Indholdsfortegnelse for 1116 i MoneyWeek

“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable,” said JK Galbraith. Predictions about stockmarkets, earnings or macroeconomic trends can be safely ignored, especially if you are a picky Virgo like me. That is why we haven’t been too fazed by the Bank of England’s forecast of a 15-month recession. Its record is no better than any other forecaster’s, to put it charitably. A year ago it thought inflation would peak at 4%. Now it thinks inflation is heading for 13%. It was too gloomy about the impact on GDP of the Brexit vote and failed to predict the 2008 financial crisis. All official forecasters did. The US Federal Reserve said in January 2008, when the credit crunch was spreading fast, that the US would expand by…

“Soaring interest rates, galloping inflation, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the impact of ‘zero Covid’ policies have driven financial markets since the start of the year. The result has been a succession of stalls and rebounds for world stockmarkets, enough to give investors cold sweats. But stockmarket operators are rubbing their hands together. While volatility frightens investors and weighs on the number of listings, it also drives up [trading] volumes. The two main operators on the continent, Euronext and Deutsche Börse, have published solid results for the second quarter... Euronext’s turnover jumped by 14% on the year... while that of Deutsche Börse climbed by 12%. Their profits rose 37%... and 10% respectively over the period... In Europe, volatility on the [bluechip] Stoxx 50 index has jumped 50% compared to…

Glencore “has long been used to doing business in unstable places”, says Megha Mandavia in The Wall Street Journal. “Now that the whole world is looking unstable, it is unsurprising to see Glencore doing well.” Profits more than doubled in the first half of the year, with earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (Ebitda) hitting a record $18.9bn. It’s quite a turnaround, says Lex in the Financial Times. In 2016 and 2020 Glencore paid no dividends because of commodity downswings. Shareholders who stayed put should enjoy forecast payouts of $8.5bn for 2022, equivalent to 12% of the group’s market capitalisation. Glencore is set to make annual pre-tax profits of $26bn, around double 2021’s total. The results have been driven by soaring coal prices. Newcastle coal futures, the Asian benchmark,…

The United Nations says that almost a third of the world’s population couldn’t get enough to eat last year due to droughts and pandemic-induced supply disruptions, says Reshma Kapadia in Barron’s. And the rocketing global population means that by 2050 we will need 60% more food than in 2010. This bodes well for America’s Deere & Co., which specialises in farm equipment and agricultural technology. Its global presence has helped it become more profitable than its peers, facilitating expenditure of $1.5bn a year on research and development. Products boosting farmers’ efficiency include robotic tractors and precision-spraying, and planting systems that save on chemicals.…

Politics & economics Democrats in the US celebrated on Sunday as the Senate passed the Inflation Reduction Act, says Ryan Ermey on CNBC. It authorises $430bn in spending, $300bn of which is “earmarked for investments to curb climate change” and introduces a 15% minimum corporate tax rate. Although the “sweeping” legislation has inflation reduction “right there in the title”, rising energy, food and property prices will have more of an impact in the short-term. However, it is also designed to reduce the prices consumers pay in the key area of Medicare (Americans pay far more than the rest of us for drugs), and the impact of this should be felt almost immediately. The bill “will be one of the greatest misallocations of federal resources in American history”, say Stephen Moore…

It’s widely accepted that your portfolio should be well-diversified to prevent a single disastrous decision from wiping out a large chunk of your wealth. At the same time, if a portfolio is too large, your chances of outperforming the market shrink and you might as well hold a cheap tracker fund. These extremes are self-evident: the big question is the number of holdings that gives you the best trade-off between return and risk. Research by Miguel Antón of the University of Madrid, Randolph Cohen of Harvard Business School, and Christopher Polk of the London School of Economics gives us an interesting way to think about this. Their paper Best Ideas looks at how many of a fund manager’s highest-conviction stocks make a contribution to beating the market. Based on holdings…

