la gramiere

Fun with labels - redux

Ok, so here goes again, though this time it might be a bit worse!  Remember two years ago when we were having fun sticking import stickers on all of the bottles we were sending to the US?  Well for the 2006 I avoided that by creating a back label especially for our importer Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant.  Great plan, huh?  Yes, except for the fact that I labelled too many bottles with our European back label and didn't leave enough for the US.  Originally when I realized this I thought that I could simply add the Kermit Lynch import sticker onto the bottle and that would be that. 

Not so fast...  In France as of 2008 they decided to follow in the footsteps of the US require alcoholic beverages to display a warning on the label against drinking while you're pregnant.  There were two choices, one a sentence explaining the risks, similar to the US or two, a fairly grotesque symbol of the  silouette of a pregnant woman inside circle and a slash through it.  (Nice huh?)  Most everyone chose the symbol for the  ease of it and since it didn't take up too much space, us included. Besides when it's small it's really hard to tell what it is no matter how offensive I actually find it.  Well this little symbol gave me a lot of trouble.  The US immediately rejected it and made it illegal to import any bottles from France that bear it, subsequently many French wineries found themselves, like us re-labeling bottles or cancelling orders if they didn't want to go through the hassle.

Well, I certainly didn't want to cancel the final shipments of our 2006 to the US, so here we are using some sort of chemical spray that dissolves label glue to peel the original back label off.  Then the bottle has to be cleaned, and finally we're sticking on the US back label.  I had a couple of orders go out already and now we're finishing the rest of it.  My poor parents!! I bet they wish they hadn't bought their house so close to ours now!! 

La Gramiere featured in a new book on organic wines in Germany!

And in German!  So I hope it says nice things about us!  Frank Kämmer, a master sommelier, discovered our wine earlier this year thanks to our German importer Martin Kössler.  We emailed back and forth a bit at a few months ago and yesterday Frank sent me a picture of the cover of his new book, and guess who's wine is on it?

  If you speak German, check out this great new book!  I'll have to wait for the English version.  It's available in bookstores all over Germany and also at the German Amazon site!  Thanks Frank!

Slowly turning...

We've been spending time checking out the grapes lately, walking through each vineyard carefully inspecting the bunches to look for signs of anything wrong... Well, kind of.  At this point now that we're fully into "veraison" downy mildew isn't really a risk anymore, so that's a relief.  It did rain quite a bit last Monday and Tuesday, just after we plowed, so that was good!  I found one or two grapes in the roussanne that had a grape worm, but I just plucked that particular grape off, and didn't see any more.  Matt always says I'm much more observant than he is when I find things like that, I don't really think it's observant, I think it's that I worry more about things going wrong.

The few grapes that we have look good so far.  The syrah has pretty much fully turned, and by taste, you can tell that the sugar levels are starting to rise albeit slowly.  The weather here has been unseasonably cool at night and only in the mid 70s during the day, which is not the way to get things to ripen here in the south.  We spoke with Remy Klein of La Réméjeanne last week and he said that he thought this would be the first year that they picked their syrah and then actually stopped harvest to wait for the grenache to ripen.  Normally he would start in the syrah and pick straight through, but with the cool weather, the grenache just isn't ripening as quickly.

It's  going to be a different harvest this year, can't wait to see how it turns out~!   I'm just crossing my fingers that it doesn't rain in September, then we may be harvesting grape soup!

 

New banner, can anyone help?

Ok, so I've just spent all morning making this new banner for the blog, but even after I followed the instructions (I think!) it still doesn't look right at the top of the page!!!  Is there anyone out there that can help me fix this?  I am html disabled and 100% not interested in understanding it, I just want it to look right!  Argh!!!

Thanks in advance!!

Oh, and by the way, what do you think?  I am open to critiques...

...well, sort of.

Some light plowing

Despite all of the rain we had in May, suddenly a couple of our vineyards are suffering from lack of rain.  The French have a saying: "un binage vaut deux arrosages"  which translates into: "one hoeing is worth two waterings."  Hmm doesn't sound so pretty through my translation, but in essence it's true.  Last year we tried it at about this time when the same vineyards started to lose leaves at the base and the bunches of grapes actually started to shrivel up.  We did a light ploughing and a couple of days later the grapes looked completely normal again, almost as if we had watered the vines!

In the bio-dynamic book that we use by François Bouchet it recommends that you plough lightly in the early evening in order to break the capillaries in the soil and allow it to breath.  It's also beneficial when rain is predicted, thus the rain penetrates directly into the soil and doesn't run off. 

The three vineyards that we plowed one grenache and our two newly acquired white vineyards have a sandy loam based soil which quickly turns hard when it stops raining.  Matt had to go over them twice in order to get the plough to go in!  The best part about plowing in the evenings is enjoying the sunset,  we even had a little picnic at the end and finished off a bottle of Billecart rosé we had opened the previous day!  Doesn't really seem like work, does it?

2007 vs 2008

Take a look at this:

This is a picture of our Syrah taken last week on July 28th, no sign of color change yet!

This was taken on July 18th last year.

I guess that means that harvest will be a bit later this year!!