la gramiere

Our first order! Can you believe it? Last week we had dinner at a new restaurant in Uzès. With us we brought tank samples of our rosé and our Côtes du Rhône villages (grenache-syrah blend). The owners of the restaurant are Uzès restaurant veterans who formerly owned the well-loved Terroirs Café on the Place aux Herbes. Terroirs is a wonderful café-type restaurant with a small wine and local gourmet products shop as well. We became acquainted with Dominique and Frédérique Becasse through Terroirs. It's our favorite place to eat in the summer time. When they sold last year, we were quite distressed. There aren't many good places to eat in Uzès and we didn't want to lose our favorite. Luckily, they sold it to a young couple who have kept it largely the same. Even better, Dominique and Frédérique have now opened a full-scale restaurant in Uzès called Le Bec à Vin. Now, instead of one favorite place, we have two!
Dominique has been asking us for awhile to taste our wines. We decided that a Tuesday night in March would probably be pretty slow, and therefore a good night to take some wine for them to taste. We started with the rosé. Our rosé is 85% grenache, 15% mourvèdre, and weighing in at almost 15 degrees. It's a big boy (It was harvested the 7th & 8th of September. We didn't want our grenache to be so hot, but due to the drought, the sugars were particularly high this year). I was a little nervous Dominique would find it too alcoholic, but the one thing that saved our rosé is that it has very good acidity, therefore bringing a lot of freshness to the wine. Luckily for us, he loved it! So did we, as a matter of fact. We spent a lot of time tasting and re-tasting our rose. The wine just got better and better. It's definitely a wine to drink with foods, spicy foods, grilled meats etc. In the end he even said that we should compare it side to side with a Tavel from Domaine de la Mordorée. He thought that it would stand up to it very well!
We then moved on to the red, which still hasn't finished it's malo-lactic fermentation and, therefore, is a bit more difficult to taste. It's very aromatic in the nose, almost floral. It got busier in the restaurant so we didn't have as much time to talk about the red, but he said, " Just imagine, this wine isn't even finished, and it's a better wine than many wines already in bottle!" We talked a lot about pricing and he gave us some very good advice, even telling us to price it higher than we had originally thought. In the end, he said that he would re-do his wine list in July and would like to have both of our wines on the list, just about the time we are hoping to have the wines available for sale!!! What a great feeling, our first order!

Spring!

Well, almost. Seemingly overnight, the almond trees are in bloom (at least 3 weeks late). The cherry and apricot trees are all suddenly starting to burst. It's such a pleasure to see the white and pink blossoms on the trees, a sure sign spring is coming. Last Thursday, my dad and I spent the day pruning. It was so warm, we wished we had short sleeves on. Then yesterday the dreaded mistral decided to change everything. 100 kilometer per hour winds, yuck! and we had to spend the whole day out there. Luckily, my sister, Molly, had come from England for the weekend, and our friends, Peter and Serge, came to help out too. So in the end the day had kind of a festive feeling. Helped by the fact that we were on the verge of finishing our biggest vineyard, the day turned out to be quite fun. Having lost my dad to a nasty cold, Molly to her flight back to the UK and Serge to various house projects that awaited him, Matt, Peter and I finished at about 5 o'clock. What a great feeling! Today we're headed back out to start on the Syrah. That's just about all we're doing here right now, pruning. The French have a saying: Taille tôt, taille tard, rien ne vaut la taille de mars. "Prune early, prune late, the best month to prune is the month of March. Good thing, since we still have half of our vineyards to finish! Almost everyone else has already finished, so I feel like we're behind, but as we are snip, snip snipping, the sap is beginning to drip from the ends where we cut. That is why March is the best month, as the sap rises and drips out, it helps the vines flush any bad things left over from the previous year. So we keep telling ourselves that we are right to be pruning so late in the season. Let's hope we're right!