We need an energy revolution Matthew Syed The Sunday Times Economics classics including Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations fail to mention the word “energy” once, says Matthew Syed. This is “curious” given that, as Charles Hall, professor at the State University of New York, puts it: “Energy is used at every step of every economic process.” Although the commodity constitutes just 5% of the economy, without that 5%, the rest “would grind to a halt”. All revolutions, from the invention of fire to the industrial revolution, are “ultimately triggered by transformations in energy”. Hall says the current energy crisis has been a “long time coming”. In 1919, it took the energy equivalent of one barrel of oil to extract 100; today, the ratio is one to five. This, he…

sambowman.substack.com Economic policy commentators are divided into two camps, says Sam Bowman: the Boosters and the Doomsters. Boosters believe that economic growth is the best way to solve all kinds of other problems, and that this could be achieved pretty quickly through better policy. Housing supply, for example, is clearly broken, and could be fixed. Corporate taxes are badly structured. Infrastructure, healthcare, policing, regulation, access to capital, immigration and education are all “pretty dysfunctional” in the UK, and all affect big parts of the economy. Doomsters (see top story for an example), on the other hand, agree that the country has big problems, but believe we’re stuck with low growth. We have fewer young workers and more old people, and this puts us on an economic “death spiral” we can…

When the Doric Nimrod aircraft funds launched a few years ago, they offered some tempting asset-backed income from a portfolio of A380 superjumbos that were leased to Emirates. A later fund, Amedeo Air Four Plus (LSE: AA4) broadened out the concept with a portfolio of Airbus and Boeing planes that were let to both Emirates and Thai Airways. But the security that these assets offer looked fragile when the pandemic hit. No A380s were flying. Many airlines were in trouble. And Airbus had already cancelled A380 manufacturing the previous year. All this made it difficult to work out what the aircraft would be worth once the leases expired. So the price of the funds crashed way below stated net asset value, even though all three Doric Nimrod funds kept paying…

Shaving some money off rising energy bills by generating your own power is becoming ever more appealing – so much so that solar-panel installation firms are reporting a four-fold increase in orders this year compared with 2021. High installation costs have deterred households in recent years. But “[the] time it would take to recoup the cost of installing the panels from savings on energy bills is expected to get much shorter – from... 11 years at January 2022’s rates to fewer than four years from January next year,” says Ali Hussain in The Sunday Times. It costs around £6,500 for the average solar-panel system to be installed on a three-bedroom semi-detached house, according to the Energy Saving Trust. Once your solar panels are up and running you can use your…

Research reveals that most firms don’t bother switching business bank accounts: two-thirds have not done so in the past six years. But moving could get you a better deal. Possible benefits include improved customer service, access to additional facilities – often for free – and potential cost savings, particularly as a growing number of digital banks add to competition in the sector. Moreover, many small businesses are entitled to take advantage of the Current Account Switch Service, an initiative aimed at persuading more consumers to shop around for a current account. Firms with fewer than 50 employees and an annual turnover of less than £6.5m benefit from the scheme, which requires banks to manage switches in no more than seven working days. It must also minimise the disruption faced by…

The stock of catering giant Compass Group (LSE: CPG) hit a two-year high after the group hiked its revenue-growth outlook for the second time in 2022, says Reuters. Compass, whose brands include Bon Appetit, expects sales to rise by 35% this year; in the latest quarter underlying revenue hit 109% of 2019 levels. It is enjoying the post-pandemic rebound in offices, schools and sports (it is responsible for Wimbledon’s catering). Small firms are also finding it expensive to manage in-house catering so they are now increasingly farming it out to Compass. The shares are up 28% in a year.…

After three decades spent honing the art of investing, US private-equity group Carlyle’s billionaire founders took a chance and handed the reins to a younger generation. Kewsong Lee (pictured), now 56, and Glenn Youngkin, 55, both alumni of Harvard and McKinsey, took over in 2018 as co-CEOs of the group that now manages $376bn in assets. When Bloomberg interviewed them at the time, they were enthusiastic about the future. The promotion gives the founders – David Rubenstein, Bill Conway and Daniel D’Aniello – time to focus on their strengths and interests while the next generation “drive the firm to the next level”, said Lee. Now, he’s run out of road. Youngkin left in 2020 to stand for public office. Lee resigned this week when the board refused to discuss his…

This week we take a look at the US’s $739bn Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). What the heck is it? An attempt to control the world’s temperature? An effort to reduce deficits and inflation? Is it meant to save lives, increase GDP, boost jobs? Or is it just another Democrat giveaway to favoured groups and artful lobbyists? According to a study quoted by Yahoo News, the bill will cut deaths from air pollution in the US by up to 3,900 per year by 2030. It provides $369bn in spending to address climate change over ten years, in addition to other provisions, including closing tax loopholes and holding down the rate of increase in the cost of prescription medication. It will also, apparently, lead to a net increase of up to 1.5…

