la gramiere

Meet me in San Francisco?

Tomorrow morning at o-dark-thirty we'll be leaving for the Portland Indie Wine Festival!  I'm so looking forward to it!  We'll be there from Thursday through Sunday soaking up the Portland vibe and enjoying the discovery of new Oregon wine producers!

After that we'll be working our way down to the San Francisco - Bay Area to spend a few days with the Kermit Lynch sales people, presenting our wine at various wholesale accounts, and hoping that they like it!!!  The 2006 just arrived in Berkeley late last week, so it will be fun to spend some time hearing people's reactions to the wine.  Well, at least I hope it will!  I hope they like it!!!

Since San Francisco is our old stomping ground, we can't wait to spend some time there!  I thought it might be worthwhile to set up a time and place where some of you who read the blog and who live in the Bay Area might like to come meet Matt and I for a drink!  I asked the Kermit Lynch sales staff where, and they came back with the new and oh so natural wine bar called Terroir!  Guilhaume Gerard who runs Terroir has gracious agreed to welcome all who wish to come on Tuesday May 13 from 6:30 on.  So if you read this blog and would like to taste La Gramière, we'd love to meet you there!

Terroir Natural Wine Merchant
1116 folsom street
san francisco, CA 94103
telephone_ (415) 558-9946
email_ info@terroirsf.com

Resurfacing from wedding madness~!

Sorry, I think, I'll be saying that a lot in the next few weeks, but I'm under the gun!  Last week it was finishing the guide and Molly's wedding, this week, the wedding behind us, it's still the guide, AND preparing for our trip to Portland for the Indie Wine Festival!  Yikes, Alice Feiring and Clark Smith have me shaking in my boots!  An oh, I have to finish the guide before I leave!  I don't think there are enough hours in the day, but I really felt I should check in and tell you what's going on here!

Had a wonderful time at the wedding.  From Wednesday on, I wasn't at my computer at all, except to print out programs! Family and friends were arriving non-stop and we were running around trying to finalize all of the last minute details of the big day! 

Tuesday, everyone came over to our house for an impromptu get together, we ordered pizzas and everyone helped "dispose"  (consume)  the samples I had opened that day to taste for the guide.  There were quite a few, but by the end of the evening there was hardly anything left! 

Wednesday we had a "winery visit and tasting"  here and then all went to Terroirs in Uzès for a great dinner on the Place aux Herbs, one of the first warm nights we've had!  I will admit I drank a bit too much wine and was a bit slow Thursday morning, but we were drinking Mas de Libian "Bout de Zan" and Rouge Garance Rosé, they both go down so easily!

Thursday we went to one of our favorite spots, called "Anne-Sophie  Huitres et Vignes"  it's a little old stone house out in the middle of the vineyards that Anne-Sophie restored and now serves ice-cold oysters and crisp white wine.  It's a great setting, casual and fun, and I love oysters!! 

Friday was the wedding, non stop rush from morning 'till dawn.  Saturday, I collapsed, did nothing. 

Yesterday I racked some of the 2007 grenache which is tasting great!  Matt went to the vineyards and sprayed 500 (a biodynamic preparation good for the soil)  with a back pack sprayer.  Fun Fun Fun!

Now I'm writing,  writing, writing, trying to finish before we leave, well you can see, I still found a way to procrastinate!

Weed Badger in Action!

Weed Badger in Action!
Vidéo envoyée par lagramiere

Another angle. It can really get some of the big nasty weeds that are all but impossible to rip out by hand. The special support that the blacksmith made, wasn't strong enough and started to bend, so we had to ask him to solder on another, and much heavier piece of iron, now, I don't think anything could make it bend.

The moment we've all been waiting for!

Weedbadger syrah 2
Vidéo envoyée par lagramiere

Here it is in action! Yes, it's true, the Weed Badger is up and running. We're pretty happy with how it works, now Matt just has to practice! I think he'll get better at it as we go! There's also an automatic sensor that needs to be installed,which will make it much easier, but it is recommended that you learn to use the manual function first. That's fine, but if you screw up, this thing just rips the vine right out! We've only lost a few, but we certainly don't want to lose anymore. I have decided that Matt will be the official Weed Badger operator, I'm not sure I could handle it! Another video to follow...

Oops!

Here's a good one. 

