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With its fairytale turrets and a 15th-Century tower, Chateau Latour Laguens is surrounded by vineyards in a region steeped in European tradition. But this chateau, south-east of Bordeaux, is also at the cutting edge of Asia's growing economic might. The staff who tend the vineyards and make the wine are still French, but this is now a Chinese-owned domain. It has been taken over by the Longhai group based in eastern China, which has created a subsidiary to run it called Chateau Latour-Laguens (Qingdao). The Chinese are developing a new taste for French wines these days. And in addition to...

A handful of venerable Californian wines have once again beaten their French counterparts - in a re-run of the Paris Tasting of 1976. Against all expectations the Cabernets – Ridge Monte Bello 1971, Stag's Leap Wine Cellars 1973, Mayacamas 71, Heitz 70 and Clos du Val 72 – were voted superior to their rivals in Bordeaux. In yesterday's extraordinary series of coordinated tastings in London and California, hosted by Steven Spurrier, some of the world's most eminent tasters found the Californian wines to have retained more of their verve over the years than the Bordeaux. Hugh Johnson, Jancis Robinson, Matthew...

Two different photographs of Catherine Gachet about to sip a glass of the wine she produces in south-western France show her looking more like a Hollywood starlet than a winemaker. But in the eyes of a French law at the centre of a battle between the country's ailing wine industry and health pressure groups, only one of the images is legal. A big smile with the wine a suitable distance from the face A court agreed with the health campaigners that the first, with the glass of wine far too close to Mrs Gachet's lips, was "too sexy" to meet...

For Immediate Release French Intellectuals to be Deployed in Afghanistan to Convince Taliban of Non-Existence of God. The clean-up portion of the ground war in Afghanistan heated up yesterday when the Allies revealed plans to airdrop a platoon of crack French existentialist philosophers into the country to destroy the morale of the remaining Taliban zealots by proving the non-existence of God. Elements from the feared Jean-Paul Sartre Brigade, or 'Black Berets', will be parachuted into the combat zones to spread doubt, despondency and existential anomie among the enemy. Hardened by numerous intellectual battles fought during their long occupation of Paris's...

Okay. We get it. You need money to run the joint.You have your quarterly fundraisers and they seemed to be working out.Must you put VisaMasterCardDiscoverAmericanExpress logos all over the place now as well?It cheapens the joint.