LONDON (Reuters Life!) - The luxurious bubbles that pop up and tickle the nose of a champagne drinker release explosions of flavor and not just fizz, scientists said on Monday. French and German researchers analyzed the bubbles in a glass of champagne and discovered that chemical eruptions in them release flavor from tiny aerosols packed with aromatic molecules that hover above ...

In the cobblestone square of Bages, a tiny village in the Medoc wine country, a dozen influential Bordeaux vintners dressed in flowing red robes gathered for an unlikely event. The vintners from southwest France were about to induct two Japanese comic book authors into their exclusive wine brotherhood, the Commanderie du Bontemps. Yuko and Shin Kibayashi, a fashionable sister-brother duo ...

French wine lovers are rushing to big supermarkets this week to replenish their cellars during the annual wine sales, unleashing a shopping spree that celebrates France's love affair with the vine. France comes alive as a wine powerhouse during the next four weeks as legions of consumers manoeuvre their shopping carts through crates of Bordeaux and Bourgognes in search ...

As the world grits its teeth and grabs another glass of something to chase the blues away, South American wine producers are contentedly watching exports bounce. International wine sales from places like Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Peru are up in the first quarter of 2009, and industry professionals are saying the crisis has been positive for them. "For Argentina it¹s ...

PARIS (Reuters Life!) - Burgundy wines, hit by a fall in U.S. and British demand suffered a 30 percent drop in first-quarter exports and a "more difficult" year ahead is expected to lead to price cuts for the region's finest vintages. Increased volumes in 2009 compared to the relatively poor harvest of 2008 which helped producers maintain prices, combined ...

As wallets grew thinner around the world, fans of Bordeaux, Burgundy and Champagne cut back heavily on their purchases of French wine in 2008, according to French government statistics released Tuesday. French households drank almost 10 percent less wine last year than in 2007, and exports by French ...

LONDON (Reuters Life!) - Producers from the world's biggest wine region are on a mission to tell the world about a renaissance in the south of France whose time may have come on the wings of a global depression. Some 25,000 producers, 270 wine cooperatives and 3,000 businesses across a vast arc of France's Mediterranean coast from ...

PARIS (Reuters) - For her cultural project on France, British student Alice Williams had planned to take advantage of being based in Bordeaux to work on wine, but that was before she gained expertise in a different subject: protest. Williams was one of thousands of foreign students caught up in strikes and demonstrations over government reforms that have paralyzed dozens of ...

LONDON (Reuters Life!) - France topped the list of gold medal winners at the 26th International Wine Challenge (IWC) unveiled at the London International Wine Fair this week. France won 49 gold medals, closely followed by Australia with 43 golds and Portugal with 36 golds in a competition of wines from 41 countries across the globe that were tasted by panels ...