la gramiere

Harvest, the aftermath...

The worst part of harvest is the clean-up afterwards!!  Things slow down, our hard working parents and various friends and relatives go back home, Matt goes back to his "real job"  at Cisco Systems, and here I am, stuck with the very worst part!!!   There are the buckets, cases, clippers, and coolers to clean, then there's all of the lunch paraphenalia, re-usable plates, cups, silverware that we use out during our lunches in the vineyards, the list goes on and on.  Like our friend Kirstin said last year when she came over after harvest, "This place looks like Sanford and Sons!"  Yes, it's true, it really does!! You can see for yourself:

Then there are the grape skins.  They seem to be everywhere, no matter how many times I hose down the winery, or just outside the winery, they always reappear!  Cleaning the cases and buckets, they fly off when I use the power sprayer, they get stuck on the bottom of my shoes, and then even end up in our bedroom!!!  Ugh, and we still haven't pressed yet, so it's far from over.  I'll bet that come Chirstmas I'll still be finding them here and there....

See all of those little black dots on the ground?? That's them!!

Sorry, gotta get back to the clean up!

A great day for picking grapes!

My whole body aches, and I can barely keep my eyes open, but we had such a great I just had to put some photos up!   We finished our biggest vineyard today after two days off!  It rained pretty hard on Thursday night so we couldn't pick Friday since the grapes were soaked.  Saturday was, according to the bio-dynamic calendar, not a good day at all to pick, so we held off until today.

It started out quite cold!  Everyone headed back to their cars to get jackets and sweaters, and then later on the sun came out and by lunch time we were all hot!  Friends kept arriving all at different times all in all we must have been about 20.  It was a great crowd, we did some good work, had a wonderful lunch and then had to try hard to motivate to finish it up.  We persevered despite the rosé and beer that was consumed at lunch!  Here's a few fun shots, more to come, I promise!  For now, we are looking at a very very very small crop, probably only half of what we normally make! But the fruit is just beautiful, and I think it will make some pretty good vino!

Sometimes the decision is made for you

Yesterday morning I went down to the vineyards to sample the grapes.  I filled a large ziploc bag with  grapes randomly selected throughout our 3 largest vineyards (the mourvèdre definitely needing more time).  As I was walking through my favorite vineyard which we call Lauzettes, I was horrified to see that the boars had quickly moved from our Roussanne vineyard which is just across the way, to this vineyard.  They had decimated it!  There was such beautiful fruit, and I was hard pressed to find one vine that hadn't been in some way touched by them!  Ugh.  Not wanting to lose any more fruit, we decided we'd better start picking today.  The sugars are plenty high and it's essentially ready, we were just waiting to see if the flavors would develop further.  Well, if there aren't any grapes left, then perfect ripeness doesn't really matter, does it?

So we're officially picking.  We started off with a small group today, due to late notice, and the lateness of the harvest this year, lots of our die-hard harvest groupies like my sister Molly and Matt's brother Brian, couldn't be here.  We had friends come the first week of September hoping to take part since in years past we were harvesting at that point, but this year it was not to be.  So we had a small crew out there today, and I was worried, but it was actually really pleasant.  We were all relaxed, there weren't a lot of grapes, and it was a beautiful day.   We finished picking the 1 hectare vineyard at about 5pm, and then we came back here to process the grapes and put them in the tank.  After cleaning up the mess, rinsing out the cases and the buckets and getting everything ready for tomorrow, it's only 10pm.  I call that a very civilized first day of harvest!  We'll see how the rest of it goes...

Harvest 2008 Begins!

Sunday morning we decided to pull the trigger and bring in the whites, well what was left of them.  The day before it seems the boars got a little hungry and did some pretty extensive sampling of both vineyards.  We didn't get much more rain on Thursday night, so it turned out well when the mistral started blowing on Friday as predicted, and it's still blowing now.  It's not often that I am happy about the Mistral blowing, but right now it's our savior.

We took a skeleton crew out to pick, since we knew it wasn't going to take us very long.  My parents, Matt's mom Joan and my good friend Alison Rosenblum and her daughter Delilah.  My mom made muffins and brought coffee so it made the morning very pleasant!  A little while later our "new best friend" Even Bakke  showed up with two of his interns Woody and Amira, so the picking went really quickly.

After that we returned to the house to press the grapes and have some lunch.  Even very very very kindly loaned us some of his equipment this year since we will harvest several days before he starts, well at least normally we would, though I'm not sure what will happen this year, the reds are limping along but getting there!  We decided to de-stem the white grapes (which usually isn't done) since we have a basket press which doesn't tend to extract as much juice as a pneumatic press or a horizontal press.  So, we thought maybe this would help.  Even let us bring over his de-stemmer and his must pump from his winery in the Ventoux about an hour away from here.  He took one look at our little crusher de-stemmer and vetoed it's use this year.  Well, that was before it got cold here and the grapes started ripening more and more slowly, if Even's grapes catch up with ours we'll have to resort back to our little machine, but we're hoping it will all work out.

