From his 2020, 2021 and 2022 harvests, a winegrower in the Hérault, in the Languedoc, kept about 680 hectoliters of wine out of sight of the bodies that inspect appellation wines. He moved it to a trading company he also owned, and a middleman from the trade found buyers among established négociants, who bought it as Châteauneuf-du-Pape. According to the gendarmerie, it sold for 14 times what it was worth.

That is about 90,000 bottles' worth. He spent most of the money on himself: a high-end car, a competition show-jumping horse and, in the investigators' words, a particularly lavish way of life. They have now seized more than €1.8 million, including a chalet in Megève valued at about €1.6 million and over €220,000 in investments.

Gendarmes from Pézenas and the wine and spirits investigators of the regional economy office arrested him in March. He admitted everything, the gendarmerie says, while the middleman played down his part. He has not been named, and the case will be heard in Béziers, on a date not yet set. The appellation told AFP the volume was small beside the 90,000 hectoliters it makes in an average year. Spread over three vintages, it comes to about a quarter of one percent.

Châteauneuf is used to defending its name. In 1923 its growers asked Baron Pierre Le Roy de Boiseaumarié of Château Fortia, a winemaker and lawyer, to help them write rules on where the grapes could grow and how the wine was made. Their union was founded that October, and in 1936 Châteauneuf-du-Pape became France's first AOC, as the growers still like to point out. Most of those rules stand today.

Fourteen times the wine is a fair measure of what the name is worth. The court in Béziers will decide what borrowing it costs.

Every three years, the Association de la Sommellerie Internationale names the Best Sommelier of the World. On October 16, before 600 people at Lisbon's Coliseu dos Recreios, it named a Norwegian for the first time. Nikolai Haram Svorte is 29, has been a sommelier since 2018 and won on his first attempt. He was head sommelier at Speilsalen, in Trondheim's Britannia Hotel, and now manages products and sales for Remuage by Moestue, a Norwegian importer of Champagne.

Many had tipped Pascaline Lepeltier, the French beverage director of Chambers in New York. She shone at service but slipped in a blind tasting, The Drinks Business reports, and finished second, with Japan's Wataru Iwata, beverage director at The Thousand Kyoto, third. The finalists tasted blind, served, paired food and wine, identified labels and, in a surprise round, named wineries from their label art. Sixty-six candidates took part, including the first from India, Kenya, Lebanon and Moldova.

"I was nervous, but I was just trying to enjoy it," he told Decanter. When Lisbon last hosted the final, in 1978, the title went to an Italian. This time it goes north, to a man who sells Champagne for a living.

Wine Enthusiast has named Sicily its International Wine Region of the Year for 2026, in its 27th Wine Star Awards. The island's DOC consortium says the award recognizes a new generation of producers, a renewed focus on quality and sustainability, and Sicily's native grapes, more than 70 of them. Livermore Valley, east of San Francisco, is the American region of the year, and the winners collect their awards at a black-tie gala in San Francisco in January.

The place to see why is Etna, Europe's tallest active volcano, where old bush vines of Nerello Mascalese and Carricante climb to around 1,000 meters on black volcanic soil. Etna became Sicily's first DOC in 1968. Taormina, where The White Lotus spent its second season at the San Domenico Palace, is under an hour away.

San Francisco gets the gala in January. Sicily keeps the volcano.

Until Thursday.