la gramiere

Labels, labels, labels

Although I tried to add all the label info required by the BATF (it's called something else now, but I don't know what) I knew there would be something we missed.  Suzanne Drexhage and Phillip Majerus work on all those lovely little details for Kermit Lynch, and they found one little thing was missing! We listed the grape varieties on the back label, and according to the US government, we are required to list the percentages of those grapes.  We also have to put a sticker on every bottle with the importer's name and address as well as the government warning.  I knew we would have to add the stickers to every bottle going to the US, but it didn't really sink in until I looked at the 1200+ 6-bottle cases in my garage. They now all have to be opened, each bottle must have two stickers placed on it, then be put back into the case and re-sealed!  Ugh!  I worked so hard on the labels so that it would be a nice package, now there's stickers all over the place. Oh well, what really counts is inside the bottle right?  I keep telling myself that in any case.  Next year it'll look a lot better, we'll know what has to go on the bottle before we make the labels, and before we bottle the wine.

Last week we had two recent college grads visiting us from the US.  Maggie Stephenson and Kris Johnson were lucky enough to come help!  They had planned on coming for harvest, but we had finished most of the picking before they got here.  Instead, they very willingly helped us with sticking the additional labels on bottles, and some fun work in the winery. It was great to have their smiling faces around while we were doing such repetitive work! Even our dog Daisy wanted to help...well, sort of.

The first shipment of 60 cases, destined for Colorado, will be picked up any day now!  That's very exciting since I am a Colorado girl and I will be thrilled to have it arrive there first.  In another couple of weeks they'll be picking up 200 cases headed for Kermit Lynch's store in Berkeley.  If you are interested in buying La Gramière please contact the Kermit Lynch distributor for your state and tell them you want some!  That way they will order some when it is offered to them. So far I know for sure that it's going to the Bay Area, Colorado, and a few cases to the Minneapolis area, so let them know if you are interested.  Another way to go about it is to go to your favorite wine shop and ask them to inquire about La Gramiere from their Kermit Lynch distributor. 

Then your wine shop can track it for you. The distributor will not be able to sell it directly to you; you'll have to buy it from a local wine shop.  I'll also keep you up to date when I ship orders off to the various states.

Ok, gotta get back to it, my parents are out there working while I'm in here typing...I may never hear the end of it!

Tough Decisions

One of the hardest things about winemaking is choosing the date to pick certain vineyards.  I already discussed choosing to pick the Syrah a bit earlier than I had originally wanted to.  Well, it has turned out to be fabulous. When you open the tap to pull a bucket for density tests and tasting, the aromas are wonderful. It's very floral. The enologist said it reminds him of the Northern Rhone, like Côte Rôtie. Now, that's a comparison I like. The potential alcohol is at 13,4, which for me is ideal.

This weekend we made a similar decision to pick our last remaining vineyard, the mourvèdre.  It's a small parcel that needs some TLC. There has been a lot of mortality, so there's not a ton of fruit.  Mourvèdre is a varital that ripens later than Grenache and Syrah. Last year we didn't pick it until the 2nd of October and I was hoping to do the same this year.  Then we looked at the weather for the weekend, rain, and they were predicting lots of it.  What to do? Bring it in and be safe, or take our chances and wait? 

I called Bertrand Cortelli of Rouge Garance. He said that there was no way he would be able to get all of his grapes in before the rain, so they were just going to wait it out.  He also said that Mourvèdre tends to be very Sensible or sensitive to rain, meaning that grapes tend to absorb the water and become diluted, but on the other hand at only 12 degrees potential, it seemed a bit early.  All in all he didn't give me a clear indication one way or the other. Darn!  Then I saw our enologist. I had gathered a sample so that we could test the sugars and acidity. We tasted the grapes. They were definitely ripening, had some good flavors and color from the skins.  It would be ideal to wait. How much rain would we really get. We began talking about the big picture, meaning our blend for 2006. We have two vats of grenache that are weighing in at 15 degrees potential alcohol and the syrah at 13,4. Hmmm, maybe it would be good to have the Mourvèdre come in pretty low. We really need to lower that alcohol. We decided to pick.   It rained for over 24 hours straight. I think we did the right thing.

Now, I'm sure that there will be some people out there who will read this and think we made the wrong decision, that you should always try to bring the fruit in as ripe as possible. Maybe they are right.  Maybe it's the inexperience, wanting to be on the safe side, but it's also the desire to make a wine that I like to drink, that isn't too alcoholic, and that has balanced acidity.  I don't want to make one of these over-ripe, super-extracted undrinkable wines that seem so prevalent today.  We'll see how it all turns out!

