Field trips and new arrivals

A couple of weeks ago Remy Pedreno of the winery Roc d'Anglade came by the house to drop off some samples for the Bettane & Desseauve guide that I'm working on.  I had met Remy once before at a wine tasting in Germany, so I took advantage of the opportunity to have him taste our 2006s.  Remy has a great palate and isn't afraid to say what he thinks, so it was interesting to get his opinion.  We got to chatting and he mentioned that he had some old 500 liter barrels that he was selling.  This was interesting to me because last year both Kermit Lynch (our American importer) and Martin Koessler (our German importer) recommended that we put some of our wine into old oak barrels to soften the edges a bit.  The challenge though, is to find old oak barrels that you are sure are in good shape and aren't contaminated with any strange bacteria.  Remy said that he would give me one for free so that we could try it! Great! It's a great way to experiment a bit without a huge investment on our part.  I am not very fond of oaky wines so I want to be extremely careful. At the same time though, I do see the benefits of a smart "elevage" in wood. 

I went down to Remy's newly built winery to pick up the barrels (I ended up getting two, the rest he had already sold). He showed me around the winery and then I got to taste his 2006s from the new casks and 500L barrels that replaced the old ones.  These "foudres" as they are called in French, are made in Austria by a company called Stockinger, and are considered by many to be the best of the best right now in the barrel world.  Stockinger makes everything to order from regular 225L barrels to 3000L foudres to tronconic vats that you can both ferment and age the wine in.  This would be our dream, to have a couple of 3000L tronconic vats, however, the price is pretty steep, so we'll have to wait a few years!  Anyway, it was a joy to taste the wines, which are almost Burgundian in quality.  The texture of Remy's wines is amazing. You would never guess that they were from the Languedoc, and the Stockinger barrels all new, you could barely detect.  They added a finesse to the wines that was perfect, not overbearing, just the right, soft touch that made the wines all the more elegant.  Elegant is not a word one often associates with southern French wines, but these wines are certainly that.

Tasting wines with their producers is such a great thing to do when you're making wine. It's a great learning experience.  Seeing how other people make their wine, how they age them, etc. is an invaluable experience for winemakers. It gives you ideas, helps you understand vinification and aging better, and makes you a better winemaker yourself. There will be things you like at other wineries and things you don't like. Sometimes you walk away feeling as if you have such a long way to go, and other times you say to yourself, hey I'm not doing so bad.  It's all about the exchange of ideas and practices that makes everyone's experience that much richer.  I'll be visiting some more wineries for the guide in the weeks to come, I'll tell you all about them.