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??? 

Comments

[Daddo]

It looks great! Can't wait to see all the bottles!!