la gramiere

Published!

Here it is!  The guide that we spent so much time working on this past year is now available for purchase in most French book stores!! It's very exciting, although I haven't gotten my hands on one yet.  I got a preview a couple of weeks ago when Thierry Desseauve and his family stopped by to show me a copy, but it was the only copy he had so he couldn't leave it for me to look at!!! Knowing how busy they are in the office, and that they probably won't have time to send me a copy for a couple of weeks, I just ordered one from the Athenaeum du Vin in Beaune, the worlds best source for wine books in all languages.  It is available on the bigger book selling websites too, but I much prefer to support the independent booksellers!

It's enough to make Eric Asimov jealous!

I think I'm a pretty lucky person overall.  And this week is no different.  A while back Kermit Lynch emailed me wondering if I'd like to spend a few days tasting with him in the Languedoc, hmm, let me think...  Yippee!!  In a recent blog post about Kermit's book "Adventures on the Wine Route" Eric Asimov mentioned that he would love to "...take this journey with him again, to see what his impressions are today."  Well  this week I am getting a little slice of what it is like to travel with him. It's something I've always hoped to do. It's so educational to listen to him talk to his producers about their wines, giving them his honest opinion in a very constructive way, and in some cases slurping with pleasure at the wines we are tasting out of barrel. 

Yesterday we met at a new producer of his in Faugères, Mas Gabinèle, then went over to see Didier Barral at Domaine Léon Barral.  These two producers couldn't be more different.  Mas Gabinèle wines are very tightly wound with underlying depth that is quite interesting.  Didier Barral makes very natural, sometimes funky wines with tons of character, much like himself. 

We had a great lunch in Bédarieux at a wine bar that specializes in "natural wines" or wines that are made with little or no sulfur.  No hot food, just wonderful plates of local charcuterie, cheeses and a wonderful plate of Iberian jamon, chorizo and lomo! Yum!  We had two whites by the glass (which I don't remember their names)  and then a bottle of Yvon Métras Moulin à Vent.  Delicious!

Then we headed off to Grange des Pères, a true Languedoc masterpiece.  But, I'm late and I have to go, I wouldn't want to make Kermit wait!  Today we are in Montpeyroux, Pic Saint Loup, and then to a small domaine near Uzès called La Gramière!!

I'll tell you more tomorrow!

Pure Pink Pleasure, the power of SO2, and other tidbits...

We did our first "controle de maturité", or sugar test on Saturday.  Everyone has been saying that harvest will be early this year, so we wanted to take a reading so that we're ready to pick, and not taken by surprise.  The syrah, which in general is an early ripening varietal, was at just under 11 degrees potential alcohol, and the grenache from our biggest vineyard was already at 12!.  The rule of thumb is that they gain one degree a week in sugar/potential alcohol, so we will be shooting to start picking on the first weekend in September.  The weather has been particularly beautiful here, not too hot and often a bit chilly in the evenings, not our usual hot August weather.  Hopefully it will hold out until harvest, hopefully we won't have any big storms either!  I'm knocking on wood as I type.

After I crushed the grapes to test the sugars I strained the juice so that we could drink it.  Delicious!  It reminded me immediately of harvest.  It's exciting to think about another year soon to be in the tanks.  The color of the juice, even after only about 15 minutes was a very pretty pink, due largely to the syrah.  We drank some of the sweet, still quite acidic juice that evening and then I put the rest into the refrigerator.  The next morning, I found the glass that I had been using to take these pictures still sitting on the sideboard, and the color had greatly changed.  The juice was now brownish-pink in color and the taste had lost much of it's previous zing.  A perfect example of the benefits of adding sulfur dioxide (SO2) as a preservative.  It's something that, for me personally, is absolutely essential in winemaking.  There are people that don't use SO2 and they make some pretty decent wines, but in the long run they don't have much hope of longevity.  Un-sulfured wines can be interesting, many even delicious in their youth, but for me personally, I wouldn't dare do it.  Hygienic conditions in the winery have to be ideal, and you have to be super careful every step of the process.  Then you have to make sure that the wines are perfectly stored at every step of the way. One person that has definitely mastered it is Eric Pfifferling in Tavel.  I bought a bottle of his Tavel rosé at a local shop recently and it was delicious.  A rosé without sulfur is even more daring, as whites and rosés tend to oxidize more quickly than reds.   Pfifferling also makes red and white, all without the addition of SO2, so if I ever want to learn how to do it, I think I'd go see him!

Here's a few pictures I've taken as we've been out and about  over the past week and I haven't been writing this blog!

Hard to see, but this is Nora Jones singing at the Roman Arena in Nimes...spectacular setting for a spectacular artist!

One of my favorite views in Uzès, the terrace of the Restaurant Zanelli:

And finally, some delicious blackberries!  Our walks with Daisy take longer now because I'm always stopping to have a snack!

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...

Summer Vacation ~ La Gramière Style

As usual, while the rest of  France is on vacation, La Gramière is in full work mode.  Sounds impressive saying La Gramière, but really it's just me, myself and Matt!  Over the weekend we were finishing up projects and making the final preparations for bottling the 2006!! Tomorrow!  Yes, tomorrow! We're going to be bottling all of the 2006 in one swoop. 

With our brand new, extra fancy concrete floor, we decided to bottle the wine in the actual place where it will be stored.  We are going to bottle the wine this year "tiré-bouché" which means that we won't be putting the capsules and labels on, and we won't be putting the bottles into boxes right away.  The wine will be stored on big sheets of rigid plastic that have grooves in them the shape of a wine bottle.  We'll stack these on pallets.  (It's kind of hard to explain. I'll take pictures tomorrow to show you.)   This also means that we won't have to block the road behind our house for 3 days, and most importantly we won't have to schlep the cases of wine from the front to the back.  The overall conditions will be much better especially for the workers who will now be out of the heat and in the comfort of our newly finished storage area complete with new windows and air-conditioning.

In other words, it's going to be much easier this year, especially, since we just had all of the glass replaced in wall of windows that leads to the storage cellar.  It is a very old wall that has a cast iron frame and many of the panes were broken. We previously had plastic covering the holes, but decided that it needed to be fixed if we were going to be storing our wine there.  So that's what we did this weekend!  Last Thursday the glass company came to remove all of the panes and the old putty that held the windows in place.  Getting the putty out was the hard part.  It's crazy stuff, and they couldn't get it to come loose. They even had to go back to their shop to get power tools!  When they were done, they told us we'd need to weld together the points where the metal crossed!  Weld?  Haven't done that before, but Matt always wanted to learn, so learn he did!  THEN,  we had to go over it all with a wire brush and then paint it so that it would be ready to put the glass back in today.  Seems simple, right?  Well it never really is.  I used a drill with a wire wheel attachment while Matt went around getting off all of the thicker stuff that they had given up on.  By the time we were finished I had worn down all of the wire on the wheel!  After that I painted the iron frame while Matt made cement to fill the spaces around the window.   This morning they put the glass back in and it's like a whole new room in the house.  I'd sure like to turn it into a big living room, but then where would we put the wine???