la gramiere

It's already July??

This month just flew by.  The past 3 weeks I've been home for a total of 4 days!  Busy, busy busy here!  The vines are growing, growing, growing, and suddenly it's HOT!!!  35 degrees for the past few days.  Ugh.

Let's see, what has been going on?  Well we'll start with our trip to Italia!  We were invited to be a part of a trade tasting in Italy called Terroir Vino sponsored by the Italian wine website www.tigulliovino.it, and organised by Filippo Ronco who I met at the European Wine Bloggers Conference last year.  It's a great event that takes place in the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa, the setting is breath taking.  Over 120 Italian wineries were present and us, La Gramière, Matt and Amy.  At first things were kind of slow, there were lots of people tasting and visiting the other winemakers and we were sort of a curiosity.  Then things picked up and we met some really great people and got some great response to our wine.  One wine-blogger even wrote a post about it here in Italian.  We met and tasted with these three crazy guys who love natural, organic and bio-dynamic wines, they write a blog about the wines they taste and the music they love. Marco even found a song to publish along with the post called "Colorado Girl"!  I love it! 

The following week was our big winery-blogger tasting in Bordeaux.  The location was great, just a few short minutes from downtown Bordeaux, a bit more from Vinexpo.  Chateau Luchey-Halde is in Merignac, on the outskirts of the town, but within the Bordeaux metro area, and there are vineyards all around the château.  It was a wonderful setting, we had a great conference room that was all windows on one side opening up onto a terrace that looks out onto the vineyards.  It was light any airy and the weather was perfect, sunny but not too hot.  The turn out was less than we had hoped but good for the our first effort. There's talk of repeating it next year at ViniSud, we'll see if it happens!  In anycase, it was a great opportunity to meet the people behind the blogs and above all to get to taste their wines!  The overall quality of the wineries present at the event was exceptionally high, which I suppose is to be expected since only the most passionate "vignerons" are willing to take the time to write a blog and share their experiences to the point that we all seem to!

Finally, this weekend we took a few days off to visit Matt's brother Brian and his family who live in Neuchatel, Switzerland.  It's always fun to go visit, but it's especially nice at this time of year when it starts to get really hot here, and up there it's sunny and warm but not hot.  We also had the chance to meet with a potential importer based in Neuchâtel, which was very exciting!  André Crelier has been importing and selling wine in Neuchâtel for 27 years.  He has the tiniest shop you have ever seen, but he sells lots of wine from it, lots of great wine.  It was one of the most interesting meetings with a wine seller/importer I've ever had.  André is definitely old-school, he buys wine from his procducers and then he actually ages it.  He's currently selling Santa Duc Gigondas from the 2001 vintage.  He explained that he feels it's his duty to offer his customers wines that are at their peak and that even though he has to hold the wines for several years, his prices are only slightly higher (we're talking a franc or two) than they would have been when he originally purchased them.  He liked our wines very much so hopefully we'll soon have an importer in Switzerland!

Now it's back to work.  We have to bottle the 2008, some 2007 syrah that we didn't blend into the main cuvée and then start getting everything ready for harvest 2009!  This will be our 5th harvest, I can't believe we've been doing this for 5 years already.  It seems like we're still learning so much, when will we feel like we actually know what we're doing??

Weedbadger in action!

This spring has turned out to be one of the busiest yet, and we are just now getting to the "weedbadging".

Here's a short video with my silly commentary.  As I explain in the clip, Matt is in our biggest vineyard which is planted very close together so he cannot use the automatic sensor, so it's a stressful job.  Not only does he have to be careful that the machine doesn't become the "Vine Badger"  he also has to keep the tractor as straight as possible so that he doesn't drive over them!!  I have yet to try, since I found plowing in a straight line a challenge, I can't imagine what I would do with the Weedbadger!

Getting those weeds! from Amy Lillard on Vimeo.

We have flowering!

Yep, as of last week, the roussanne vineyards were in full flower, now this week pretty much everything is except for the mourvèdre.  I've been spending my mornings out there working on the wires in the 3 vineyards that are trellised, well, I finished one and am on to the second, as always I'm behind in the spring!  Here are some pictures of the roussanne in bloom, last week it was quite hot so I was out there at about 6:30 every day to work until noon, then came home to escape the heat.  The temps have dropped so far this week which is nice, but after an unannounced and unexpected rain on Sunday I had to treat the vineyards yesterday and today.  This morning it started out pretty calm but by 8 am the wind kicked up, the sprayer was full though so I had to keep going... I came back home with a nice blue tinge on my face and arms from the copper.  I scrubbed and scrubbed, but I still smell like sulfur, ugh!

