Another beauty has been made here at Château Pontet-Canet in 2016. This is the twelfth vintage that the Pauillac property has used biodynamic practices. Pontet-Canet leads the way in Bordeaux in this vision of a holistic, balanced approach to winegrowing. The results speak for themselves. 2016 was also, remarkably, the fortieth vintage undertaken by Alfred Tesseron. If the renaissance of Pontet-Canet has been his life’s work, it has also been that of his right hand man, the fascinating Jean-Michel Comme. Once again they have harnessed the characteristics of Pontet Canet’s terroir to produce a pure, harmonious Pauillac with the most glorious texture. It represents the entire harvest. No second wine was produced. If you can afford it, buy it.

I’ve a real soft spot for Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars. An eye-opening spell there in the late 80s as a cellar rat was inspirational. The denim-clad, cool-as-hell winemakers swaggered about the stainless steel and the French barriques in their freshly minted wine cellars with an insouciant Californian air that belied their competitive ambition. The place was run with steely determination by founder Warren Winiarski, a political theorist at the University of Chicago, who moved west to become a winemaker in the mid 1960s, establishing the property in 1970. The small boutique winery became synonymous with the seismic Paris tasting of 1976, an event fictionalized in Bottle Shock [starring the late, great Alan Rickman]. The Stag’s Leap 1973 Cabernet Sauvignon, from a vines just three years old, was voted best red by a panel of French judges. In a blind tasting, the wine felled mighty Bordeaux châteaux Haut-Brion, Mouton-Rothschild, Léoville-Las-Cases and Montrose, not to mention domestic competitors Ridge and Heitz. The tasting put Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars and the Napa Valley on the map.

You could be forgiven for feeling something of an underachiever following a trip to HALL, the ambitious state-of-the-art boutique winery on the outskirts of St Helena in California’s Napa Valley. Created in 2002 by serial entrepreneur Craig Hall and his wife Kathryn Walt Hall, the property is founded on the site of the old Napa Valley Co-Op. The centerpiece is a stunning new winery and tasting room, given an almost transparent air with floor to ceiling glass. In contrast, set beside it, is the renovated stone Bergfeld Winery established in 1885. Works of art are dotted about the gardens, including a giant silver rabbit that jumps Watership Down-like, out of the vineyard, as if making a bid for the St Helena Highway out in front.

Robert Mondavi Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon was one of Napa’s foremost wines in the 1970s, as much a product of the effort and genius of Robert Mondavi himself as the famous To Kalon vineyard in Oakville that, by and large, provided the wine’s core of great Cabernet fruit since its inception. Fast-forward forty years since the first Reserve Cab was first released and much, seemingly, has changed.