The winery that collaborates with authors & the official wine partner of the NBA!
🗞️ HEADLINES
🏀⛹🏻♀️ Kendall-Jackson has struck a deal with the National Basketball Association (NBA) to become the league’s first official wine partner. The partnership aims to bring fine wine to the forefront of NBA events.

🇦🇺 Australia welcomes removal of Chinese wine tariffs (of up to 218.4%!). Before the tariffs, China was Australia’s largest wine export market with a 14% tariff advantage over other nations.
👍 Fine wine market shows signs of recovery after a year of consistent declines. The industry benchmark, the Liv-ex 100 index, has been in freefall since March 2023. However, recent data shows that in February, the Champagne 50 index rose for the first time in 18 months, whilst the Italy 100 index rose in December last year, and again in February.
BUSINESS
Marketing via literature
Did you know that legendary Tuscan wine estate, Biondi-Santi, collaborates with renowned authors to help market their wines?
Joanne Harris, author of Chocolat, recently participated in a special event in London, celebrating Biondi-Santi’s release of Brunello di Montalcino 2018.
Authors like Harris, create downloadable works which are accessible via QR codes on the wine labels.
The brief for Harris was to write something based on the theme of respect. She has written a series of stories called La Voce which, over time, is intended to build up into a library that “tells the tale of the estate and its evolution over time.”

NEW RELEASE
If you haven’t heard it already, La Grande Année 2015 has landed
Last week, Champagne Bollinger launched the eagerly anticipated 2015 vintage of La Grande Année. For the release in London, guests were served an alfresco dinner in a woodland setting to evoke the theme of the forest, reflecting the Bollinger family’s forest in Cuis which provides the wood for their barrels.
The wine is entirely vinified in small oak barrels and each bottle is riddled and disgorged by hand - how tedious!
CLIMATE
Doom and gloom
Decanter reports on what will happen to the world’s wine-producing countries, if global temperatures increase beyond 2°C.
Average global temperatures were 1.52°C above the pre-Industrial Revolution era in the 12 months to January 2024, according to EU data. This led to searing heatwaves and drought which had a major impact upon wine production, as yields fell to their lowest since 1961.
Six researchers from the University of Bordeaux and one from the University of Burgundy analysed the potential impacts of rising temperatures. They estimate that up to 70% of the world’s wine producing regions could become unsuitable for grape growing, including large swathes of California, Spain, Italy, France and Greece, if temperatures increase beyond 2°C.
That’s it for this week :)