Egrappoir

Egrappoir
Vidéo envoyée par lagramiere

Here's a video of my dad, our friend Fred and Matt loading the grapes in the destemmer.

The wine makes itself!

...That's the secret to vinification that Serge Ferigoule of Domaine le Sang des Cailloux in Vacqueyras revealed to me last year before harvest.  He said that 95%  of  your wine is made in the vineyards, after that you just let it make itself. If you start with great fruit, then great wine is what you end up with. 

Well, our fruit was perfect this year. There was only the tiniest bit of rot in one section of the Syrah vineyard that we were very careful to remove.  Once back home, we emptied the cases into the destemming machine which removes the stems and crushes the grapes, added a small amount of sulfur, and chilled the wine to about 20 degrees C (about 68 F).  Now we wait.  Last year we seemed to wait between 5-7 days before the wine started fermenting, but this year it was only 2-3.  A fellow winemaker suggested that it was because we now have yeasts in our winery that weren't there last year, and this helped kick-start the fermentation.  You can tell that fermentation has started by the foam that bubbles out when you stick the thermometer into the cap of skins that has formed on the top, or by the pungent gas that wafts up from the top of the vat or, by the more scientific way of checking the density of the juice.  Once the fermentation has started we start pumpovers, which is a fairly simple operation.  It consists of pumping the juice from the bottom of the tank over the top and wetting down the cap of skins that has formed on the top.  Pumpovers accomplish several things; one, they break the cap up so it doesn't retain too much heat (fermentation produces heat), two they help to gently extract more color and flavor from the skins, and finally they add C02 to the cap to keep it from going off or having some funky bacteria growing in there.

Back to checking the density, which is just my kind of science, meaning even someone that retained absolutely nothing from her high school chemistry class can manage it!  Every day we check the temperature of the wine and then draw off a bucket-full of fermenting juice to check the density.  First, I fill a graduated cylinder (a plastic one is good since you tend to break everything during harvest), let the bubbles settle and then drop in the "mustimetre" which in my best translation is a must meter.  The term for grape juice that is meant to be turned into wine is "must" so this is a glass instrument that is used to measure the density, and therefore, sugar levels in the wine.  As the sugars transform into alcohol, the density of the liquid decreases.  A bit too technical ?  Sorry.  The "mustimetre" floats in the juice and you then read the corresponding number on the "mustimetre."  We start somewhere between 1100 and 1115 and when all is going well, these numbers go down 10-12 points per day.  So far all is going well and it looks like the Syrah will be the first vat we press.  Once it reaches 1005 in density we'll drain all of the juice out of the vat and then transfer the remaining skins to the press where we will press the rest of the liquid from the skins.  Looks like that will happen this weekend. It's a fun day, but lots of work...  Enough technical stuff for now.  It's wine-thirty here in France!

In other news...

The big news of a month ago now becomes even bigger... A couple of weeks ago we got a message from Kermit Lynch on our voice mail saying that Bruce Neyers, Kermit's national sales guru, was unhappy about the fact that he was not going to get to sell our wine.  This translates into Kermit now being our national importer and buying two-thirds of our wine!!!!!!!!!!!!!  Yippee!!! I waited to share this news with you until I was sure that it would all work out and that it was really true.  I have been exchanging emails with Bruce Neyers (who also owns his own winery Neyers Vineyards) so I can confirm to you that it is indeed true.

I have a funny story about Bruce and me... Back when I started working for Kermit Lynch, I did some wholesale selling for them in Napa.  Bruce agreed to take me around for the day to introduce me to some clients and then let me take over these accounts.  I had brought some sample bottles up from the Berkeley store and met Bruce at Palisades Market in Calistoga.  When we arrived, we met Joel Gott and his father who showed us to their back room where we would taste with them some of our wines.  This being my first outing with Bruce as a rookie salesman, I was a little nervous.  When I pulled out the samples, I realized I had forgotten a corkscrew.  I sheepishly told Bruce.  He gave me a very stern look and told me that I should never, EVER be without a corkscrew.  It turned out he didn't have one either!  We very embarassingly had to ask Joel if he had one!  I thought I had really blown it with Mr. Neyers...  He got over it and we had some good times while I worked with the Kermit Lynch crew.  I am so honored and thrilled that Bruce will be representing our wine throughout the US.  The first shipment is due to leave our cellars on Monday, but that's a whole other story.  I'll tell you all about it tomorrow!

