la gramiere

Oops! I forgot the arrival part...

Back to the barrel story.  As usual here at Domaine de la Gramière, things are never as easy as they seem to be in theory.  In theory getting two 500L barrels is great!  Then, though, you have to figure out how to get them to your house, and then you have to find a place to put them!  Well, thanks to our friend Peter Till, getting them wasn't that difficult.  Peter has a small Nissan pick-up truck, that without, I don't think we would ever have been able to make wine at all!  It has delivered sand and cement, transported grapes, and now 2 barrels.  I borowed Peter's truck and drove the 45 minutes to Roc d'Anglade to pick them up.  Remy has a small fork lift that we used to load the barrels, and luckily, Peter had stowed behind the seat two cargo straps with clamps on the end that you can use to tighten them down.  Once Remy got them all strapped down and we were "pretty sure" they would stay, I set off back home.  Slowly.  My worst thought was that one of them would fall out onto the road and hit another car and cause a big accident!  You can imagine, especially when I was all alone, Matt was away on business, oh my! What would I have done.... Anyway, after almost an hour of winding my way slowly around the curves of the small country roads I made it home and Peter came to help me unload the barrels.  We left them outside of the winery for the night since it was already dark.

A couple of days later Matt was back, so we called Peter for some help to get the barrels into place.  Because, of course, they weren't going to stay on the ground floor, we had to get them up onto the top of the old vats in the winery, which are at least 10 feet high, and the barrels are super heavy and most of all unweildy.  Hmmm. Could we try to push it up the ladder?  No.  Peter to the rescue!  He had a winch and some rope in his truck which we rigged to the roof beam, then there was the problem of attaching the barrel to one of the straps.  Matt had the brilliant idea of tying a string around a heavy duty chisel and then inserting it into the hole in the barrel.  (The string was so that we didn't drop the chisel into the barrel.)  Once the chisel was barred across the interior of the hole, it created something to hook the winch rope onto so that we could hoist it up!  Phew! We did it.  What a team. It's amazing what you can do when you are determined to find a way!

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.

Go on, have a good cry...

The vines are weeping here, it always gives me a little charge to see them.  Looking across the vineyard early yesterday morning you could see the sun reflecting on the drops of sap dangling from the freshly pruned vines.  When you see them you definitely understand why they say that pruning late is a good thing, it leaves a fresh cut so that the sap runs freely, helping the vine to rid itself of toxins, a sort of spring detox if you will.  Look closely and you can see that the wood is drenched several inches from the tip, they really are weeping!

Oh the Goats!

My sister-in-law Elise and I always joke about the Minnesota accent when we talk on the phone, so when I chose the title for this post, I imagine it being pronounced with an accent from the great white north! Oh the goats! 

Anyway, back to the goats.  Here in my village of Saint Quentin la Poterie, we are lucky enough to have a small goat cheese producer that makes the most delicious fresh goat cheese.  It's especially delicious at this time of year because the mama goats have just had baby goats and they are producing the most delicious milk imaginable, which translates into the most delicious goat cheese imaginable.  But, I am not writing this post to tell you about goat cheese, but about the whey that is a by-product of the cheese making, and that is the main ingredient in pruning paste.  What, you might ask, is pruning paste?  Well it probably exists in many forms, but the one I am talking about is a biodynamic preparation that we spray on the vines just after pruning.  It is supposed to help the vines heal more quickly and to fend off nasty molds and bacteria that can cause diseases in the vineyards.

You make the pruning paste out of composted cow manure (which we get from a biodynamic preparations service),  bentonite or montmorillonite clay, and  whey (from cows, goats or sheep). In French whey is called "petit lait" or little milk, which I think is a much better name than whey.  We go to our local goat cheese maker to get the "petit lait" of which they have plenty.  They feed it back to the goats, it's great for their digestive system and for their coats, makes them nice and shiny, that is if a goat's coat can be shiny...  The bacteria in the whey and the manure have an antiseptic effect on the wood of the vines, limiting the development of other bacterias, they clay helps it stick to the vines.  Matt then uses a backpack sprayer to spray the concoction onto the freshly pruned vines. I say Matt does it, because I hate using the backpack sprayer, it's heavy and it hurts my shoulders, one of the few physical activities in the vineyard that I refuse to do.  Well, refuse might be a little strong, I would do it if I absolutely had to, let's just say that I prefer not to.

Anyway, the best part about making the pruning paste is going to get the "petit lait" because you get to see the goats!  The last two times Matt went, they had little teeny goats that had just been born that same day, so cute!  I went to get the whey this week, and they are a little bigger now, but still so much fun to see.

