Lack of Experience...and Lessons learned

Arrgh! Bit of a setback on Thursday.  I decided, just out of curiosity, doubt, a hunch, I don't really know what, to call an enologist friend in Burgundy to chat about the latest analyses of the wine.  It's funny, and not so funny.  I am not an enologist,  not even close, so, when I receive these bulletins, I have learned over the past few months to interpret some of the numbers, but some I still have no idea what they mean.  That's what happened when I received the last numbers for the malolactic fermentation, I had no idea what they meant.  So I called our enologist to find out what he thought and he didn't get back to me right away.  So, I decided to call my friend Kyriakos Kynigopoulos, who is a well-known enologist in Burgundy and also a good friend. 

Stop! Hold the presses, or the bottling machine in this case, it turns out the malo-lactic fermentation isn't finished, and according to Kyriakos, there's no way we can bottle the red in 2 weeks. Ugh! Just when I was getting everything in place.  Needless to say, I was a little disappointed and not very happy with our enologist. To be fair though, he is used to working with big cooperative wineries that just want to get the product out and get it sold. He said that we still could bottle if we want in June but that we would have to give it a good dose of sulphur to block the malo-lactic fermentation! Just what I want to do, after working so hard all year to make an organic wine, right,  add lots of sulphur just so we can bottle it a few months early!  I asked him what he would do if it was his wine, he said he would wait.  Arrghh! At the end of our conversation I think he understood me a bit better and realized that for us the most important thing is the quality of the wine, not the need to bottle it early! 

Now I know what the Malo-lactic numbers mean, and believe me I won't forget it! We are still going to bottle our rosé on the 7th, that is ready and waiting to be drunk!  The tourists are starting to arrive in Uzès and we want them to be quaffing Domaine de la Gramière rosé while sitting on the Place aux Herbes!

On another note, remember those cherry blossoms I took a picture of last month? Take a look at them now! Yum....