Friday night I was relaxing with a cup of tea waiting for Matt to get home from a business trip to Zurich.  The phone rings and it's Mr. Paume, the man we bought our vineyards from and from who we are renting our white vineyards.  We had asked him to grind up our vine cuttings in all of our vineyard, we don't have a chipper and they're so expensive, it's just as easy to pay him to do it.  Well, he tells me while he was shredding the cuttings he noticed that we hadn't pruned one of the white vineyards, the clairette.  What?? I said.  Of course we have.  We finished pruning it about 3 weeks ago.  No, he said, you haven't.  I was completely perplexed.  We had spend 2 days freezing our butts off with my parents pruning it, attaching the new canes to the wires and everything.  I couldn't understand, I thought he'd lost his mind, and he thought I'd lost mine.  "I'll go look again, and call you right back," he said. 

Five minutes later he calls me back.  No, you haven't done it.  Holy shit,  we pruned someone else's vineyard that happens to be about the same size and right next to it.  Ugh.  Not only did we prune it, we plowed it and put our nifty organic fertilizer on it last weekend!  I said to him," Oh no!  Do you think he'll be angry? "  "No, he replied, I think he'll be thrilled.  But you should call him anyway. More importantly though, you've got to get out there and prune the Clairette right away."

So guess what we did on Saturday...??? 

Unbelievable, but, in the end I suppose it's better than harvesting the wrong vineyard, right?

Vine food and body building

We recently had our the soil of our various vineyards analyzed, and found that some of them were  out of balance and that we needed to give them a boost.  As you certainly remember we spread some horse manure this fall, but we decided that it probably wasn't quite enough.  While we were in Germany last fall for a wine fair, we met some other organic and bio-dynamic winemakers from the Loire -Domaine de Bellivière -who told us about a product that is approved for organic viticulture that they used and had very good results with.  We decided to give it a try.   This is definitely something we don't want to do often; number 1, because it costs a small fortune, and number 2 because we'd like to seed nitrogen fixing plants, and find other ways to build up the humus of our soil naturally without having to have to use these types of fertilizers, even though they are organic. 

The product is called Bio-Post Bouchon, and it is, according to the company's literature, it helps regenerate the microbial life of soil and also helps fix nitrogen.  It's full of micro-organisms and microbial flora that help to revitalize the soil, especially ones that have been weed-killed in the past like ours.  So we ordered 4 tonnes of it!  That's 4 pallets of forty 25 kilo bags.  Yippee!  What a way to spend your Saturday!  We asked the former owner of our vineyards, M. Paume, if we could borrow his spreader, and he of course agreed.  We told him we were fertilizing our vineyards (well, we left out the organic part)  and he thought that was a very good idea.  The only problem was our PTO shaft on our tractor wasn't long enough, so he had to loan us his tractor!  That was super nice!  We got it all set up, Matt driving his tractor (I didn't dare)!  So once we got the first load in the hopper, we realized that I would have to transport all of the bags of "fertilizer" up to the vineyards; otherwise, Matt would spend most of his time going back and forth from the vineyards to the hangar to fill up. 

What a great job.  First filling the back of the car with these 50-pound bags of fertilizer and then unloading them up at each vineyard.  Then Matt would slit them open, lift them up chest high, and dump them into the spreader.  By the end of the day we figured I had moved 4 metric tons, twice and Matt once!  Now that's a great way to get in shape for summer. 

Today it's gently raining on our newly spread soil amendment (I hate the word fertilizer!) and this weekend we are planning on using the Weed Badger to work it into the soil.  Though they are predicting rain all week, so it may be too wet in the vineyards for the Weed Badger!  But we'll never complain about rain here, well at least not spring rain, this winter's rainfall is again far below average, AGAIN, so we are hoping to get more before it gets too hot.

Getting Certified

Since we bought our vineyards in late 2004 we have farmed them organically using only copper and sulfur in the vineyards along with many biodynamic preparations such as infusions of nettles, horsetail, willow and other natural remedies.  We didn't apply for organic certification though,  at the time it seemed unnecessary; for us, farming organically was a life choice, not some fashionable band wagon we were trying to jump on.  Recently though, we've felt differently.  More and more it is apparent to us that we need to have that certification, even if we never put the logo on our label, we must be able to say that we are certified organic. 

The certification process takes 3 years.  The first year you can't say anything on your label or anywhere in your literature about organic conversion.  The second and third years you are allowed to say that your wine is made with grapes that are "in organic conversion" and finally after the third full year you can be organically certified.  Currently in France there is only a certification for "organically grown grapes" and not organic wine or winemaking, that is changing though and we will soon be able to be certified in both, grape growing and winemaking.

