Spanish wine Pingus has found itself at the center of a corruption probe launched by Spanish police into the dealings of the late mayor of Valencia, Rita Barberá.

According to online news outlet El Español, the Guardia Civil's investigation into gifts received by Barberá during her term of office indicates the politician may have overstepped accepted levels of donations. Barberá died in 2016.

It is understood that, between 2004 and 2008, Barberá – a member of the right-wing Partido Popular (PP) – received gifts totalling over €7600 ($8300) from private contractors. These included a Louis Vuitton bag in 2004 and, for Christmas in 2007, a bottle of 2001 Pingus valued at €1520 ($1660)

The donations were uncovered as part of a wider investigation into widespread corruption by members of the Valencia city council belonging to both the Partido Popular and the left-wing Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE).

Barberá's brother-in-law, José María Corbín, is also under investigation after "the Civil Guard discovered that [Corbín and lawyer Diego Elum] received a commission of €1.7 million ($1.85 million) after the award of a contract for sanitation and cleaning of the city's sewers". Barberá is also formally linked to Elum in police documents.

Her brother-in-law, however, may well be counting on the remarkable good luck that seems to follow him around. According to a report in El Español last month, Corbín won state lottery prizes twice in the early 2000s, taking home a total windfall of €420,000 ($460,000) between 2005 and 2007.

This week, drought conditions continue in southern France and central Spain and while, as reported last month, empty winery tanks are being used to stock water for use by firefighters against wildfire, numerous French administrative departments have since declared drought crises. These include the Pyrénées-Orientales (where wildfires have already struck), the Var, the Bouches-du-Rhône and the Gard.

According to the recent decree by the Pyrénées-Orientales department, whose borders encompass the likes of Collioure and Banyuls, Rivesaltes, Maury and the Côtes du Roussillon and Côtes du Roussillon Villages wine regions, the department is seeing "a historical drought situation whose intensity and duration have not been equaled since the beginning of meteorological records (1959) and, most likely, well beyond".

Water bans are currently in place although vineyard irrigation (where possible) is allowed, albeit at reduced levels.

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