la gramiere

Tangled up in the Syrah

All of our vineyards are pruned "en gobelet" (head pruned, Ithink in English) except for the Syrah, which is trained on wires since it is not a varietal that will 'stand up on it's own, meaning that the shoots fall to the ground and stray out into the rows if they are not trained onto wires.  There are some pretty good trellis systems out there that make keeping the shoots on the wire pretty easy, but of course, ours is not that easy!  It's an older system that greatly needs to be updated. We had intended to do that this spring, but as usual, we ran out of time.  So, I've been spending my mornings out there intertwining the now quite long syrah shoots through the wires to keep them from overtaking the rows, and to get them off the ground.  It can be pretty delicate work. It's easy to break the whole thing off if you're not careful. It happens though and there's nothing you can do about it.  There are two main reasons for doing this. Number one is so that the tractor can easily go down the rows when we are spraying sulfur and copperand number two is so that it keeps the air circulating and the sun gets to the new little grapes that are quickly forming.  It's pretty tedious work, and not my favorite thing to do, so imagine how useful an "i-pod shuffle" could be to me out there.  My sister Molly thought it would be a good idea, so she got me one for fun.  I'll admit that when she gave it to me I wasn't jumping up and down. I didn't really think I needed it.  BUT!  The other day when I finally loaded on some music from my i-tunes library, it was such an amazing change.  The time passed so much more quickly!!  I'm not a super-savvy tech person, so I just let i-tunes load the music on there randomly. The only problem was that every so often, I got Diana Krall and Nat King Cole singing Christmas Carols!!  I guess I'll have to read the directions!

Spring Vineyard Photos by Gaspard Aichele, age 11

Weed killing- The natural way...

First of all a Daisy update and a big thank you to all who emailed my with their thoughts and wishes for her!  She unfortunately lost the tendon on the front of her left leg, which will mean that she will always have somewhat of a gimp, but thanks to antibiotics and a lot of TLC she's now starting to heal.  The wound on her leg is a nasty one that will take several weeks to close up, but the rest of her is coming along well.  She's in a fair amount of pain but is persevering, trying to adapt to her new foot which doesn't move the way she always wants it to.  Thankfully she is young and had lots of energy and joie de vivre!  She'll be just fine in a few months, maybe not quite as fast on her feet, but we're so very thankful to have her home!  That's all that really matters....

Now back to our scheduled programming:

One of the biggest problems with organic agriculture is weeds.  We have a fair amount of them, and this year we needed to try to get rid of them.  Up until now we've been mowing the rows, plowing and pulling as many of them as we can.  We bring a hoe out to the vineyards and try to chop out the thistles, which are the worst. You can buy a super duper attachment for your tractor that actually plows in between the vines, but they cost about €10,000 and for us we'd need a new tractor too, since ours doesn't have external hydraulics. Hmmm not quite in our budget this year.  Mr. Paume, the man who sold us our vineyards offered to loan us the old-fashioned model, a sort of plow that has springs, that you can manually push in between the vines to get a good chunk of the weeds.  So last week we spent 2 days plowing all of the vineyards, it was great timing, a few days later we had a nice steady rain which soaked in right at the foot of the vines thanks to this ingenious, if old fashioned implement!

Our friend Gaspard, age 11, wanted to come help for a day, so he's the one who you see in the photos pushing the handle back and forth.  Matt and I took turns driving the tractor until Gaspard was too tired to do any more.  I then offered him my camera and told him to take as many pictures as he liked.  Gaspard's father Benedikt Aichele is a jewelry designer in Uzès, his creations make you swoon, his mother Sophie Lossky is an architect and designs furniture, you'll see Gaspard has a great eye.  I'll post a slide show of his photos for you!

Lastly I couldn't resist showing you these two pictures, the first is a row that I plowed, the second one that Matt plowed.  For some reason I am incapable of plowing in a straight line, either I am too close or too far away, and I have Matt behind me constantly telling me!!  As you can imagine, by the end of the day, we need a break from one another, it's frustrating for us both!  Do you think anyone offers courses on how to plow in a straight line???

Think good thoughts for Daisy

On Thursday afternoon, we went off to Switzerland and left Daisy with our friends for the weekend.  Friday morning I got a call from them saying that she had run away.  I came back on the afternoon train to look for her and to put signs up all over the area.  No sign of her until this morning when I opened the back door and found her lying there, badly wounded.  We whisked her off to the vet, and as far as we can guess she was attacked by wild boar, and possibly hit by a car too.  She must have been passed out for a couple of days and when it started raining this morning she made her way back.  She has several wounds all over her body, the worst one being on her front leg, where it is lacerated to the bone, with an opening of about 6 inches.  The biggest worry is the infection, it seems this probably happened on the first day she got out, and now 4 days later it's looking pretty bad.  Hopefully she reacts well to the antibiotics and they are able to stitch her up and save her leg.  So we're pretty sad around here, happy that she's back with us and that she will be ok, but so very sad to think what she's been through. 

In other news, like I said, it's raining here!  A good steady rain, at times hard but all in all the vineyards are getting a good soak.  We did lots of plowing last week with a pretty nifty implement that a friend loaned us, I've got some great pictures I'll put up very soon!  Thanks for your thoughts for our pup! She's very brave and strong, I know she'll be ok, but it's been a pretty awful experience.

Finished! Well, almost...

It's been pretty crazy around here!  Last week I spent way too much time on the computer finishing up my work on the Bettane & Desseauve Guide. I finally sent off my work, there are a few loose ends to tie up, but the bulk of it has been handed in which is a huge relief!!!  It may seem like having to taste through lots of different wines is a lot of fun, but I  and can tell you, at the eleventh hour, when you have to finish writing about a winery and their wines, it's not so pleasant opening up 10-12 bottles at 10am!! and then again at 11am for a different winery, and then another at 2pm.  Our friends sure are happy though, lots of free wine to drink! Otherwise it would just end up getting poured down the drain.

Now we are going through lists, double checking, making sure that we haven't forgotten anyone.  It's not an easy task!! After working for so many months on a project you are so happy to see it finished, that it's hard to go back through to make sure you haven't forgotten anything, but it's very important! Imagine if we accidentally forgot a great winery?  It's bad not only for them, but for us too, we want the guide to be as complete as possible!  Here's a little picture of what my desk looks like, as you can see I'm not the neatest person in the world, but there is, somewhere, some sort of organization... I just know, I've got that information, somewhere here!!