la gramiere

Wine Tourism

When I'm not in the vineyards, the cellar, at some office of French bureaucracy, or cleaning my house because my parents or sister-in-law or some other distinguished guest is coming, I sometimes have the pleasure of doing a wine tasting evening or a wine tour.  Take this week for example.  Saturday night I was asked to host a wine and food pairing dinner at the Academie du Vin et du Goût.  Usually I am a customer there.  Once or twice a year, depending on her schedule Joanne Weir brings a group of students over for a wonderful week of cooking classes here in Provence.  I am in charge of planning the weeks' activities for Joanne and we spend an evening at the Chateau de Clary ( home of the Academie of Wine and Taste) pairing food and wine.  The owner Jean-Jacques Verdat opened the business about 3 years ago. They have wonderful facilities; a large reception room that could easily hold 300, an ancient cellar that could hold almost as many, two small tasting rooms for food and wine pairing evenings and finally a professional tasting room with individual spitting sinks for each participant.  Last week they had a group of Danish and Norwegian journalists visiting four different departements of the southern Rhone; the Ardeche, the Gard, the Drome and the Vaucluse.  Since not all of the journalists spoke French, they asked me to come host the tasting evening and "walk" them through the wines of each of these regions.  It's a great evening and there's lot's to be learned.  For instance, did you know that Saint Peray, an appellation at the southern end of the Northern Rhone famous for  its whites also makes a delicious sparkling wine made from 100% marsanne?   Well I didn't , at least  until fall 2004 when I started taking Joanne's groups there. 

I also lead day tours of the southern Rhone wine regions.  On Monday I hosted a wonderful group in the appellation of Les Baux.  There were 4 couples from Conway, South Carolina, not far from Myrtle Beach, they told me.  We spent the day touring wineries around Les Baux and St. Remy de Provence. It's a great area to taste wine and visit wineries.  Contrary to much of France, these wineries have taken a hint from Napa Valley and all have tasting rooms and fixed hours of operation so you can taste the local wines.  We started with the very Napa-esque  Chateau Romanin, a newly built mega-million winery tucked up against the Alpilles, not far from St Remy.  It's owned by some Parisians who are interested in biodynamics, and they spared no expense building the winery.  Frankly it was the antithesis of a typical French winery, but it was very interesting to visit. We visited 3 other wineries that afternoon, Terres Blanches, Mas de la Dame and Mas St Berthe.  Interestingly, all of the wineries in Les Baux have decided to go organic, except Mas Ste. Berthe.  They have gone as far as Lutte Raisonnée but still want to make sure they can fight a nasty outbreak  of something or other, if and when that occurs.  We had a nice lunch at the Bistrot des Alpilles in St Remy too!  They were such great people, lots of laughs and good times.  It's fun to get to spend a day away from it all and taste other people's wines.  Today (Thursday) the group was headed to see the Pont du Gard, which is just a short way from my house, so I invited them to come taste our wines and tour our winery (all 20 square meters of it!)  It was such a pleasure to have them visit and taste our wines.  When are you coming????

Baby Leaves!

It's such an exciting time of year.  My dog Daisy and I took a walk in the vineyards on Friday, most of the buds have opened and the baby leaves are opening up.  (Click on the picture to enlarge them so you can really see the detail.) The color green at this time of year is one that cannot be duplicated on any color palate.  It's so bright and fresh.  Walking through the vineyards just makes me smile.  The excitement of the new year, the hope of good weather and a great harvest.  There's still loads of work to be done, but somehow  when you look at the vines and see the result of a winter's worth of pruning, it makes it all worthwhile.

Email troubles...

I have been having trouble with my email lately, I'm still working on it, so I've changed the address in the link in the lefthand column of this page in case anyone wants to try again!  Thanks, I'd love to hear from you!

This is not Napa...

We had a great Easter picnic yesterday with lots of friends, some old, some new, and a great big Easter egg hunt for all the kids.  As we were setting up, using saw horses and long boards to make the tables, I thought to myself, "This is not Napa."  There was no fancy catering, no servers, and bottles of our wine had just been pulled from the vat with labels printed out on the computer and stuck on with a glue stick.  Oh well!

Lucille made a delicious asparagus and prosciutto tart, Lucy a yummy couscous, Matt made his famous spring salad with fava beans, green beans, asparagus and potatoes, and I made Joanne Weir's recipe for Brandade.  Sacha made a yummy fruit tart, Sophie a Russian Easter dessert that was to die for, and there were so many other things, it was unbelievable.  Then our friend, Sylvain, (who we affectionately call the chicken man) came with chicken marinated in lemon and olive oil to put on the grill!  All of this washed down by the official Domaine de la Gramiere 2005 blend.  Delicious.  It may not be Napa, but I think it's oh so much better.

No going back now!

Ok, so we did it!  I admit to being a little nervous Sunday when we did the actual blending.  I kept saying to Matt, are we sure?  Once we do this, there's no going back.  It took a long time and a lot of transferring the wines back and forth, but they are now blended.  We don't have a tank big enough to hold all of the wine in one, so we started by putting half of the pure grenache into a bigger tank that was empty, then we put in half of the mourvèdre in the new tank too.  Next we put the rest of the mourvedre into the 1st tank of grenache, all of this we did by simple gravity.  After that we pumped half of the syrah-grenache into the big tank with the mourvèdre and grenache and combined what was left with the other tank of grenache-mourvèdre.  Sound confusing?  It sure was for us.  At the end we added 1 hectoliter of the press wine to each of the blended vats and then pumped some of each into a fiberglass tank with a floating lid. That way we ended up feeling that we had a pretty homogenous blend.  I'm sure we'll transfer it at least one more time before bottling to try to ensure that it is as homogenous as possible.  That was just the beginning though, after all that, there's still the clean-up, which anyone who's ever worked in a winery will tell you, is the most work of all.  Here's a picture of the lees at the bottom of the cuve and the tartrates that are left on the walls of the vat after fermentation!