A long battle over the $156m estate left by Prince (pictured) has ended, six years after the musician died without a will, says Rolling Stone. Prince, who died in April 2016, had no spouse or children, leading to a complex process of dividing his assets between six siblings and half-siblings. Three of the heirs agreed to sell their interests to music publishing firm and talent company Primary Wave and two died before the matter was concluded. Further delays resulted from a dispute between the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and estate executor Comerica Bank over the value of intangible assets, such as music, name and likeness rights. Comerica valued the estate at $82.3m and the IRS at $163.2m, with the argument resolved largely in the IRS’s favour in January. The…

“Greece is having a good summer”, says Helena Smith in The Guardian. With a million visitors a week descending on Athens, this year’s tourist season looks likely to top 2019, the previous record. That year brought in 33.1 million visitors and netted the country €18.2bn in revenue. “Tourism accounts for 25% of Greece’s economic output and one in five jobs.” The irony is that after years of crisis, low wages mean that “an estimated 43 % of the labour force can’t afford to take a holiday” of their own. However, the tourism boom should still see GDP growth hit 4% this year, according to forecasts from the European Commission. That would see Greece comfortably outperform the wider eurozone, which is forecast to grow about 2.6% in 2022. The ASE index…

For a country maligned as chaotic and spendthrift, “Italy seems surprisingly functional”, says Paul Krugman in The New York Times. It has done a good job vaccinating its people and life expectancy is 83 years, compared to 77 in the US. Rome’s reputation for fiscal irresponsibility stems from the 1980s, when imprudent outlays lumbered the state with high debt. Yet in recent years “Italy has been quite disciplined”. Before Covid, the government was consistently running a primary fiscal surplus, meaning it was collecting more than it was spending, excluding debt payments. Italy doesn’t have a spending problem, it has a growth problem. Even before the pandemic, Italy saw no growth in real gross domestic product (GDP) per capita for two decades.…

Australian copper miner Oz Minerals has rejected an A$8.4bn (£4.8bn) takeover bid from BHP Group, the world’s biggest listed miner. The offer came at a 32% premium to Oz’s share price last Friday, but Oz, which runs copper- and gold-mining operations in South Australia, branded the move “highly opportunistic” as copper prices have slumped recently. BHP, which is currently reliant on iron ore, is keen to increase its exposure to copper, demand for which it thinks will “double in the next three decades”, says Rhiannon Hoyle in The Wall Street Journal. “Electric vehicles use four times as much copper as [petrol]-fuelled cars… and wind- and solar-power production requires more copper”. For all copper’s growing importance, there are “precious few dedicated miners of the red metal”, as Lex points out in…

South Korea’s initial public offering (IPO) market has been hit by cancellations as global markets have suffered from jitters over inflation and interest-rate hikes. The benchmark index has lost a fifth this year. The first six months of 2022 saw just 36 flotations, while 2021 was a record year: 89 listings raised 19.7 trillion won ($15.7bn). Korea is highly geared to global growth, so it is especially vulnerable to worldwide turbulence. Global investors are heading back to safer assets outside emerging markets. Withdrawals from IPO funds on the local market – these hold newly issued shares and bonds – eclipsed 1.6 trillion won ($1.23bn) in the first half of 2022, says Korea JoongAng Daily.…

Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak would like to convince you that they are a breath of fresh air, despite both having served in Boris Johnson’s government. New policies are being thrown around thick and fast as they spend the summer sipping warm pink fizz and eating cheese canapes with the rather niche electorate of around 160,000 Conservative Party members. Polling of the membership has consistently shown Truss (pictured) to be ahead. We believe she will be announced the winner on 5 September for three reasons. Firstly, she has chosen policies that appeal to members. Reversing tax hikes resonates strongly across a party that has become more and more perturbed by the tax burden rising to its highest level since the World War II. Truss’s tax cuts could be inflationary, but…