The rest of the week I'll be out there grappling with those unruly vines...

Click on the photos to see them larger, they don't really show that well here.  below are the before and after shots of the rows when I am putting the wires up and thinning the shoots.  The last shot is the aftermath of thinning the shoots.   

Off? What's an off?

Stemming certainly from the term "off Broadway"  the French have coined the term for any event that  takes place outside of the normal scope of an event.  Every year at the theater festival in Avignon there is another festival that runs concurrently called the "Off".  What in the world does this have to do with this blog, you ask?  Well, the term is also widely used in the wine industry over here for tastings that are held alongside big wine trade shows like Vinexpo or Vinisud.  Pretty much any big tasting event has several "offs"  in satellite locations near the official event.  These tastings allow for small wineries who don't have the clients or the budget to pariticipate in the big shows as they often cost several thousand euros for a winery to participate in, therefor rendering these events inaccessible to us small guys. 

Two years ago when I went to Bordeaux for Vinexpo with my friends Denis & Kirstin Gayte, we didn't even enter the big fair we just went to several "offs" that we were invited to.  These are my kind of tastings with real "vignerons" who make real wine.  There are several this year too, Haut les Vins, Les Femmes Vignes Rhône and another one at Chateau Moulin Pey-Labrie with lots of interesting winemakers from all over France.  BUT, the best "off"  of the year, the one not to be missed, is one I'll be participating in along with 20 other vignerons from all over France, with specail appearances by Gianpaolo Paglia of Italy, Oscar Quevedo of Portugal and Laureano Serres of Spain!  We've gone international!   Our common thread?  We all write wine blogs!  Imagine, you read these blogs, follow along with our daily lives, the ups and downs, the ins and outs, now we will all be pouring our wines in one place, for one day only!  I personnally can't wait because I read the blogs of many of these people, yet have never tasted their wines.  A very cool way that social media has linked us all together!

Thanks to the efforts of Emmanuelle Dupéré-Barrera, Mélanie Tarlant and Iris-Rutz-Rudel who have spent countless hours organizing the event and 20 vignerons (which is a bit like herding cats) the event promises to be a great one for everyone involved!  They have even created a special blog for the event, so you can see who will be participating and discover their blogs. 

Monday June 22, 2009
Vigneron/Blogger's Winetasting
11am -7pm
Château Luchey-Halde (Mérignac)

All of the information (in French) can be found on our website, so if you plan on attending Vinexpo this year, you definitely don't want to miss our event, it will be the place to be on Monday!

 

On a mission in Moline!

I think that I've mentioned before that my mother grew up in Moline, Illinois, world headquarters of John Deere.  In fact when we bought our first tractor, I looked and looked for a used John Deere in our price range, but there were none to be found.  When I told my mom that we had bought at '63 Massey Ferguson she called me a traitor.  Ever since I've been trying to rectify the situation.

Last week we returned to Moline for my dear grandmother's funeral, she lived a very long and happy life, so while we were all very sad to finally lose her, we also gathered to celebrate a life well lived.  She was 98!  While we were there seeing extended family members, some of whom are retired farmers, and all of whom know someone who spent their lives working at the John Deere headquarters, I decided I should ask for their help.  It's not easy apparently to find an old John Deere vineyard tractor, you see in the midwest they didn't really have a need for narrow tractors.  They call them orchard tractors here and everyone said that I would have a hard time finding one, these models have become popular for hobbyists who like to restore them and then drive them once a year in the harvest parade.  But that's not what I want at all, I don't want one that has been restored to perfection, I want one that I can use! 

As with most things, I may have set out on this quest a bit naively, of course it won't be easy to find an old tractor, let alone ship it to France, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to try!  The idea was that I would plant the seed in the heads of my family members that live in the area, and that one day while they're driving around in the country, or talking to a neighbor, they might come across my dream tractor.  I didn't intend to find one on this trip, nor do I really have the money to buy one right now, I just thought it would be fun to explore the idea. 