Signs of Spring

Besides the bees buzzing, there are lots of signs of spring in the vineyards right now.  Over the last few days we found as we were pruning that the most vigorous vines at the bottom of the vineyards were starting to weep when we snipped the old wood off.  They are weeping sap, which has started to rise again, a sure sign that spring is here.  -  What I meant by the vines at the bottom of the vineyards is that there's a slight slope and the "bottom" is usually the most vigorous area since when it rains they end up with the most water and thus suffer less and produce more. - Thought you might be wondering!

Then low and behold yesterday I saw my very first "bud break", that when the bud actually bursts open, it's very exciting!  The spiders are all out spinning complex webs to catch the gnats, mosquitos and little flies buzzing around, and we are even starting to see little lady bugs nestled in the bark of the vines.

As I look out my window the peach trees across the road are in bloom, the apricots too.  The almond trees have just finished blooming and their first bright green leaves are starting to appear.  I even saw two poppies yesterday but I am considering that a fluke since normally poppies aren't out until the end of April, and I'm in such a good mood with the arrival of spring that I don't want to think that it might be yet another sign of global warming...maybe they were just ready for spring like I am!

Thirsty Bees

Thirsty Bees
Vidéo envoyée par lagramiere

The other day, after the mistral stopped blowing, we noticed that the bees had come to drink out of Daisy's portable water bowl. By the end of the afternoon, you couldn't get near it! It was fascinating to watch them gather and drink up. We had to leave the bowl out there overnight and by morning there was no water left! Pretty amazing.

House for rent

Just in case you are planning a trip to southern France anytime soon, I thought I'd show you the house my parents just bought!  It is located in the village of Vers-Pont-du-Gard, which is right next to Castillon-du-Gard, which is where our vineyards are!  How convenient when we're out there pruning, or plowing or picking grapes, we can just run on over to Mom and Dad's for lunch!  They are not yet planning on spending all of their time here, so they've decided to rent it out as a vacation rental on a weekly basis.  Unfortunately for any of you hoping to come for harvest, they will be here, enjoying their new house and picking grapes! But it's available all summer long and late fall, winter and who knows when else, just depends on when they decide to come.  If you're interested, drop me a line and I'll put you in touch with them.  There are two bedrooms, one bath, a nice kitchen, living room, and a good sized courtyard with an outdoor bbq.  Vers-Pont-du-Gard (Vers for short- pronounced Vairsss) is a wonderful village with all amenities; bakery, pharmacy, little grocery store, post office, doctors, you name it.  The Pont du Gard (roman aqueduct built around 19BC) is just across the road, in fact, Vers is where the quarries for this famous structure are located.   The quarries are still active today, you can visit them during your stay!

Hello again

It's funny, I've been writing this blog for over two years now, telling you about the things that are going on here in southern France, how the vineyards are doing, how the wine is tasting and who's buying it.  Then suddenly I've let more than two weeks slip by without writing a post.  At first I felt a great pressure, like I was letting everyone down, then it gets worse, then after more than a week you start to wonder: "What if I just stopped? Would anyone notice? Would anyone wonder what happened?"  It's an odd feeling, you know there are people out there reading the blog because they send you emails and post comments, but what if I just disappeared.  Blogging can sometimes be surreal.

Anyway, like I said, these past two weeks have just slipped by.  First I was in London visiting my sister, not really wine related, though we did have a great meal at The Pot Kiln, an excellent English country pub owned by British chef/TV personality Mike Robinson.  Since then we've had lots of guests, family and friends, and we've been doing lots of pruning.

The weather here has been unseasonably warm, which is wonderful when you're out there pruning, but worrysome for the fruit trees and the vines.  In fact, we never really had a winter, the temperatures only dropped below zero once or twice, so it should make for an interesing growing season.  We are still way behind in annual rain-fall so we're hoping for some rainy days in the next two months to make up for it.  Meanwhile, we're out there pruning with family and friends, again feeling lucky that we have so many people willing to be a farmer for a day or two. Here are Brian and Jennifer (Matt's brother and sister-in-law) and below is David Buchanan, Matt's former boss! Imagine that.
 

The 2006 is coming along quite nicely.  We've been tasting it with various people including Martin Kössler and Dunja Ulbricht, our importers in Germany. I have to tell you, it's really good.  A bit less concentrated and tannic than 2005, more silky and rich in the mouth. It has the same "La Gramière" fruit with good acidity and a touch of "je ne sais quoi" that I think makes it delicious.  I think it will be a bit hit, well, I hope so!

I'm glad that some of you are still out there, I'll do my best to keep the posts coming and not to take so much time off! (from writing this blog anyway).