Am I repeating myself??

As I am going about my daily activities lately, and thinking about what to write for this blog, it seems to me that I've already written it! Last year at this time, maybe a bit earlier, maybe a bit later, but I am doing largely the same things as I did then.  So I wonder, will I be boring those who have been following along since then??

This week I racked all of the new wines. Racking is a process in which you transfer the wine in a vat into another in order to remove the lees or sediment that has settled to the bottom of the vat after fermentation has finished.  This year is different in that we're doing it much earlier than we did in the two previous years.  The malolactic fermentation happened very quickly so the wines were ready to be racked and now they are settled in for a long winter's nap!  The 2007s are going to be great here in the southern Rhône.  It wasn't an easy vintage to vinify, we had strange weather all summer long, not very hot, amazingly cool evenings and absolutely no rain.  Many people (us included) chose to harvest early because the sugars were high and we had several days of strong Mistral winds that had a tendancy to dry the grapes out and concentrate the sugars even more!  Others chose to wait until the grapes were more mature, maybe even hoping for some rain to dilute the concentration a bit.  I'm sure they came up with some pretty great wines too, just a bit more alcoholic.   That said, we don't have any choice,  with only 4 parcels of  land which are mostly grenache and syrah, both of which were ripe early this year, we had to pick when we did.  Most people have more vineyards that ripen at different times and most importantly, if they are lucky to have cinsault and carignan, they are have more blending options!  All in all, I think we made the right decision, because the wines are tasting great!  Lots of luscious fruit, followed by some really nice soft tannins.  It won't be a tannic monster, but that's ok with me.  I haven't had the chance to taste much else, but soon, I'll make the rounds and let you know how it's looking elsewhere in the Rhône.

I've also been over at Denis Gayte's winery helping him press.  He sometimes finds himself one person short, so I go over and give him a hand when he needs it.  He's down in the vat shoveling the skins onto a mini conveyor belt, his dad Philippe mans the press, and I shovel the pressed skins into the trailer.  Denis has been so great helping us out, that I am more than happy to give him a hand too!

Finally, I've been spending some time sticking labels and capsules on bottles! Wahoo, now that is a fun way to spend an afternoon. Our new organizational system was great at the time we actually bottled the wine, but now we've got over 12,000 bottles that need labels and capsules!! I've been doing some by hand,  thinking that maybe we could work our way through it, but it takes too long!  So we are going to rent a machine for a few days and then just crank through it, otherwise we'll still be working on it next spring!

So that's a little wrap-up of what's been going on here.  Not overly exciting for the time being, but things are starting to pick up again, so I'll have more to tell you about soon!