la gramiere

Your comments...round 2

Just so you know, I love them!  Really, I do.  I so appreciate it when people leave comments on the blog, and I love to discover that I have a new, or maybe old reader, that has just found something worthwhile to say on the blog.

I know how it is.  If you are a blogger, then you are also a blog reader.  I have my favorites, that I read regularly, and every once-in-awhile I want to weigh in.   Often though, I start the comment, then doubt creeps in.  Is this comment really relevant?  Am I like some of the other commentors, just trying to draw attention to myself and my own blog?  Well, no, I only comment when I have something valid to contribute, or feel some sort of connection with a particular post.  But I always wonder - belittling myself and raising the comment receiving blogger up onto a pedestal that they may or may not deserve - will they think that my words and opinions are worthwhile???

OOPS!  Wait I hadn't finished this!!   This first part was accidentally published last night, when Matt was installing a new fancy Cisco router and was doing me a favor by clicking the save button!!  Little did he know that it went directly onto the web.  I didn't realize it was published until this morning when I received the comment notification email for the comment from Ryan!  Oops!  At least it seemed somewhat coherent, though unfinished!  (For those of you who didn't see the first post, sorry for the long explanation!)

Anyway where I was planning on going with this post was to highlight some of the people who comment most often on my blog, I figured if they were willing, we could all get to know them a bit better... so here are those who chose to respond to my request for information:

Steve Lanum: I met Steve  back in 2001 or 2002 when we lived in Paris.  He's a San Francisco resident who we met through the Kermit Lynch store.  Unfortunately, he tells me he's not tech savvy enough to send me a photo!  Steve spends a fair amount of time in Paris, checking out the latest "natural" wines and hopefully he'll make it down here for a visit someday...

John G: Better known as Mr. Quaffability, I think the first time John left a comment was when the 2005 arrived in the Bay Area,  but I'm not sure.  Since then we've emailed back and forth several times and he even came for a visit last summer with his family.  When he's not busy blogging, or combing the shelves of Trader Joe's for great wine deals, John is a web developer in Santa Rosa, CA.

Tim Stephens: Tim, along with several other people, went to an amazing amount of trouble to get a hold of some of our 2005.  Tim is a "home" winemaker, as he describes himself, making about 20 cases of wine per year.  But he knows a heck of a lot more than I do about wine chemistry.  Sometimes when I read his comments I think that he should have been the one to come over here and buy vineyards, not me!!  We have lots of back and forth chats over email, I'm sure some day we'll have the opportunity to meet in person.  Check out his blog here : Château Bon Chien

Iris: Iris has a winery not very far from here, about an hour as the crow flies, yet we have never had the chance to meet.  She also has a wonderful blog, and is much more courageous than I am, in that she maintains her blog in French and in German - her native tongue.  As she said in her reply to my questions, she often is doing the same things as we are, at the same time, celebrating rain or lamenting the lack there of.  She often looks upon things with humor and good will, even when the boars came and devasted a large part of one of her vineyards.  I like to think of our winery as small, but Iris is even more artisanal than we are, she even bottles her wine barrel by barrel with a small unit that fills 4 bottles at a time, then proceeds to cork each bottle with a manual corking device.  Pretty amazing.  If you read French or German take the time to visit her at her  Blog de Lisson.

Greg Hirson: Greg first got in touch with me when he discovered our 2005 on a wine list in Portland, he even sent us a picture.   Since then he regularly pipes in on various posts, always with a generous enthusiasm that makes me smile.  Greg is at UC Davis getting a graduate degree in Viticulture & Enology.  He's even making his own wine this year at a custom crush facility with some friends.  Greg is also quite a passionate cook, he chronicles his explorations of various cookbooks and cooking techniques here: Greg's Food

There are many others, that either wish to remain anonymous, or didn't have time to reply to my email, I know how it is, so I hope that they continue to comment, as I do so enjoy getting all of your feedback and kind thoughts!  Thank you all!

Aloha La Gramière!

