Hermann J Wiemer, the producer who symbolised the rise to prominence of New York State Riesling, has sold his estate to his winemaker. The Mosel-born Wiemer, 65, turned the property on Seneca Lake in the Finger Lakes district over to 29 year-old Frederick T Merwarth.

In acquiring the Hermann J Wiemer Vineyard, Merwarth obtained a 15,000-case boutique operation with 26ha under vine. The purchase price was not disclosed.

The German wine region of Mosel-Saar-Ruwer has officially changed its name to Mosel in a bid to become more consumer friendly. The new name became official on 1 August and will apply to all wines starting with the 2007 vintage.

The Mosel-Saar-Ruwer growers' organisation won approval on 9 August 2006 for the name change to go ahead. It is now official.

Singaporeans consumed about S$153.4 million worth of wines last year a 24 percent increase from the previous year.And making the most inroads in the market are Italian wines.

A bottle of wine that comes with a 24-carat gold label and a price tag of S$2,300 has not deterred a small number of buyers in Singapore. In the past year, the number of Singaporeans buying such luxury wines shot up by 200 percent.
Some of them even have a special vault in the wine-producing regions of Tuscany to store their pricey collection.

Building a wine cellar in France can take an entire lifetime. In London, merchants are offering clients a simple service - they select the wines, buy them and keep them in climate-controlled storerooms.

In an example of "les anglo-saxons" giving a market-friendly twist to an age-old Gallic tradition, firms charge a minimum of 100 pounds a month to put together a full-blown cellar, with no effort required from the customer.
Others offer a pre-selected collection of six cases of wine well-suited to ageing: mostly Bordeaux, either entirely red, or a combination of red and white.

In what scientists are hailing as the greatest breakthrough in a generation, Australian researchers have identified the aromatic compound that produces the black pepper smell in red wine.

Boffins at the Australian Research Institute spent eight years trying to find the compound, dubbed Rotundone, which was discovered last year, but kept secret while patents were secured.
The black pepper aroma is typical of many top-end Australian Shiraz wines.

Chateau de Marmorieres in La Clape has become the latest victim of major fraud, with the theft of 18,000 bottles worth €50,000.

The Languedoc-Roussillon chateau received an order from someone identifying himself as Dee James, the wine buyer for Maxwell's Restaurants in London. The caller gave a delivery address on Tottenham High Road, in North London.

After the French government scrapped the 2003 revision of the Médoc's Cru Bourgeois classification this past June, area wine producers are proposing the creation of a label displaying the term Label Cru Bourgeois to replace the classification in the meantime.

During a specially convened general assembly on July 24, nearly all 230 members of L'Alliance des Crus Bourgeois du Médoc, the wine trade organization uniting most of the growers using the designation, voted in favor of the project.

The federal government put forth last week two proposals that, if passed, would require all alcoholic beverages sold in the United States to carry alcohol content statements and serving-facts panels on their labels.

According to a statement issued by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (a division of the Department of the Treasury), under the proposed amendments to existing regulations, winemakers, beer brewers and spirits distillers would be legally obligated to provide information about calorie content, carbohydrates, fats and proteins in their products.

Surely every wine lover knows the feeling by now. You sit down to dinner with that special bottle you've been saving. You take your first sniff and sip of the wine, and your worst fear comes true: It's a corky bottle, marred by the dull, musty aroma caused by 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA) taint.

But what if you could know that a bottle was corky before you opened it, and could save yourself from both the mental anguish and financial loss of a bad bottle of wine?