Tensions between China and the West are rising all the time. Over the last week, the country has been launching a series of alarmingly aggressive military exercises around Taiwan. Even if that does not lead to an invasion, or a blockade, it is a scary escalation of the simmering conflict in the Pacific. In the background, China has been actively supporting Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, while Xi Jinping’s regime has been becoming increasingly autocratic. Led by the US, the Western powers’ relationship with China is more fraught than at any time in the last half century. A cold war has opened up, and one day that may turn hot. An emerging powerhouse There are plenty of predictions that China’s powerhouse economy, already on track to overtake the US as…

Alpha is the amount of value an investor adds or takes away from an investment portfolio. In other words, it measures how their stock- or asset-picking skills affect the portfolio, above and beyond any returns that are simply down to what you’d expect from the performance of the market as a whole. Alpha can be looked at in two main ways. The first is simply to compare the portfolio’s performance with a benchmark index. So the returns on a portfolio of UK shares might be compared with the returns on the FTSE All-Share index over a given time period. If a fund manager’s portfolio has returned 15% compared with 10% for the benchmark, then the manager has generated positive alpha of 5% on this simple measure. Of course, the manager…

“About a year after The X-Factor, when I’d done the tour and made some money, I went into Louis Vuitton and bought a pair of trainers for £1,000. At the time I’d not spent anything close to that much on any item in my whole life. I still remember putting my card into the machine and desperately hoping it wouldn’t be declined.” Singer Fleur East (pictured) in The Sunday Times “Pin your ears back in maths classes and know your value. It’s no good going through life in a financial haze because you’ll end up the loser.” Actor Maureen Lipman on the advice she would give her younger self, quoted in The Sunday Telegraph “There’s no chance the iPhone is going to get significant market share. No chance.” Steve Ballmer,…

blog.acton.org For the past two years, there has been a growing trend for people to quit their jobs, says Andrew Leston. Dubbed “the Great Resignation”, many people, and especially the young, believe that “the current system sets you up for failure”. This is “a crisis of freedom, identity and exhaustion”, of “great discontent”. A recent report from Gallup found only 21% of employees in the US believe their work to be meaningful. Not unrelated to this trend, the welfare state has ballooned from $20.8bn in outlays in the early 2000s to $1.75trn now. Yet slacking off is not the route to happiness. As Teddy Roosevelt said in 1903, “Far and away the best prize that life offers are the chance to work hard at work worth doing”. It is human…

Petra Diamonds (LSE: PDL) is a Londonlisted independent diamond miner. It holds 74% stakes in four production operations (three underground kimberlite mines in South Africa and a large high-volume opencast kimberlite mine in Tanzania). These sites include the Cullinan Mine in South Africa, which was the source – in 1905 – of the world-famous Cullinan diamond. At 3,106 carats, this was the largest rough gem diamond ever found. It was cut to form the two most important gemstones in the UK’s Crown Jewels. As at 30 June 2021, Cullinan’s gross resource was 150 million carats, meaning that its life could be much longer than the current target of 2030. Last year Petra undertook a restructuring which, along with the sale of several exceptional blue and white diamonds from Cullinan, cut…

Activist Bluebell Capital is battling to install its co-founder Francesco Trapani on the board of Swiss luxury goods giant Richemont, says Reuters. Bluebell is calling on investors to back Trapani, a former CEO of Bulgari, as a representative of the firm’s A-class shareholders at the annual general meeting next month, instead of existing director Wendy Luhabe. Bluebell, which owns a 0.2% stake, also wants Richemont to focus on “hard luxury” jewellery and watches, which make up 80% of sales, instead of its loss-making e-commerce arm, and to rename itself Cartier, after its most famous brand. Richemont is controlled by its founder Johann Rupert, through unlisted B-class shares that give him 50% of votes with just 9.1% of capital.…

Criminals are using the cost-of-living crisis to create new scams to part you from your money. “During the pandemic, criminals adapted their methods to exploit victims’ fears over [Covid-19], and are now finding new avenues of attack,” says Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan in the Financial Times. Losses from authorised push-payment (APP) scams – where you are conned into transferring money into the criminals’ accounts – have leapt by 40% this year to over £580m. Impersonation scams, whereby you are contacted by someone pretending to be the police, bank staff or HMRC, for instance, have also risen. Losses from these scams climbed by 15% in 2021 to £96.6m. One strategy that exploits the cost-of-living crisis involves fraudsters sending you an email pretending to be from your energy supplier. You are invited to claim…