It was Martin Kössler our German importer that first asked us to go ahead with the organic certification, he is a big proponent  of organic and biodynamic wines and is planning a convention of sorts in 2009 and wanted us to be a part of it.  Martin felt though, that if we were to participate, we needed the certification, and I agree.  It's too easy to say you're organic and/or biodynamic and then say that you're not certified because you haven't taken the time or because you don't believe in the label, more and more I truly believe that it's an important process that needs to be supported by all farmers who refuse to use chemicals in their fields. 

We met with the agent from Ecocert who will oversee our conversion.  First we visited each parcel (we have 6) he looked at the surrounding vineyards, for potential contaminations from neighbors, looked at the soil, at the weeds growing in our vineyards and at the general state of our vines.  He asked us some questions and finally I realized that he was trying to find out if we were earnest, trying to see if we were hiding anything and wanted simply to be certified without really believing in the process.  Of course in the end it was pretty easy to see that since we have all kinds of weeds and other interesting plants growing in our vineyards, that we were pretty serious about organics.  We then had to take him to the place where we store our tractor so that he could make a list of any chemical products that we might still have in reserve before going organic.  We showed him the half bag of sulfur and the half bag of copper that was left over from last year, both of which are allowed in organic agriculture, and he seemed content that we were on the up and up. 

So we signed a bunch of papers, he gave us a three ring binder in which we now have to keep track of   all of the products we purchase for use in the vineyards etc.  We are on the way to being certified organic grape growers, and as soon as we can be certified for winemaking we will be too.  There's another good one.  There are lots and lots of people out there who grow their grapes organically, then when it comes to winemaking will put anything and everything into the vat including GMO yeasts, enzymes, vitamins... all sorts of industrially produced things.  That seems completely incomprehensible to me.  Our one caveat is SO2,  which is used as a preservative in wine,  I'm not willing to give it up, I've tasted too many funky,  bizarre, unstable wines recently to go 100% SO2 free.   We don't use a lot, and I'm sure could use even less, but we're just not ready to go there quite yet. 

Weed Badger Progress!

I'm sure you have all been waiting with baited breath to find out how the Weed Badger assembly is coming along.  Matt has spent lots of time working on it, and at times has regretted not ordering it pre-assembled.  But in the end he's learned a lot about how the whole thing works, which should help in the event of a problem!  We even had to have our local blacksmith create a part that would help stabilize the arm.  Matt measured and re-measured drew a model and then finally decided to create a model out of cardboard so that he was sure it would work.  We took the model to the blacksmith and explained it to him, he said he would have it done in a couple of days.  The very next day he came by with it, it weighed a ton.  He said;  "you'll have to see, I made this part a bit shorter than the model, the piece of iron I chose was too short.  If it doesn't work, bring it back and I'll fit it."  Hmm, seems like Matt might not have spent all of that time making a model if he felt that the blacksmith could wing it!  Of course it didn't work, it was too short.  Matt took it back, the guy fixed it, but it still wasn't right.  So he ended up grinding some holes out himself and cursing the blacksmith for not having followed his directions.  Ugh.

Then there was the "thingy" he needed to attach the arm to his newly forged part.  The Weed Badger parts included a top link (a part used in a 3-point hitch)  to use to attach the arm to the tractor via our newly crafted part.  The only problem is that our vintage Massey Ferguson isn't quite as big as those new fangled John Deere's that everyone has in the US, so the top link was way too long.  So Matt took it over to our friend Peter Till's house and they had fun doing what boys do, cutting it down and welding it back together with sparks flying everywhere!  Finally we've  got the whole thing put together - well I can't really take much credit- but it's just about there.

We actually fired it up on Friday, pulled it out of the garage and started up the hydraulics, it was all going great until I noticed that there was a small, slow leak in at the oil filter.  Matt tried and tried to tighten it, but it clearly says to only tighten it by hand.  Ugh.  What to do?  There's over 60 litres of oil in the tank.  Do we drain the whole darn thing?  And if so, where do we put all that oil?  Matt had the brilliant idea of putting the pump on the oil drum into the reservoir and pumping it back into the drum.   The fun isn't over yet!!

But we did get it running and even got the head to rotate, so we know he's got 99% of it right!  It's just that little, tiny 1% that's the fly in the ointment.