Our first shipment of 2006 La Gramière left this week for Hawaii!  I wish I could have packed myself up into one of those boxes to accompany it!  A tropical beach vacation sounds just about right.  Although I can't really complain about the weather here.  It's been cold at night, just a few degrees above freezing, but absolutely beautiful during the day.  I'll be out pruning all next week, so I hope that the weather holds out.  We've got to make some progress on the pruning.  Then the week of February 4th, I start full-on with my 2008 Southern Rhone wine tastings for the Bettane & Desseauve.  Lubéron, Ventoux, Tricastin, Vinsobres, Costières de Nimes, Vacqueyras, Gigondas, Beaumes de Venise and Châteauneuf-du-Pape.  It's going to be quite an experience.  There are also two big trade shows coming up, Millésime Bio next week in Perpignan and then Vinisud at the end of February in Montpellier.  The fun never ends.  And in the mean time, I've got to get those vines pruned, we've got to get the Weed Badger put together, and lots of other things!

So, back to Hawaii... A great big THANK YOU, to the person at Southern Wine & Spirits that decided to order some of our 2006! Next time I'll come personally to deliver it!

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a ....

Weed Badger!!!  Yup, Matt's new toy is called a Weed Badger.  One of our biggest issues over the past few years has been lack of rain.  When it does rain, the weeds that grow in our vineyards tend to benefit more from the rain than the vines do.  Since we are organic and don't use any chemical week killers, the weeds have progressively gotten to be more of a problem.  There were some this year that were taller than I am!  So we really wanted to get on top of it this year.

First of all we have been doing a fair amount of plowing to uproot the weeds in the rows.  In our biggest vineyard the previous owner had planted grass every other row to prevent erosion and to provide a bit of competition for the vines, in essence to make them less vigorous.  Well, vigor hasn't really been our problem, and erosion isn't that big of an issue either, so we decided to plow up the grass too.  The grass also tended to drink up any rain water that we got.  Matt has been spending a lot of time going over the grassy rows trying to break up the well-established grass.  This will have two effects, one will be as I said to keep the rainwater for the vines, the second will be a nice boost to the soil with the decomposing grass, it will be good organic matter for the soil.  That along with the compost we spread, will hopefully give our vineyards the oomph they need for the coming year.

Back to the Weed Badger though!  There are many incarnations of this sort of machinery on the market.  It's basically an in-row tiller, it tills the soil between the vines, eliminating the weeds at the base of the vines that are impossible to get with a regular plow.  Of course we could do this by hand, but some of the weeds have very tough roots and are next to impossible to pull out, and secondly, it's about the last thing on Earth I want to spend my time doing!!  The great thing about the Weed Badger is that it tiller is situated on the side of the tractor and not behind it, so you only have to look down to monitor the progress and not behind you, which is very tiring for your back and neck.   Additionally, the tiller is round with lots of metal tines.  It turns in  circle and rips the weeds out, contrary to what other in-row machines do which is to plow then up, which often displaces the dirt away from the base of the vines.

Matt thought that this machine would be best suited for our purposes.   The biggest hitch though was that instead of coming from France, Italy, Spain or Germany, where other machines of this type are made, it comes from the US!  Leave it to us to have heavy farm equipment shipped over here.  Of course we couldn't find what we needed here.  Matt has a certain knack for finding the most obscure and hard to get equipment and then deciding that it's the one and only thing that will work for us!  So after 4 months, we finally have received the Weed Badger.  We have very high hopes for it.  Now we just have to figure out how to put the thing together since they couldn't ship it assembled!!  Stay tuned for more news on that!

Note: The two middle photos are from the Weed Badger website.  www.weedbadger.com

The Box - what do you think is in it??

There's a mysterious box that was delivered to us Monday... It has been sitting in our courtyard ever since.  Every time I look at it, it makes me think of the first season of Lost when they were staring at the hatch.  I imagine a strange sound emerging from it, just like on the TV show.  What do you think it could be??? I have to wait until Matt returns from Sweden this weekend to open it up! 

Is it a reverse osmosis machine?  Since we've been in drought mode and our alcohol levels are high, maybe we decided to take matters into our own hands????

Is it a new tractor that Matt found on the internet for a good price, the only catch is we have to assemble it ourselves?

Or maybe it's a whole bunch of soaker hose so we can start irrigating the vineyards?

