If there was one good news about the benefit for Alsace of the recent NATO summit in Strasbourg, it is that Americans will at last know that Strasbourg is in... France. We were of course delighted when we heard that one of our wines, our Pinot Gris Tradition 2005 had been chosen for the Friday night gala dinner prepared by Strasbourg's most celebrated chef Emile Jung of Crocodile restaurant

As husbands and wives did not dine at the same table that night nor did they have the same beverage selection (oh... la la !) until the following day we were not sure if our wine had been served to Barack and Nicolas or at Michelle and Carla's party. Knowing the popularity and personality of the first ladies, we are pleased to report that our wine was enjoyed at Michelle and Carla's dinner and from what we heard through the grapevine, they had lots of fun ;-) Thank you Emile for your nice words in the menu you sent us. Perhaps our French President should take lessons on that from his Italian born wife !

Having heard the news on the occasion of a visit to Japan, walking in front of a local hotel doing a promotion for US beef with the poster of President Obama, I could not resist taking this picture... Yes, we can ! 

Interesting recent article on the carbon footprint of DIAM cork.

After almost ten years of intensive internal research for alternative methods of closure, we have decided to use "DIAM" corks of the brand Oeneo-Bouchage for an important part of our Classic range of wines of the 2006 vintage and for the whole of the 2007's. This decision comes after the successful test we carried out with this closure on 375ml size bottles in the year 2004 and on a fraction of wines of the 2005 vintage. From vintage 2008 on, we will start using DIAM in its latest presentation.  

We have always observed - and this phenomenon is widely known in our profession as one of our main quality issue - that a fraction of the wines sealed with natural cork suffer from what is generally called "cork taint". In fact, this phenomenon seems to have become more marked in recent years, and so in 1998 we began to seriously investigate ways of overcoming the problem.

We studied and experimented with every different type of "cork" that existed on the market (agglomerated, treated, synthetic, 1 + 1 (composite), and screw-caps. For technical questions, the screw-caps is not suited to our way of working because all our wines are palletized or stored on bins, bottles unlabelled, before their labelling at times of shipping. The binning of bottles with these screw-caps closures poses potential problems of leaking on such bottles.

After countless tests conducted with great rigour by Marc Hugel as well as a recent 4 days visit of their premisses in Spain we have finally selected DIAM, manufactured by Oeneo-Bouchage.