● Keen to launch your own small business but worried about the risk of leaving the day job? There is a middle way. New research from GoDaddy suggests that a third of businesses with fewer than ten employees are now run as a “side hustle”: in other words, the owner is running the business while continuing to hold down a job, either full-time or part-time. Working this way brings extra stress – not least in terms of time management – but provides entrepreneurs with an opportunity to test the waters before jumping in with both feet. ● Short-form video-sharing social-media app TikTok is launching a range of new tools aimed at small businesses. TikTok says its Follow Me programme will enable small and medium-sized enterprises to connect with a broader…

Home furnishings chain Wickes (LSE: WIX) saw its share price slide by 20% last week after it released poor half-year results, says The Motley Fool. The company lowered its pre-tax profit forecast for this year from £83m to £72m-£82m amid uncertain demand. The brand boomed throughout the pandemic, but has been hurt by the cost-of-living crisis, which has prompted consumers to cut unnecessary spending. The company expects the DIY market to keep “softening” as inflationary pressures mount. The share price has depreciated by 45% over the last twelve months.…

£9m The cumulative funds offered by nine Russell Group universities to students to defer their places this year. After a record number of A-level entrants received places in higher education, the universities have been overwhelmed by student numbers, and are offering up to £10,000 and in some cases waived accommodation costs to encourage students to come next year instead. $2,664 What an unfortunate traveller caught by Australian biosecurity detectors ultimately paid for two egg and sausage McMuffins and a ham croissant from McDonald’s. Australia has strict laws against bringing packaged foodstuffs into the country to prevent the spread of contagious conditions such as foot and mouth disease. $1.3bn The amount won on the US lottery last week. The anonymous winner purchased their lucky ticket for the Mega Millions for $2…

The Bank of England has set off “the most piercing of warning sirens”, says Faisal Islam on the BBC. Last week the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) raised interest rates by half a percentage point to 1.75%, “the largest interest-rate rise in a quarter of a century”, while forecasting that inflation will peak at 13% later this year. Even more shocking, it is now predicting that the UK is heading for “a recession as long as the great financial crisis and as deep as that seen in the early 1990s”. The Bank reckons that inflation will still be near double digits this time next year, while GDP will contract in the last quarter of this year and throughout the whole of 2023, say Delphine Strauss and George Parker in the…

“When we were turning out big profits, I became somewhat delirious, and looking back at myself now, I am quite embarrassed and remorseful,” said SoftBank’s CEO Masayoshi Son, as he unveiled a record quarterly ¥3.1trn (£19bn) net loss this week. The Japanese conglomerate, known for its multibillion-dollar bets on technology companies, has been caught up in the market sell-off. Son says that “dramatic” group-wide cost-cutting will be needed. Softbank’s two Vision funds, launched in 2017 and 2019, have “deployed a $162.2bn war chest, with about $7bn still available to invest”, says Katie Prescott in The Times. Son made his name with early bets on Yahoo founder Jerry Yang and Chinese e-commerce behemoth Alibaba. But his recent record hasn’t been so impressive: he “wrote a $4.4bn cheque, the first of many,…

Three to buy Unite The Daily Telegraph Property offers protection from inflation. Unite, a real-estate investment trust that owns student accommodation, differs from other commercial-property funds because its contracts are often only a year long. The short-term leases mean the trust can bolster income rapidly by charging next year’s tenants higher rents. Demand for student accommodation is increasing fast. The only drawback is the 21% premium to net asset value, but the shares are volatile. Buy on the next dip. 1,148p Halma The Mail on Sunday Halma owns 43 companies in the safety, environment and healthcare sectors. It provides them with funding to invest in research and development. The group reported turnover of more than £1.5bn and profits of £316m in the year to March 2022, and a 7% rise…

● Apparently Revolution Beauty, the Aim-listed “multi-brand, multi-category, multichannel, mass-beauty innovator”, specialises in “cruelty-free” products, says Alistair Osborne in The Times “Try telling investors who stumped up 160p a share in July last year.” US private-equity outfit TSG Consumer Partners did fine when it sold £156m of shares at the float. Co-founders Tom Allsworth and Adam Minto also cashed out £15.6m a piece, although they retain around 30%. For everybody else, this “make-up dream, big on social influencers… has morphed into a scary clown face” – not least for Jupiter, which was “daft enough to have put in £90m”. The shares now trade at 25p, down 59% in one day after a profit warning and a delay to the full-year results. Broker Zeus has cut forecasts for 2023 earnings from…

