What a week. News filtered through that The Wine Advocate (now part of the Michelin Group) had branched out and produced a special report on Mezcal, Sicilian wine pioneer Lucio Tasca d'Almerita died and Ribera del Duero celebrated its 40th birthday (on 23 July, if you want to mark your calendar).

In other news, the Castilla La Mancha region of Mondéjar approved the addition of Airén to its list of permitted grapes (it joins the likes of Malvar, Macabeo, Torrontés, Sauvignon Blanc, Moscatel de Grano Menudo and Verdejo in the white grape category of the region).

Meanwhile, the week-long Foire aux Vins d'Alsace wine fair comes to an end this weekend, having given regional journalists a range of topics to cover over the last ten days, from the 10-year anniversary performance of burlesque troupe Pin-Up d'Alsace to natural wines from their region getting their own stand. Local publication L'Alsace asked the sensible question for wine fair attendees: “is it possible to eat healthily at the Foire aux Vins”?

Here, though, are some of the stories you might have missed this week:

Clive Coates MW, one of the great authorities on Burgundy, producing several books on the region as well as the wines of Bordeaux and wider France, has died aged 81.

Initially enrolled at Westminster Hotel School with the ambition of becoming a chef, the younger Coates was "rapidly disillusioned" by his chosen profession and moved sideways into the wine trade. Following a five-month stint as an intern at Bordeaux négoce house Calvet he returned to London and began working at a fine wine merchant's store.

He worked for The Wine Society from 1967 to 1973 and in that time, studied and passed the Master of Wine (MW) exam, becoming an MW in 1971. He joined British Transport Hotels (the wide-ranging hotel and hospitality arm of the nationalised British Rail network) as the head of its wine division in 1975 and stayed for six years.

In the mid-1980s he established the independent wine publication The Vine which he continued to produce (through paper and digital iterations) for over 30 years. He eventually settled in the village of Saint-Bonnet-de-Vieille-Vigne, just west of the Mâconnais, and became something of a guru on the wines of Burgundy.

He explored the wines of France widely, however, and was a pioneer in bringing many regional wines to the attention of the British public in the 70s and 80s.

"In 1971, to take Cahors as an example, the price of one bottle of champagne would buy you all the Cahors, in bottle or in halves, that they had on the entire wine list," he said in an interview published on his website. "So these investigations didn't have to cost the earth. One took one's notes, shared the bottles with the proprietor and his friends at the end of the meal, listened to the gossip about all the wine-makers in question, and then sallied forth the next morning to visit the best. Finding good value in the backwoods of France fascinated me. I enjoyed the challenge." 

Coates was a prolific, but succinct, writer almost throughout his career. His first article was published in 1967 and he continued to write on wine until 2021.

According to fellow Burgundy writer Remington Norman, Coates "died peacefully in hospital in Lyon on Monday after a long illness".

Six major figures at a Catalan wine producer accused of mass fraud across multiple DOs, including Priorat, have been summoned to testify at the Reus district court in Tarragona on 21 and 22 September, it was announced this week. The Les Borges del Camp-based Grupo Reserva de la Tierra, is suspected of passing off around 15 million falsely labeled bottles of wine annually, making profits of over €14 million annually from the scam between 2019 and 2021.

The scale of the fraud is vast. In all, the group is believed to have passed off around 40 million bottles of basic table wine as wines from Priorat, Montsant, Terra Alta, Tarragona and Catalunya. Although the case came to light in 2021, more details have since surfaced.

According to news agency Europe Press, the counterfeit bottles of Tarragona wine alone outnumber the entire regional production by almost three to one. For Priorat, the fraudulent bottles amounted to nearly half of the region's output.

As part of the investigation, the police also uncovered 81,000 counterfeit Denominacion d'Origen stamps (the rectangular label found at the bottom of Spanish wine bottles certifying their regional provenance). These had been ordered from a sticker printing company (Adhesivos Orcajada SA) in Murcia.