Don't forget to vote, if you haven't already! :-)   

And the winner is....

Maybe me!  The nominees for the American Wine Blog Awards have just been announced and La Gramière has been nominated in the category for Best Winery Blog!  I realize that my blog has a more narrow focus than most wineries, therefore a bit less of a broader readership, but I'd sure love to win! Not everyone dreams of living in Southern France and making wine, and after reading this blog for awhile, I would imagine that I've convinced some that it's not a dream at all, but more of a nightmare! 

We've spent the last 4 days pruning, this is our last push, spring has sprung here and the sap is rising, some of the buds are very close to bursting open.  So, the pruning has to get done.  By the end of Northern Planting Time next Thursday, I hope to be finished.  The mistral wind has been howling this week, and my poor parents decided to come out to help us prune!  Once again we have our family out there with us slaving away.  I looked up over the vines at one point and asked them if they ever thought for a minute that they'd be spending their retirement pruning vineyards in southern France.  My mom replied; "Retirement, what retirement? " and my dad; "NO, not even for a second!" So there you have it, you never know where life will take you.

Easter weekend is always a time when, according to the bio-dynamic calendar, it is "unfavorable" to do any sort of work in the vineyards, we call these "black days".  Right now we are looking at 3 days where we can't prune or do any sort of vineyard work, I can't say I mind!  That doesn't, of course, mean that we won't be working...  We have an 8:30 meeting at the vineyards which I'll tell you about later,  then it's back to the garage to put the finishing touches on the Weed Badger!!! Stay tuned,  it will be making it's debut very very soon!

So, if you love this blog and you want to see it win, please vote!  And tell all of your friends to vote too!  Check out all of the other blogs in the other categories, there are some great ones out there, and lots of newcomers this year.  It's very exciting!

Le Mazet and the Saladin Sisters

Saturday night we  were invited to a party at a  "restaurant" called "Le Mazet" by the Saladin sisters of Domaine Saladin in Saint Marcel d'Ardèche.  It was in celebration of the first anniversary of the re-opening of the family restaurant called "Le Mazet" (or little house in provençal) .  A Mazet is typically a small stone building that was built in the vineyards for the vigneron to take shelter in during the cold winter months while out pruning or otherwise working in the vineyards.  It's not really a house, but a place to warm up or even cool off in the summer.  Nowadays it's often it's just a small one-room cottage or a small house that is used only in the summer with no heat, but if you're lucky there's running water.

We were invited by Marie-Laurence and Elisabeth Saladin, or as I like to call them the "Saladin Sisters," who are well-known here in the southern Rhône.  These two women stand out for their hospitality and - for lack of a better word - "sunny" personalities.  There really is no better way to describe them, they are the most genuine and generous people I have met in a long time, and their wines reflect their personalities flawlessly.  Natural and honest, never over extracted or over-done, they are wines that you want to drink, and not simply taste.  For me, in a wine tasting, this is one of the most important criteria.  There are many, many wines out there that show well in a tasting, polished, lightly oaked, soft rounded tannins, but somehow not real, if you will.  Wines that are as real and honest as those of Domaine Saladin are rare to find, and a pleasure to drink. 

The restaurant, which is more like a grill, with a short, simple menu, is a breath of fresh air.  No frills here, just fresh, high-quality ingredients that make your mouth water.  Piping hot grilled sardines were served as an appetizer, then they brought out a nettle soup that was thick and concentrated, we could just feel the cleansing properties of the nettles as we ingested this wild concoction. Finally there came wooden plates full of perfectly grilled local beef that just melted in your mouth, all washed down by Saladin Côtes du Rhône.

We were lucky enough to arrive early before the crowds of villagers, family and friends filled the restaurant.  It was even more crowded due to the fact that it was windy and raining outside which is rare for our region, bad timing, but lots of fun with a fire in the fireplace and a band singing in the back room.   We talked and talked wine with Marie-Laurence and Elisabeth, tasted their 2007s and then our 2007s.  Finally they were pulled away by the call of their guests that were thirsty for more of their delicious wine, so we made our way home down the windy roads of the Ardèche and the Gard happily recalling the wonderful evening we spent with our new friends.


Definitely seek out these wonderful wines!  They are imported into the US by Becky Wasserman Selection

If you're visiting the area:                    Restaurant Le Mazet

Saint Marcel d'Ardèche Tel : 04.75.90.50.46

restaurantlemazet@orange.fr