la gramiere

Bottles, bottles and more bottles!

We have officially made the decision to bottle our 2007 a bit later this year.  Well at least I think we have.  It seems that every time I make a declaration like this something changes and we end up doing the opposite of what I have just declared.  So, now that it's out there, we'll probably be bottling next month! 

If we do indeed decide to bottle, it's ok since we HAD to take our 13000 bottles now, or lose them.  There is a huge bottle shortage here in Europe, last year one of the glass furnaces shut down and every since bottles have been really hard to come by.  So I got a call from our supplier, she said that they wanted to deliver the bottles right away.  I explained to her that we were going to wait until after harvest to bottle this year and so if she had to cancel the order and then re-submit it then, that would be fine.  She called me back a few minutes later and basically said that if I didn't take them now, she couldn't guarantee that I would have them in November or even in January, so I had better take them.

So that was another thing we had to deal with last week, making room in the cellar to fit 11 pallets of bottles!  We got up at 6 am to start moving pallets around and were just finishing up when the truck pulled up.  Now we can barely move in there, but it's manageable.  At least we know we have our bottles, now I'd better order the corks just in case!

If it's not one thing, it's another...

Ugh, I have to say, the past few weeks have not been easy.  With more rain last Monday and Tuesday, the mildew had a field day.  I got calls from several friends saying that suddenly there was an explosion of mildew, and not just on the leaves, this time directly on the grapes.  Since then though, the weather has dried out and things have really started to heat up.  Heat is good, downy mildew doesn't like it one bit, but powdery mildew thinks it's ok.  For now though we only have the downy kind, and hopefully it will stay that way.

Tuesday night after the rain cleared out, Matt went down to the vineyards to spray.  Let me remind you here that we are a good 20 minute drive from our vineyards, which is getting harder and harder to manage.  For example, it can be pouring down rain here at the house, lightening, thunder, threatening to hail, and in Castillon du Gard, it isn't raining at all.  Of course the opposite can be true also, but more often than not we get more rain here at the house than we do at the vineyards, primarily due to the fact that the house is 20 minutes closer to the Cevennes mountains.  Anyway, back to Tuesday...

I had gone off to taste the wines of Domaine Gramenon, at the very last minute for the guide, and was on my way back at about 8:30 pm so I stopped by to see how Matt was doing.  Everything was going fine so we agreed that I would go home and get dinner started (a rare happening, since Matt does most of the cooking!)  As I was headed down the hill, my phone rang, it was Matt, there was white smoke coming out of the tractor and it was making a funny noise.  Ugh. 

This had happened to me the previous week, the radiator over heated and there was steam coming out of every orifice of the tractor.  I refilled the radiator and everything seemed fine.  But now this is the 2nd time it's happened, doesn't seem good.  Worried that we would push the tractor over the edge we decided to play it safe.  The only problem, the sprayer was about three-quarters full.  We tried to get the rinse tank to work to rinse out the jets, but it just emptied out into the sprayer itself and by this time it was getting dark and the headlights on the tractor don't work.  So against our better judgment, we left the sprayer full overnight. 

Big mistake!  We had to borrow a friend's tractor to finish spraying and once we got it all hooked up, we realized that everything was blocked, no liquid was coming out anywhere, even when we opened to valve that drains the whole thing.  Now, here's where not living close to your vineyards comes into play... we had a few tools with us, but not many. Matt proceeded to unhook all as many of the hoses as he could and try to get the sludge out.  I went to the garage where we keep the tractor,  which is located in the next village over to bring back any sort of long skinny tool or piece of plastic that I could find to stick into the hoses and try to dislodge the sludge that was now blocking everything.  Finally just when we were about to give up for the night, it started to slowly glurp out of the bottom value, glurp gloop gloop.  Yippee!  It was coming out!  By about 10:30 we finished cleaning it all up and put everything away so that I could finish spraying early the next morning...

So the next time you think we're living " the dream" think again... 

Battling the Mildew!

Wow, with all the rain we've had, suddenly it seems everyone has mildew (the downy kind. so far).  At first, we thought, we were the only ones, that we had royally screwed up. Having missed the first window to spray while we were off having fun in the US, but it seems that everyone has it, even the conventional farmers, the ones who have already applied  5 systemic "treatments" still have some mildew.  It seems it's unavoidable this year.  But it's still scary.  At first it attacks the leaves and makes little light yellow circles on the leaves, then it starts to spread and it can even eventually get to the grapes. That is bad, very bad.  It essentially makes the individual grapes and/or the entire bunch shrivel up and fall off.  Ugh !  This is the first time we have had to deal with this kind of situation, up until now, it's been fairly easy, dry hot summers not much rain, even not enough.  Now we have more than enough. 

Last week it was beautiful, sunny with a good Mistral blowing, but today it rained all afternoon, and we're supposed to have thunderstorms tonight.  There has been talk of hail.  Please, please, no hail, that would be the icing on the cake. 

As you can see, the vines have now flowered, these pictures were taken about a week ago, so we should be in the safe zone, but hail could ruin it all!  I'll keep you posted!

More Nice Words from Kermit Lynch!

The sun is back!

I never thought I would be so happy to see the sun again.  Living here we get our fill of it, I often wish it would rain like it has recently.  The only problem is, it lasted a whole MONTH!  Our roussanne vineyard (that we just rented this year)  has suffered an attack of downy mildew, so we've been scrambling to try to find some natural remedies since copper sulfate is preventative, not curative.  A horsetail infusion is one thing we sprayed on it mixed with some bentonite clay.  This afternoon I went out and sprayed whey on them with a backpack sprayer.  It looks like it's not spreading any further, so now we'll just have to see how many of the bunches were effected.  It basically makes the grapes shrivel up and fall off, and since they are just starting to flower, we won't know for awhile how bad it is.  It's not everywhere though, so at least we'll have some grapes to harvest.  Apparently roussanne, is very sensitive and susceptible to most diseases!  This is our first experience with a varietal like that, what bad timing as far as the weather is concerned!

The other thing the rain had done, is make the weeds grow out of control!  Matt had a few afternoons on the Weed Badger before it really got wet last week, so half of our biggest vineyard is really looking good.  The other half is being engulfed by the weeds.  The rows have been mowed but in between the vines, they are almost as high as the vines are, which really isn't good from a mildew perspective.  Just take a look at the difference, it was a good year to invest in mechanical weed control!