If it's July, we must be making cement!!

Yes, for the third year in a row, we're making improvements to our set-up here at La Gramière.  The last two years it was in the back of the house where we make the wine. This year it's in the front where we store it.  We have a long, narrow garage at the front of our house where we stock the wine once it was in bottle. It had a dirt floor originally, then we put in a layer of rock.  This is not very convenient when you're trying to move pallets of wine around.  It's, in fact, impossible!  Last year we prepared each pallet for shipment, case by case, unstacking it from one pallet and re-stacking it on another pallet right in front of the door so the transporters could pick it up. 

Of course, at this time of year when we are preparing to put the 2006 in bottle, we started to think about cement. Ugh.  I have absolutely no desire to ever mix cement again, and luckily neither did Matt.  So this year we got a cement mixer!!! Yippee!! Only one hang up though, Matt decided that we need to lay more rock down.  We got 3 m3 of river rock delivered last week.  Well, we isn't quite right, Matt was out of town for work, so I got 3 m3 of rock delivered.  The only problem was that the truck couldn't back up into the garage because it was too big, so he dumped it as close to the door as possible, leaving me to shovel, by myself, the rest of it into the garage.  At first I didn't think it was any big deal, but after about 10 shovels full, I realized I was in trouble... Luckily for me, and unluckily for her, my friend Lucy happened to drive by and amazingly offered to come back and help me!! It went much faster with the two of us, and a little bit later our neighbor Jean-Marc came by and gave us the extra hand we needed to finish.  People are amazing, I don't know what I would do without my friends!!

Over the weekend, we worked on spreading out the rock and getting the levels marked on the walls.   This morning the cement mixer arrived. Peter and his son, Cameron, came to help, and we put together the nifty troughs that Matt made to get the cement all the way to the back of the garage (which we now call the "cave" or cellar).  It only took 1 hour from start to finish to pour 8m3 of concrete!!!   We asked ourselves why we would ever bother doing it any other way!  Well, there is the cost of the cememt.  I's quite a bit more expensive, but it's totally worth it.  This new cement we used is even self-levelling.  It was amazingly easy to use, and now we'll be able to use pallet movers and dollies and all kinds of other cool things.  Until we bottle the wine, we can even used it as a roller skating rink!