We just had a fresh asparagus omelette for lunch, I wanted to taste the wine again a couple of days after we blended it.  It was delicious! The 2nd grenache tank that was higher in alchohol and a bit riper, added just the right amount of richness to it and the mourvèdre a bit of spice.  I can't wait for you all to taste it!

The Blend

Saturday night we organized a dinner with some good friends in order to decide the best blend for our wine.  There aren't that many options but,  a decision had to be made none-the-less.  It's a very fun exercise. Originally we thought that we would make two blends and two bottlings, a Côtes-du-Rhône and a Côtes-du-Rhône Villages (the villages vineyards being a better terroir and therefore a slightly better wine, in theory.) Lately though, after browsing through some local wine shops, looking at all of the wines on the shelves, I wondered if it wouldn't be better to make just one wine the first year.  Many wineries have 3 different wines on the shelf, a Côtes-du-Rhône, a Côtes-du-Rhône Villages and then maybe some sort of reserve blend.  The problem is, as a consumer, you have no idea really what the difference is between these wines, except for price. The back label may have a nice paragraph about where the grapes were grown, what varietals are in the blend and how it was made, but in the end I think it may just lead to confusion, especially since we are a brand new winery.  Secondly, I don't think qualitatively there was a huge differnce in between our two wines that would justify a price difference for the two bottlings.  They are both great, but would they be even better blended together?  That's what we set out to discover.Here's a picture of Matt's brother Brian and the aftermath of our dinner-tasting! I for got to take one during the tasting! Oops!

My favorite things...

Now, for those who know me well, they know that my list of favorite things is quite long, I tend to use the word favorite quite often.  I tend to like superlatives.  Right now, though, as I continue to do the same things that I generally do all year long, everything seems to be a bit brighter, a bit more cheerful, and altogether more enjoyable.  I suppose it all has to do with spring. 

On my morning walk with our dog Daisy, we drive just a short way out to our favorite spot,  surrounded by farmland, freshly plowed fields, vibrant green winter wheat, and old cherry trees.  There's a small orchard of cherry trees that hasn't been maintained in many years, meaning that the trees have a natural beauty that the neatly pruned, cultivated ones don't.  We've all seen cherry trees in bloom before, but have you ever taken the time to look at the blossoms up close, I never had.  Take a closer look, they sure are beautiful.

Another favorite is of course the Wednesday market in Uzès.  I've mentioned it before here, but I can't help mentioning it again.  Contrary to the Saturday market, Wednesday is more intimate, allowing only farmers who grow or raise everything they sell. The Place aux Herbes is filled with vendors who sell their produce, meats, goat cheese and olives.  We always meet our friends for coffee and enjoy the sun on the square if it's warm enough, or huddle up in a cozy café if not.

One last one for today, I could go on and on of course.  Last winter I finally found the perfect "Dutch bike", the kind they ride in Holland that sit upright, and easily holds a basket on the front.  I'd been looking for one for a few years, I wanted an old one, a little beat up, one with character.  Yesterday I got it out and rode it up to the bakery to pick up some bread for lunch.  It's such a great feeling to ride a bike like this, you feel so free, like a kid again. 

You may ask yourself what this all has to do with wine, well in truth not much, but since this is a wine blog from the south of France, I figured sharing the pleasures of daily life here would be welcomed from time to time too!

Fermentation

Last night I noticed a comment was posted on the blog from Tom at Fermentation, one of the wine blogs that I check almost daily just to see what he has to say.  Needless to say I was quite gratified that he had read my blog and left a very nice and encouraging comment.  A few hours later I thought, well, since he read my blog, maybe, just maybe, he would put a link to my blog on his site.  Well, guess what?  He did!  I am very honored to be among the blogs that Tom thinks you "must read".  For some reason I've always wanted to be linked on his site, he seems like someone who is very discerning when it comes to blogs and he won't just include anyone that sends him an email.  Thanks for the nod, Tom!

Hey look everybody!  By some fortuitous turn of events Mike Duffy over at Winery Web Site Report happened to notice that I changed the address of my blog.  Mike is such a great guy, he sent me a detailed email of how I could better my blog and my website.  Today he even wrote a blog entry about it! Click on the link above and you'll see what he has to say about my blog!   Thanks again Mike!

Welcome!

Well, here we are at my new blog home!  Hope you like the new look, the most important thing though, is that there are pictures again! Yesterday I spent the day racking the mourvèdre and the press wine. Racking is the process of moving the wine from one tank to another tank and removing the lees, or sediment from the bottom of the first tank, and then putting the wine back again.  We are doing this with the mourvèdre because it has a high volatile acidity, which isn't good.  Volatile acidity can make a wine smell like nail polish remover, which is very bad.  Mourvèdre has a tendancy to have  higher levels of volatile acidity, but  we want to make sure that it doesn't get any higher.  The press wine we racked  because we haven't done it since harvest so there was a pretty good amount of sludge on the bottom of the vat. I took that sludge (or in professional terms "the lees") and added some SO2 to it, mixed it around a bit and put those lees back in with the mourvèdre.  This is a little trick that my friend and wine critic Michel Bettane told me about, he said that if you remove all of the lees from mourvèdre it can dry it out, grenache lees are apparently perfect, so we'll see.  I'm not at all sure what our enologist Mr. Almeras would say about that, and I'm not sure if I'm going to tell him that I did it!