Bright and vivid, it’s hard to beat Beaujolais for ‘gluggable’ wines

 

Caves de Juliénas-Chaintré Villages Cuvée Six, Beaujolais-Villages, France 2018 (from £9.95, nywines.co.uk; eynshamcellars.com; butlers-winecellar.co.uk) It would be very hard to find a red wine region in the world offering better value for money than Beaujolais at the moment. I don’t just mean that the land north of Lyon provides some of the most reliably drinkable red wines you can find for not much more than a fiver. Wines that are relatively light and, with their soft to non-existent tannin and bright berry thirst-quenching juiciness, are the ideal incarnation of that onomatopoeic wine adjective, gluggable. Chillable, wines such as Tesco Beaujolais Rouge or Sainsbury’s House Beaujolais (both exactly £5). The region also regularly hits a thirst-quenching, prettily-scented spot for a couple of quid more, with “villages” wines, from superior vineyards, such as Morrisons The Best Beaujolais Villages (£6.50 until 4 October), Waitrose Blueprint Beaujolais-Villages 2018 (£7.99) or, in super-succulent, vivid, finger-staining, fresh-off-the-bush style, the Cuvée Six made by a 170-strong co-operative of local growers.

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Paris Is About to Change

The city was hit hard by the pandemic, but French leaders know transformation is necessary.

The pandemic hit Paris hard. It hit poor Paris suburbs harder. Paris had already staked its future on merging with a wide ring of banlieue towns to form the new Metropolis of Grand Paris—an environmentally resilient 21st-century capital. But the coronavirus made clear how urgent that transformation really is.

Last year, more than 38 million people visited Paris. This summer, international travel bans sent hotel occupancy down 86 percent. The greater Paris metropolitan area has seen economic activity fall by more than 37 percent during the pandemic compared with the same period last year. In Île-de-France, the region that metropolitan Paris calls home, 100,000 jobs have been lost since mid-March.

The strict national lockdown from mid-March to mid-May did succeed in reducing infections, hospitalizations, and deaths. But after it was eased, the virus began to spread once more. Though current hospitalization rates remain manageable and death rates are relatively low, the number of new cases has risen alarmingly in recent weeks, with cases surging in the Paris metropolitan area. On August 27, Prime Minister Jean Castex declared 21 of France’s 101 administrative departments, including Paris and its neighboring departments, COVID-19 “red zones.”
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France horse mutilations: Police hunt two suspects in Losne

Police in France have launched a manhunt for two suspects after the latest in a spate of horse mutilations.

Forty officers have flown by helicopter to the town of Losne, near Dijon, after a horse was attacked on Sunday morning.

Dozens of horses have been killed or maimed around the country this year, prompting public outcry.Police do not know why the animals are being targeted, nor whether it is the work of one person, or if initial attacks have inspired copycat killings.

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