The Week in Wine Episode 28

Don enjoys wine as beverage this weekend while Olly has a Langhe bianco that was delicious, but from an unusual combination of grapes. The Most-Wanted Chardonnays tops the readers' favourite articles this week with Don also enjoying a story about how wine is helping the US on the global diplomacy front. Olly talks about his article in which he asks if certain aspects of winemaking in the former USSR (and Warsaw Pact countries) was bad, are those same aspects of winemaking bad today? The weekly wine news rundown includes Henkell-Freixenet taking over Freixenet; labor exploitation ruling in Champagne; a huge fraud swoop in Italy which nabs 2.5 million liters of fraudulently labeled wine; French soccer star Kylian Mbappé is accused of having a glass of wine in Paris while his teammates lose at home in Madrid; the wines of the Cru Bourgeois get a new anti-fraud back-label and Zuccardi inaugurates a new natural wine winery. Don looks forward to a most-wanted article on Absinthe and (impatiently) waits for a new piece on winegrowing from the Rhône Ranger himself: Randall Grahm.