How about a new super fancy peristaltic pump!? That would be cool.

It could be a dynamizer so don't have to spend an hour swirling the bio-dynamic preparations around in a barrel by hand!

In any case it's the most expensive piece of equipment we've invested in so far, so let's hope that's a good one!

Stay tuned to see the unveiling!

PS- you see that tarp covering it?  Yes, that means we've been getting even more rain.  It's great!  Though I have to say I miss our Provençal sun.

Where's La Gramière??? 2006, that is.

Why is it taking so long? When is the 2006 going to be available in my area? Well, I've been getting a fair amount of those questions lately, and as it turns out the story is more interesting than you might think. As most things seem to be here at La Gramière these days....

 

The truth is, we've had a bumpy ride this past year. It all started back in July when we first presented our wine for the "agrément". For those of you who missed that post last year, the agrément is a process here in France practiced by most appellations by which a wine is "approved" by a panel of other winemakers and at least one enologist, and thus given the "right" to call their wine "Côtes du Rhône" (or whichever appellation the wine falls under. You are required to have your wine analyzed by an official laboratory and send that analysis along with the samples. They come to you winery (or house as the case may be) to pull the samples from the specified vats that you registered with them previously. You can present all or just one or two of your vats at a time, I presented them all since we were planning on blending them before bottling, and the entire vintage would be bottled at one time. The person that comes to collect the samples arrives with pre-printed labels and his own bottles, and he witnesses that you a pulling the wine from the specified vat so that you can't cheat. The wine is then taken to a central location, often Orange or Avignon to be tasted by the aforementioned panel. You have three chances to pass the tasting, and after the third, it has to be labeled as a lowly Vin de Table, or Table Wine, the lowest designation in France.

 

You can see where this is leading, I imagine. On the first round, our two largest vats of wine were refused, and our one barrel passed. The barrel was of course filled with the same wine that was in those vats... I was shocked! Absolutely couldn't believe it. Everyone loved the wine when tasting it out of the vat. We had taken sample bottles of it to many people, friends, professionals , everyone loved it. It's a super concentrated wine, due to the lack of rain and our conversion to organic, we had very small yields (22 hl/ha), maybe that was the problem. The reason they stated on Vat 4 was  "Ascence, fatigué" and Vat 5 "Ascence, oxydé" . Those are some strong words. Ascense is a enological term meaning that there is volatile acidity in the wine and that it will eventually turn to vinegar. Both wines were at 0.5 VA which is in no way "ascent". The fact that they called them "tired and oxidized" was even more incredible - when you taste this wine you'll see, it is far from being tired or oxidized. You can imagine our state of shock. To cut the story short, we were refused a second time, and then considered not sending it back a 3rd time so that we could say it was a choice to be in Vin de Table, to sort of save face, but we decided we had nothing to lose. The wine had now been bottled and everyone said that they wouldn't refuse it a 3rd time, it's like a death sentence to vigneron. Guess what? They refused it.

 

Even worse, the day they refused it was the day I was tasting with Kermit Lynch, our American importer. Ugh. I had, of course, told Kermit of our troubles, and amazingly he said that it's happening more and more, often to really great wines that are out of the ordinary and don't fit the profile of a classic wine from that appellation. Hmmmm ... Now we were stuck with Vin de Table, which is ironic, since we purposely bought vineyards 20 minutes away from our house so that we could be in the Côtes du Rhône appellation.

 

I called our German importer Martin Kössler to break the news to him and he said: "Great! That's terrific news, I don't care at all! The whole appellation system is falling apart in France, and some of the most interesting wines are being refused." Well, that made me feel a bit better. Kermit on the other hand was a bit more reticent. Côtes du Rhône sells well in the US, Kermit wanted to talk to his national sales manager Bruce Neyers about it, thinking it may be a harder sell now.

