Bottling La Gramière 2006!

Here's some photos of our 2 fun-filled days of bottling!  It went amazingly well, after a couple of hiccups early on.  Hiccups... like deciding to bottle some magnums, but then not having any way to store them! I forgot to order boxes for them, and they didn't fit on our plastic dividers!  So, we did like they do in Châteauneuf-du-Pape and Burgundy. They stack them in neat piles on the floor!  I love the way it looks. I wish we could do it all like that!   It's not very practical though! We bottled some magnums at the request of our German importer K&U.  Martin Koessler, the owner, said that his restaurant clients really like to have magnums for their by the glass selections.  We had wanted to do some last year too, because magnums are always fun for dinners or bringing to parties, but we weren't organized enough.  Many people shy away from them, but after all it's just two bottles, and it looks very impressive on a dinner table.

Besides the fact that it was a little cramped in the cellar, our new system worked out wonderfully.  It was so much easier and we were all in a festive mood, especially since on the first day, Tuesday, it was my birthday!  We took a break at around 5:00 to have cake, and what a yummy cake it was, Devil's Food, that Matt had made for me that morning. YUM!

This year we needed only 4 people to make  it run smoothly, more than that and people were standing around wondering what to do.  A huge change from last year.   Many Thanks to all of our dedicated friends who came out once again to help! Kirsten, Denis, Serge, Jean-Marc & Fatima.  Hip, hip hooray!

At one point Kirsten and I were joking about the bottling line and remembering the intro to Laverne and Shirley!  Remember them bottling beer and the glove on the bottle!  Here's our version of it...  "Doing it our way!"  If I could only get that song out of my head!

Now the wine is resting comfortably in the cellar, (almost 11,000 bottles) awaiting  it's next exciting journey, which will be to a store near you!  I've been discussing shipping with the Kermit Lynch office in Beaune. It looks like mid-September we'll be getting those pallets ready to go!  I imagine Germany will be clamoring for some around that time too!  I'd better hurry up and get my labels ordered, or else I'll be in big trouble!  Hopefully, we'll get some to the UK this year too. I just have to take the time to try to find a good importer, and get some samples to them...

See the FLICKR slide show below for more pictures...

Comments

[Iris]

You did it your way - and "it's getting better every day" apareantly - great work you did there, congratulations! Do you have any reseller at Duesseldorf? It would be much easier for me, to find your wine here then than in my Hérault- and to bring it home to my German friends one of these evenings!