“More bear markets are coming. The next one is going to be the worst in my lifetime,” says Jim Rogers, the veteran investor who co-founded Soros Fund Management with George Soros. “We’ve made so many mistakes this time that interest rates will have to go very, very high” to bring inflation under control, he tells Kitco News. “We will have a serious recession; many people will go bankrupt, we’re going to have a lot of problems. There’s no other way to solve the problem other than double-digit… rate hikes.” While inflation rages, investors should look to agricultural commodities and energy and take advantage of any setbacks. “If there’s peace in Ukraine, all grain prices are going down for a while, and that’s the time to buy.” That would also bring…

washingtonpost.com The changing economics of the news business has altered the nature of the news itself, says George Will. Newspapers once had a monopoly on assembling for advertisers a broad audience of the sort of readers advertisers value – affluent and mature. This gave newspapers a respectful attitude toward readers who wanted to make their own judgements and were averse to political agendas in reporting. The internet changed all that, taking the advertising revenue and leaving media outlets reliant on readers. In the competition for digital subscriptions, the content began to be driven more by fear and anger. Editors “agitated the digitised, urban, educated and progressive youth to the point of political indignation”, says Andrey Mir, author of Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers. Their papers became part of the…

■ Funds run by Schroders lead the latest Spot the Dog report of consistently poor performers, says Citywire. While the fund house’s name appears on just one laggard – the £41m Schroder European Sustainable Equity – it also manages the three largest by terms of assets held: Halifax UK Growth, Halifax UK Equity Income and Scottish Widows UK Growth. These funds hold nearly £6.7bn in assets, amounting to 62% of the assets named and shamed by the report. All three are part of the Lloyds Bank group, but Schroders has overseen the two Halifax funds since 2018 and the Scottish Widows one since 2020. “Investors would be forgiven for expecting to see an improvement in performance by now,” says Jason Hollands of investment platform Bestinvest, which compiles the biannual list.…

● The Bank of Mum and Dad is running out of cash, says Lily Russell-Jones in The Sunday Times. Parents who are struggling with inflation are cutting back on how much money they give their children. Research by Brewin Dolphin has found that 41% of parents are no longer setting aside money for their child’s future. “This could mean fresh hardship for young people trying to get on the property ladder”: the Bank of Mum and Dad currently hands out about £6bn a year to help with property purchases. ● A government rule change could help divorcing couples, says Jenny Ross in The Yorkshire Post. At present, as part of any divorce agreement you need to give assets to each other within the same tax year as the separation for…

In investing you have to get the big ideas right. By identifying and tracking secular themes, you are participating in an industry where a rising tide lifts all boats. When the key trend is working in your favour you benefit from a natural hedge against company-specific risk. Clean energy is one of these secular themes. It is also not always the case that you can do good for humanity while at the same time making the best decision for your wallet. Human beings are self-interested, and corporations need to allocate capital as efficiently as possible. There used to be so much fossil-fuel consumption in the world because it was the most cost-effective method of generating power. Now, the narrative has flipped. It is much more efficient and profitable on a…

2021 Domaine de l’Ile Blanc, Porquerolles, Côtes de Provence, France £32.95, handford.net; £240 per 12 bottles in bond, farrvintners.com It is like Groundhog Day at Jukes Towers this week. Every year, around this time, I taste a vast range of top-end French rosés, and because there are so many, I put them on my website. Among this pink avalanche of flavours, Domaine de l’Ile stands out. The 2021 Domaine de l’Ile Rosé (£122 per six bottles, £127 per three magnums, £95 per jeroboam, goedhuis.com; £23.99, handford. net; £175 per 12 bottles in bond, farrvintners.com; £175 per 12 bottles in bond, frw.co.uk) is undoubtedly a shimmeringly sexy, coral-hued, raspberry and rhubarb-smooched beauty, but it is not the super-star creation from this Chanel-owned estate. Our minds turn to rosé at this time…