 

When these kinds of things happen, no matter how good you and others might think you wine was, it seeds doubt in peoples minds. It was a very hard thing to swallow, imagine trying to explain to your friends and customers. No matter how good they thought it was, they still might ask themselves what is really wrong with the wine. That's exactly what happened. Kermit took a few bottles with him back to his house in Bandol, the wine had just been bottled, and somehow that fact escaped him. Just after bottling wines tend to taste differently for several weeks if not a couple of months. Every time I opened a bottle I hated it, I said they were right to refuse us. How on earth are we going to be able to sell 1000 cases of a wine we don't like!! Matt however kept the faith and told me I was being too hard on it, that it was a good wine and it just needed time. We got an email from Kermit saying that he had tasted it and wasn't at all happy with it, and that maybe we should think twice about bottling it. My stomach was in knots. What were we going to do???

 

The thing was, we had bottled it, and for some reason Kermit thought that it was a tank sample. Luckily when I got a hold of him, he was relieved to hear that it had been bottled - "that changes everything," he said. He still had two more bottles, and decided  he would hold on to them for awhile, and taste them again. A few weeks later, I got an ebullient phone call from Kermit, he had just finished having lunch with François Peyraud, of Domaine Tempier, and they opened a bottle and thought it was great. Phew. But we weren't out of the woods yet. Kermit asked me to send 2 cases to his office in Beaune who would then send them to California where they would send out samples to distributors to see if they would bite.

 

Problem was, we had to re-design the label. In our lovely logo, there are the words Côtes du Rhône, which are no longer allowed to be there. Double UGH. So, Mark, if you're still reading, that's the real reason we had to change the labels after everyone voted... Thus our new label. It took longer than we thought to get the labels printed, which delayed the shipment of the samples. Just before Christmas though, I got a call from Dixon Brook, the manager of the Kermit Lynch office in Beaune. The samples had arrived and were being sent out, but even without them, the National Sales Office already had orders for 100 cases! Wow! The only way that could be possible is from the power of this blog; otherwise, how would distributors even know it existed?? Now hopefully those distributors who received samples will order some too. So if you’re interested in trying some, click on the link at the left hand side of this page (Find La Gramière in your state).  Now’s the time, the samples have been sent, and hopefully they’re ready to order!

The 2006 La Gramière is not a shy wine, it’s super concentrated,  but backed up by lots of ripe fruit and spice. Typical to 2006 southern Rhône wines, it’s very fruit forward with medium tannins. I like to drink it at cellar temperature, that is to say a bit cool, as I think it really brings out the fruit.  It goes wonderfully with any kind of roasted lamb or beef, and I think it will be great this summer with your best BBQ ribs. We even had it with a hot Indian curry and it really stood up to it well.  I imagine that it will keep getting better over the next few years, but who’s to know, it’s only our second wine!

I don’t think you’ll even notice that it doesn’t say Côtes du Rhône.

The saucers are full

Sounds like a secret pass word doesn't it?  Well, in reality, it's Matt's gauge of whether or not we got much rain.  This morning Matt came in and triumphantly announced,  "the saucers are full."  Of course, I knew what he was talking about, but my sister Molly just stared at him with a blank look.   I know, it's not that interesting to most people to know it's raining here in the Southern Rhône, but we're ecstatic!  As with the past two years, we are in desperate need of rain again this year.  We are well below the average annual rain falls yet again, so some gray, rainy weather is welcomed!  I am supposed to be out there pruning right now, as we are in the end of the "Northern Planting Time" which is when we prune and do other vineyard work according to the biodynamic calendar.   It's ok though, since  Molly and my parents are here to do some wedding planning.  Molly is getting married here in April and she has decided to have the ceremony at the medieval Saint Caprais Chapel. It is situated in the middle of the vineyards of Castillon du Gard, where our vineyards are located too (though the chapel isn't in the middle of our vineyards, just nearby.)  The green and white marble tabel dates from the 13th century, and the altar from the 14th.  It's quite impressive and a very romantic setting for a wedding.  The reception will be up in the village of Castillon, so we have lots of fun planning to do!  Here are some pictures we took of the roman chapel and it's surroundings.  I think it will be a very special event and I imagine large quantities of La Gramière will be consumed throughout the week!

Happy New Year!!

Here are some favorite memories from 2007:

After some time off with friends and family, we will now return to our regular programming! Looking forward to some great times with all of you in 2008. Best Wishes for a Happy and Prosperous New Year! Amy & Matt