So first we went to the John Deere Pavilion in downtown Moline where they have some old tractors and some huge brand new ones too.  We chatted with the folks there, and they even gave us a John Deere pin to put on our jackets!  Then I started chatting with the couple that owns the coffee shop where we drank our delicious cappucinos every morning.  Turns out they both worked at Deere and once they retired they decided to open an espresso shop, they make some of the best coffee I've had in a long time.  Bonnie and Jim Vonderheide spent 6 months traveling to various places to learn how to make the very best coffee drinks around, and boy did they succeed.  Before that though, Jim ran the Deere plant in Madrid in the 70s, the one that made vineyard and orchard tractors!  Small world in Moline.  They were very interested in my quest and kept my card so that they could contact me if they ever came across one!

My best bet though I believe will be my Uncle Jay Grafton. (Jay is on the right)  Well, he's not really my uncle, he's my Mom's cousin, but we always called him Uncle Jay.  Jay was a farmer, I figured he must be able to help.  Well, he wasn't so sure, thought that I would never find one, but I kept pressing, asking him to just keep thinking about it.  Then one of his neighbor's stopped by, Jim Bane, Jim restores old buggies and then takes his horses out and rides them in parades.  Jim liked the idea and thought he might know the right people to ask.

In the end I'm not sure I'll ever end up with my vintage John Deere, but it sure was a fun topic of conversation during our visit.  I bet you some day I'll have one!  If you're ever in Moline, make sure you drop by Bonnie and Jim's for the best coffee you've had in a long, long time. 

Dead Poet's Espresso, Ltd.
Bonnie & Jim Vonderheide
1525 - 3rd Ave A
Moline, IL 61265
309-736-7606

La Gramière featured in WSJ magazine online ! Thanks Alice!

Just got back from the US to find this very flattering plug from my fellow blogger, writer and friend Alice Feiring!  La Gramière featured in very good company, thanks to Alice.  Check it out here!

Fixing our mistakes....

We've been spending some time in the vineyards walking down the rows, looking for things that we forgot to prune, for ones low down on the vine that we forgot to cut and also for those super annoying sprouts that come out of root stock.  The weather here has been quite unst able, beautiful and sunny one day then pouring down rain the next.  There has been hail in several areas, in the Ventoux and Gigondas the ground was apparently covered with tiny bits of ice, it looked as if it had snowed one vigneron said.  Sunday it rained hard all day, and I mean all day, it was incredible.  Then luckily Monday came with sun and wind to dry things out.  Hopefully it stays that way for awhile now.  We're going to do our first copper/sulfur application this weekend, it's on the early side, better safe than sorry.  Meanwhile I'll be keeping an eye out  for those vines  that need a second look!    Next week I'll start suckering which is by far my least favorite thing to do in the vineyards, but this year I think it will be better as I have finally learned how ot download pod casts onto my ipod!  Now I have Terry Gross and this American Life to help me pass the time!

Inspiring Thirst - The Blog!

Just wanted to let you all know that there's a new blog out there that is a must-read for me, and certainly it will become that for you too.  The team at Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, our US importer, has just started a blog, called Inspiring Thirst, named after Kermit's most recent book.  This is a blog that you won't want to miss!  For me it's a wonderful reminder of my 3 years working in the store and of our many, many tastings at the store after hours.  Each time a new container of wine arrived from France Kermit would have the warehouse bring up a bottle of each wine that had just arrived, from an everyday Vin de Table all the way up the ladder to Grand Cru Raveneau.  It was a such an amazing education and a time in my life that I will always remember fondly.  Now you too can have a glimpse of this very unique place in the world of wine, there's no other store in the world like it. 

If my assumptions are correct the man behind the creation of the blog and most of its posts is Clark Terry, a dedicated wine blog reader, but as you can imagine, nothing happens in Berkeley without the approval of Kermit himself!  I'm hoping that even he will write a post from time to time!  Hope you enjoy it as much as I am, those guys definitely know how to Inspire Thirst!

Annual Tavel Tasting - with Michel Bettane!

It's that time of year again, crunch time!  I have 10 days to finish the tastings and write-ups for the Bettane & Desseauve Grand Guide des Vins de France.  So I've been spending my days going over my notes from all of the tastings I've already done, tasting more wines from producers that have sent more samples and doing some last minute vineyard visits.  For some reason every year I write about my visit to Tavel, and this year will be no different.  Namely because this year Michel Bettane came down from Paris to participate in the tasting with me. 

