la gramiere

VINISUD

Vinisud. Yes that's what all of the French blogs are talking about right now. It was last week in Montpellier, about an hour from where we live. Since it's our first year making wine and the wines still haven't finished malo-lactic fermentation, we had no intention of participating. Well, until our banker called us and asked if we would like to come pour our wines one afternoon at their stand. Hey, not bad huh? A chance to go to the biggest wine-related trade show in France outside of Vinexpo, and for free. A small stand costs €2000, so we'd really have to be convinced that it would be beneficial to a small winery like ours in order to participate in the future. Pariticipation, that's what it seemed to be about, just being there, rubbing elbows with other vintners, seeing old friends, and possibly making a contact or two. Walking into the convention center in Montpellier, you realize just how many wineries there are out there, and just how small you really are! Our bank, Banque Populaire du Midi, had a large stand, that was located kind of far away in the back of the hall that hosted the wines of the southwest, far from our friends and colleagues in the Côtes du Rhône. We got out our samples, pulled from the vat that morning, with the labels that I had printed out from the computer and then glued on, then added a little tape on the corners... We felt a bit like amateurs, which of course we are. We didn't see much action there at the back of Hall 4, mostly because people didn't expect a winery to be pouring tastes at a bank stand. So after a couple of hours we decided to go make the rounds and try to see some friends. First we found Claudie and Bertrand Cortellini from Domaine Rouge Garance, a winery in the neighboring village of St Hilaire d'Ozilhan. These wonderful people practically saved our lives during harvest. They put us in contact with our enologist, they loaned us their harvesting cases, and generally re-assured us throughout our stressful first harvest. We left them with promises to return later with a sample for them to taste. Then we saw many others, Jean-Marie Popelin, who along with his wife Marie just started a winery not far from us called Chateau Haut Musiel,  Eric and Christine Saurel from Montirius a biodynamic winery near Vacqueyras, and many others. We quickly realized that it would be much better for us to pack up our samples and spend the time talking with colleagues, so that's just what we did. We took our samples back to the Cortellini's and there we got the best compliment we could have hoped for. Bertrand said that it really expressed the terroir of the vineyards around Castillon (where his vineyards are too). They both were very excited and thought that we had done a great job with our first harvest! Yippee! It was so nice to have two ( Michel Bettane and the Cortellini's) enthusiastic reviews of our wine in the same week. I can't wait until it's in bottle!

Exciting weekend! On Friday we received our business cards in the mail from Elise, my sister-in-law and our graphic designer. It was such a thrill to open the box and see our very own business cards! Now we are official! On Saturday, my good friend and wine journalist Michel Bettane, formerly of La Revue du vin de France, now out on his own with his colleague Thierry Desseauve, came to visit for the weekend and taste our wines.  www.bettanedesseauve.com Boy was I nervous, and excited at the same time. To have one of France's most respected wine journalists come, (as a personal favor of course) to taste our wines, was a great honor, but also pretty darn scary! What if he didn't like them, what if he found a flaw in them, what if he called them simple and one-dimensional???? Well, there was of course the chance that he would like them too.
Michel arrived at lunch time and it was a beautiful day, so we decided to go into Uzès to have lunch at one of my favorite lunch places, Terroirs which is right on the Place aux Herbes. Saturday is market day and as I said it was a beautiful day so the terrace was already full. Tom, the owner poured us a glass of wine, a Vin de Pays de Vaucluse, a delicious quaffer from Domaine des Aphillanthes. Spring was in the air, everyone was peeling off their coats and soaking up the warm sun. As we were finishing our lunch, the former owner of Terroirs passed by, he is opening up a new restaurant in March, and invited us to stop by and see how it was coming together. He asked my to bring some samples for him to taste so that he could put our wines on his list, even if they weren't going to be ready until July, that was no problem! Great news, he said that he likes to "faire travailler les copains" (or help sell his friends' wine).  Very exciting!
Back at the house, it was now time for the moment of truth. I had pulled samples from all of the tanks that morning in order to give them a bit of time to breath and to warm up a bit. We started with the rosé, which is showing well right now. He was pleased, clean fruit, full, ample, a touch heavy due the ripeness and high alcohol. He gave us some pointers for bottling and we moved onto the mourvédre, which up till now I haven't been very happy with. He stuck is nose in the glass and said, "now that's mourvédre". Wow! I was really surprised, notes of garrigue herbs, thyme, rosemary, a touch of leather. All good. He liked the other two also! So we are off to a better start than I thought. Wait, that was only Saturday, I tell you the rest in the next posting...

Well, our attempts at gently warming the wine didn't work, the malolactic fermentation still hasn't taken place. Our enologist wants us to stop warming and add a small amount of SO2 to protect the wine from bacteria and other nasty things that could occur. Adding the SO2 will stop the malolactic fermentation from taking place, at least for a couple of months. So, that means we may have to wait a bit longer in the spring to bottle the wine. Oh well. I'd rather leave the wine ferment on it's own naturally than continue to manipulate to. I guess we'll all have to wait a bit longer to taste it!

A trip to the Distillery.

That's what I did yesterday. You see, the French government requires anyone producing wine to "give" them a certain percentage of their harvest, be it in marc (the skins, pips, and various fermented yellow jackets and other things), in lees (the solid grape matter that settles at the bottom of the tank after fermentation) or in wine if you don't have enough of the first two to fill the requirement. All of these things are picked up by your local distillery to be distilled into industrial alcohol. Think of it as an extra tax on wineries. Well, given our chaotic state just before harvest, we didn't have time to figure out who to contact and how to go about giving our grapes skins etc. to the distillery so we took our marc back to the vineyards and composted it. That is a shame, because now we will almost certainly end up having to give them some of our wine. Some, meaning about 200 liters, which is more than I care to think about! So, back to the distillery... In late November we racked our wines -- transferred them from one tank to another in order to "take it off the lees" or remove the solid grape matter that had settled to the bottom of the tank. This turns out to be a very thick purple sludge. We stored it in a big blue plastic barrel, put some SO2 on the top and then promptly forgot about it. I called the nearest distillery located about a half an hour away from here to find out how it all works. They said that first I had to become of member and buy shares - which cost a whopping 3 euros per share, fill out a bunch of paper work and then promise to deliver to them 4 hecto-liters (400 liters) of wine, which is about 4% of our production. The lees that we recovered from racking all of the wine turned out to be about 2 hectoliters, so we were half-way there! Not so bad since we had missed out on the skins etc. So, I drive up there in my little blue putt-putt 1978 Renault, the poor little thing barely made it with 200 kilos of wine in the back! I couldn't believe it when I arrived, the place reminded my of something out of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory." The distillery is a huge operation with great big smoke stacks spewing out white steam. There were tons and tons of wine by-product, skins, seeds, stems etc in great big heaps like at the dump. Big bull-dozer type machines would come to scoop up large quantities to be heated boiled and re-boiled resulting in the precious alcohol that the French government seems so interested in. There I was, in my little tiny car being passed by huge trucks with cisterns full of purple gunk, vying for a place to empty my little barrel full of goo. What a crazy experience!