Phew!

I have to say this year has gone much more smoothly than last.  Of course, that is completely logical.  We've made some improvements and are much more organized.   Again,  amazingly, we had lots and lots of help.  Friends that willingly came for a day, sometimes two, sometimes almost every day!  The weather here has been unseasonably warm, and more humid than usual too.  That makes it hot and sticky in the afternoon.

There is a section of our largest vineyard that was re-planted on a different root stock than the rest.  This section ripens a bit later, so we decided this year to harvest it a bit later. On Thursday afternoon, we started picking the Syrah.  It was a tough decision.  I have been hesitating because I think they could have ripened a bit more, but the sky looked gray to the south, and the skins on the grapes are thin.  We found a few patches of rot, so we decided to pick it.  If the rain came, the rot would spread quickly.  Tasting the juice today, I think we did the right thing.  It's delicious, with a very nice acidity,  and beautiful, rich, dark, color.

Hope you enjoy the pictures of our friends, we had such fun, and ate so well.  This year my mom decided to tackle the meals, and did she ever do a great job.  We had lots of delicious food and yummy baked goods, which helped us keep pick, pick, picking! Here she is in action! Along with all of our other friends, including; Luc and Christina, Fred and Marie Jo, and my sister Molly.   More to come soon!  Tommorrow we'll pick the last of our main vineyards, leaving only a small parcel of mourvèdre that we will harvest in late September or early October!

2006 is on it's way!

At about 7:30 this morning we officially started picking the 2006 La Gramière!  It was very exciting, but also frustrating as there are always little things that go wrong on the first day.  This morning the tractor wouldn't start and we had to jump the battery.  Later Matt decided to stop and buy a new one since it wouldn't hold the charge...

Oddly enough, there was a heavy fog over Castillon du Gard this morning.  It almost felt like we were in Burgundy.  It lasted until about 10:00 and then the sun broke through and it quickly became unbearably hot. Yuck.  It's terrible when you have friends that have come out to help and the weather doesn't cooperate.  Luckily, everyone was in good spirits, and everyone that came out today said they would return at some point during the week.  So it must not have been that bad.

I'm sorry, surely there's much more to tell you but my back is aching and I can barely keep my eyes open!  Just so you understand what kind of operation this is, you must know that Matt and I (and my mom!) were out there picking grapes all day along with our friends.  We then loaded the boxes of grapes into the van, took them back and put them through the destemmer.  After picking, we cleaned all of the cases, hoses, the destemmer and the buckets, loaded them back into the truck where they await tomorrow's picking!  We could never do this without all of our friends and family. 

I got two different readings from the grenache we picked today.  One said 13.5 and the other almost 14.5 potential alcohol.  I'm hoping it ends up more around the 13.5 mark.  We'll know when we see the enologist later this week.  I was on top of the vat trying to judge how much was in there, and suddenly I got a whiff of the freshly crushed grapes.  Wonderful! You can smell the sweet grapey quality, but there is also a definite spiciness to it, and the juice tastes oh, so good! 

Sleep tight everyone, I'll see you tomorrow in the vineyards!

The Natural Way....

As you all know, we are farming our vineyards organically and we want to produce a wine as natural as possible, thus we do not add any yeast to our crushed grapes to help them ferment.  We rely solely on the yeasts that exist naturally on the skins of the grapes.  Our oenologist, being the scientist that he is, frowns upon this, but at the same time respects our wishes.  So, in order to give our fermentation a kick-start, we are making a "levain" or starter, much like you would do if you were making bread.  My mom and I went out to the vineyards at about 8 pm tonight to pick some perfect bunches of grapes, as dark and unblemished as possible.  After a long day of cleaning out vats, and organizing the "winery", we drove out at sunset to collect some grapes.  When we got home, I dumped them in a bucket and crushed them with my hands, covered it with a towel and will leave it sit in a warm place to start fermenting.  When the first vat is full, I will dump this bucket in and hope that it will help get the grapes fermenting!  Only one more day to prep, and it will be full of errands to run and projects to be finished.  It's so exciting, I can't wait to get out there and start picking.  A friend asked me if I was dreading starting all over again.  On the contrary!  I'm so excited and optimistic.  Here we go again on a whole new adventure.  True, we have one harvest under our belt, so it seems to be a bit more relaxed, but we still have oh, so much to learn!  Yippee!!!