Baby Grapes!

Take a look at these lovely little syrah grapes.  The flowering now finished, the grapes are starting to really grow! The grenache isn't far behind. I'll take some pictures tomorrow.  I haven't been down to check out the mourvedre in a few days , so we'll do that too. Last week the wind blew for 6 days straight.  Often people ask me if the wind on a certain day is considered a "Mistral" and I tell them that any time the wind blows over, say 30 km/hr and out of the North, people call it a Mistral.  Last week was exceptional though, it was 6 days of winds with gusts up to 95 km/hr the temperatures dropped 10 degress celsius overnight and stayed quite cool for the whole week.  That's not great for grapes in flower...it causes what we call "coulure".  In my handy little French-English wine dictionary (written by Paul Cadiau) called "Lexivin" in French or "Lexiwine" in English it says that in English it's called  "shatter" or flower abortion.  These poor little flowers didn't choose to shatter or abort, they were simply blown off, all the way to Morocco perhaps...  The syrah seems to have withstood it pretty well, we'll see how the grenache fared.