内容摘要：Without cooling this will melt aluminium, and is, Mr Varvill says, "literally too hot to handle".

Without cooling this will melt aluminium, and is, Mr Varvill says, "literally too hot to handle".

But that is all she will say on the matter. French winemakers are walking on eggshells at the moment, fearful of saying anything that might aggravate the situation.Perhaps their representatives will be more forthcoming? I get in my car and drive over to one of her neighbours - François Labet. He is the president of the Burgundy Wine Board, which represents this region's 3,500 winemakers.

"The US is the largest export market for the whole region. Definitely," he tells me. "They are the biggest in volume and the biggest in value."And, until Donald Trump's re-election, the US market was booming. While French wines and spirits global exports, sales of Burgundy wines to the US rose sharply.

from 2024, to 20.9 million bottles. This was worth €370m ($415m; £312m) in revenues, 26.2% higher than in 2023.Mr Labet says the US accounted for about a quarter of Burgundy's wine exports last year.

Burgundy's reputation abroad is mainly for its red wines, which are made from the celebrated pinot noir grape. Indeed, in the English-speaking world, burgundy is not so much a wine as a colour.

The French word for the same colour is bordeaux; showing they know more about their wine, because while Bordeaux wines are mostly red, two-thirds of Burgundy is actually white.New German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is making a high-stakes trip to meet US President Donald Trump - his first time in Washington DC as the leader of the European Union's largest economy.

Tariffs, defence spending and the war in Ukraine will be high on the agenda when Merz meets Donald Trump on Thursday at the White House.There's also speculation that Trump's team - which repeatedly has weighed in on Germany's domestic politics - could subject him to an Oval Office "ambush".

It would not be the first time.Both South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky found themselves in awkward, tense or even fiery exchanges as the world's cameras rolled, capturing every moment. Those moments have turned once cosy, diplomatic moments in the Oval Office into potentially fraught, tight-rope walks for visiting leaders.