False accolades (wine ratings and medals) and aging mentions also featured on some bottles. According to national broadsheet El País, the fraudulent bottles were distributed throughout Europe and exported to the US and China.

"The Mossos [national investigation] have calculated that the income that Reserva de la Tierra obtained from the sale of these fraudulent wines could be €20 million a year, but the economic damage caused to the buyers of these millions of bottles can never be calculated," said the prosecutor.

According to the police (as reported in Decanter.com), affected wine labels include (but are likely not limited to): Heredad Mestral, Vega Escal, Clos Roja and Vinya Carles (Priorat); Heredad Centum (Montsant); and Vespral, Armonico and Grafico (Terra Alta).

Following their heroic efforts fighting the forest fires that swept through over 20,000 hectares of land and forestry just southwest of Bordeaux town, the 1200 firefighters who came from across France to tackle the blazes are set to receive a local gift in the form of wine.

The major agricultural unions of the region, the FDSEA (the Deparmental Agricultural Union) and Jeunes Agriculteurs (Young Farmers), announced on Tuesday that they would coordinate the distribution of the wine as a "thank you in solidarity".

According to regional news outlet FranceBleu, "the FDSEA and the JA33 want to 'show support' to the 1200 firefighters from 60 departments by allowing them to taste 'good bottles of Bordeaux wines, as a family or as a team'". 

For its part, the regional wine trade body, the CIVB (Conseil Interprofessionel des Vins de Bordeaux), has teamed up with the local rugby club, Bordeaux-Bègles, and is offering to foot the bill for up to 1000 seats for local firefighters to attend the first Top 14 (France's annual rugby union club competition) match of the season against Toulouse, on Sunday 4 September.

A Chilean truck driver has been accused of theft after the container he was transporting on behalf of a winery arrived at the port of San Antonio minus over half of its original cargo. According to local newspaper El Lider de San Antonio, suspicions were raised after the driver arrived five and a half hours later than the scheduled arrival time.

Precisely what route the truck took remains unknown but, when the container's weight was checked against the manifest, there was clearly a discrepancy. Of an initial load of 20 pallets of wine boxes, only eight pallets were found to be in the container at the port.

The missing wine totals 1008 cases (12 pallets each with 84 boxes of wine) across a range of quality and value. In all, the disappearance represents a loss of 19 million pesos.

While no further light has been shed on where the driver went in the missing five and a half hours, a further layer of mystery was added to the affair by the official complaint lodged by the unknown winery. "Twelve pallets had been appropriated with 84 boxes of export wine each, in such a manner that all the security seals on the container were intact at the time of its opening," detailed the complaint.

We often see a sudden spike in interest in less well-known wines at Wine-Searcher.com and this week, our team noticed that a certain Château de Cayx was getting a lot of interest from users. The impressive Cahors estate is the summer residence of the Danish royal family and while, inevitably, the building and grounds are "too beautiful for words" (according to Hello! magazine, which profiled the building and gardens two years ago), this did not explain the sudden run of searches we were seeing.

It appears two events coincided last weekend, highlighting the estate and its wines. Firstly, recently single (according to royal gossip columnists) Euro-royal heartthrob Prince Felix of Denmark celebrated his 20th birthday with family at the property last Friday (22 July). Cue a round of official and candid pictures on social media platforms.

Secondly, Felix's dad Prince Joachim (who would later be at the Champs-Élysées to congratulate Danish cyclist Jonas Vingegaard on winning the Tour de France) appeared in Cahors town to congratulate Vingegaard on retaining his yellow jersey (the top worn by the overall leader of the month-long race).

It was here that, according to Danish publication Se og Hør, nine bottles of Château de Cayx were presented to the rider. 

"It was an English journalist who gave me red wines from the château that Prince Joachim has," Vingegaard told Danish television channel TV2. "It's supposed to be their best red wine [...] I think that is a great gift."

The estate produces a range of reasonably priced, predominantly red wines based on the local mainstay, Malbec.

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