Having Michel Bettane come to visit an appellation is no small event, he is one of the top ten, if not five, if not 3 wine tasters in the world.  Every time I taste with him I come away in awe of his amazing ability to evaluate wines in a very fair, honest and straightforward manner.  Tasting with Bettane in an appellation that is far from the uppity, high-pressure tastings of Grand Crus in other regions is a real treat because you get to see the his real personality come through.  Over lunch at the lovely restaurant "La Genestière"  in Tavel joined by several vignerons from the appellation and by Sandra Gay their public relations agent, Bettane told the story of his first visit to Tavel 25 years ago.  He visited the monks at Château de Manissy and fell in love with their rosé which, at the time, was aged in large old oak casks.  This type of élevage, Bettane insisted, made for a rosé with more depth and amplitude than today's rosés that are virtually all made in stainless steel or concrete vats.  He encouraged the winemakers present, not to change their styles, but to try making a small amount in the old style to sell as a limited production "reserve"  cuvée.  Doesn't hurt to experiment, right?

For the tasting of the 2008 vintage we were joined by Richard Maby from Domaine Maby who is president of the appellation of Tavel and Guillaume Demoulin of Château de Trinquevedel, who is in charge of tastings for the local growers union.  Being that it is a fairly small appellation and that wineries generally one produce one Tavel rosé we only had 30 wines to taste.  That meant that there was no hurry and we could all take our time and taste the wines together.  It was a very pleasant atmosphere with Bettane tasting next to me, discussing the wines while I took notes and gave scores to the wines since it is my responsibility to write the section on Tavel for the guide.

At the end of the tasting we got to chatting about how well Tavel rosés can age (amazingly they age quite well)  and before we knew it both Richard and Guillaume produced older bottles.  We tasted a 91 Maby that was still quite alive, notes of grass and what they call in French "feuilles mortes"  or dead leaves, not really a bad thing though it doesn't sound all that great, what was really surprising though, is that the wine still had a nice freshness, it wasn't oxidized in the least.  Then Guillaume brought out an 89 and 1970 Trinquevedel, one that his grandfather had made!  The 1970 was really quite a lesson in aging rosé, it's not something that you'd want to drink every day, but it was not dead, far from it in fact.  The wine was a deep coppery color, and there were notes of orange peel, minerals, caramel and walnuts.  It  was very similar to a Tawny Port, save the fact that it was dry.  We all decided that it would be great accompaniment to a walnut tart that was not super sweet, with just a hint of sugar.  What a special treat to have the opportunity to taste these rare wines!

There you have it, yet another amazing day in Tavel.  There's something magical every time I go there, I can't wait to see what next year has in store for me!

A very good feeling!

As you can see from these pictures we finally finished pruning everything this weekend.  We had just the  mourvèdre left, which we always leave until the end.  My brother-in-law  Billy was here again, and lucky him, he got to finish it up for us, all by himself while Matt and I were plowing and spraying our magic concoction of goat milk whey, fresh cow manure, clay and basalt on the vines.  That was this year's recipe for the bio-dynamic pruning past.  Hopefully it will do the trick, and keep the mildew spores from propagating on the vines since it was a very wet winter and there were plenty of spores left out there from last year.  The weather here has been beautiful, but also wet, we're expecting more rain throughout the next week, the bud are just starting to burst, and we're seeing the first leaves opening up.

 Matt has been spending a lot of time getting things in order, making sure the sprayer works, fiddling around with various things that have been forgotten over the winter, and playing with his new tractor. We actually had both the tractors out last weekend, which was great!  I'm trying to get used to driving the new one, I have to admit, I'd rather be on the 63 Massey, it's so familiar, but the new one is certainly more powerful, and definitely more adapted to the work we'll be using it for.  At least we can use the Massey to plough, and during harvest for sure! 

 This is always a very busy time, often leaving Matt frustrated that he doesn't have more time to dedicate to the vineyards, but unfortunately, La Gramière doesn't yet pay the bills, so he has to continue to balance his day job at Cisco Systems with all of the pressures of the vines.  Everyone is saying that we'll need to treat early this year due to the high concentration of mildew last year, so we're trying to get everything ready so that when it's time we can get out there and protect our future grapes!  It's funny, I can't say why, but in my gut, I have the feeling that 2009 is going to be a great year.  Let's hope I'm right!