 So, we de-stemmed the grapes and then loaded them into the press turned it on and waited for the juice to start flowing.  We let the press cycle through once and then pulled the cage out and dug down into cake of skins to break it up because there were still lots and lots of whole grapes that hadn't been squished.  Meanwhile my Matt's mom Joan had made a batch of her world famous chocolate chip cookies, so we got to enjoy them while we were hard at work!

In the end we got about 300 liters of juice which will hopefully start fermenting without the help of added yeast!  BUT, I warn all of you, this year I will not hesitate to innoculate the white if it doesn't start on it's own.  As I told Even this morning, I want to make white wine this year, not pour it down the drain like I had to do with our rosé last year!

Gambling with your grapes...

Well the roller coaster ride that is 2008 continues here in the Southern Rhône.  Earlier this week we received juice analyses on our Roussanne that convinced us that we should harvest them today, before there was more rain predicted, more rain and violent thunderstorms.  But, after consulting with our good friend Even Bakke (who I will properly introduce to you in the coming days) we decided that the Roussanne wasn't quite ready yet and that we would take a chance and hope that we didn't get all of the rain that they were predicting and that the mistral winds would indeed kick up to dry out whatever rain we did get.  Early this evening the rain started falling, heavy at times, but mostly just steady.  Now as I'm getting ready to go to bed, the moon is out and I can see the stars.  This, of course, doesn't mean the storms are over, they had predicted a slow-moving storm, so we're not out of the woods yet!

We're willing to take this chance though because we have so little white, that if we can fill a barrel I think we'll be lucky!  So, it's our first year making white, we don't have a lot to lose, especially quantity wise, why not learn something about the ripeness of Roussanne and Clairette instead of panicking and harvesting it before it's ready.  It's always a gamble, another vigneron friend of mind said that he always regretted waiting at the beginning of harvest, especially when it's sunny and beautiful in the early days, and two weeks later you're harvesting in the rain...  It's easy for consumers and critics to sit back in a chair and criticize a wine, or the decisions a winemaker made in a certain year.  It's also easy for us as farmers to criticize our neighbors for harvest too early (in our experienced and professional opinions -hahaha!) But you always have to remember that everyone makes decisions based on what they think is best or based upon what risks they are willing/able to take.  It's not as easy as you may think, especially when an entire year's work is at stake.

I'll let you know how much rain we did or didn't get tomorrow morning, and whether or not the gamble paid off.  Of course, we may not know that for several more days, or even months, until we see what kind of white we're able to make...or not!

Harvest Rush

It's always a rush when harvest gets started.  Being awoken at 5:30 by the sound of the harvesting machines driving by the house yesterday morning, I lay in bed excited, even though we would never dream of using machines to harvest our grapes.  It's started, my phone has been ringing, other vigneron friends wanting to know when we're starting, looking for some last minute materials or even with an urgent request to borrow a pump.  It's a great kind of adrenaline high, thinking about all of the things that are still left to do, what we've forgotten, heading down to the vineyards to collect samples to send off to the lab.  It's scary too though!  Will it rain again on Friday, should we start picking now or wait longer?  The weather has been less than kind to us and many others this year.  It rained heavily last Thursday and Friday night, not ideal at this moment, the grapes soak up the water, the bunches are wet and humid and rot could set in.   Luckily for us, it dried up quickly and the sun came out, no rot so far, but we are monitoring it closely. 

The biggest problem is that the grapes just aren't ripe yet!  They are starting to sweeten up, but the skins are still very tannic and bitter when you chew them up.  The seeds have all turned to brown and when you crunch them up in your mouth they now taste nutty, which is a good sign.  Our grenache came in at 13 potential alcohol yesterday, which means we still have at least a degree to go.  Pretty much everyone agrees that grenache isn't ripe below 14, despite the fact that we'd like to make a lower alcohol wine, it wouldn't taste very good if the grapes aren't ripe!  We should be able to bring the syrah in a bit lower to balance it out this year.

So now we are rushing around trying to get everything ready!!! Cleaning up the winery one last time, getting buckets and bins rinsed out and piled up and secateurs cleaned and sharpened.  They are currently predicting more rain on Thursday night, possibly violent thunderstorms, yuck.  So we're going out Thursday morning at o-dark-thirty to pick the whites.  The roussanne has turned a lovely brownish red, and is tasting good, there isn't much of it, so we're going to get it in before another possible soaking.  If anyone has a good relationship with the weather gods, could you have a word with them for us??

Sorry no photos!  I can't get them to upload!!  Argh!

Almost famous, again...!

On Monday a journalist from the regional paper called the Midi Libre came to interview me for a series of articles he's doing on the "vendanges" or grape harvest.  It was lots of fun since he had read through a lot of my blog and had become a fan!  He wrote a really nice article that gave a good sense of us and our adventure without making it sound like we were a couple of rich Americans, which is very nice, since we aren't!!!  So thank you Richard Boudes and his colleague Gilles Lefranq who took that great photo!!

A bunch of crazy wine bloggers!

Last weekend I took a couple of days off to play.  Well, and maybe to work a bit too, learn a bit, taste a bit, and to exchange ideas. The occasion was the European Wine Bloggers Conference, the location was the city of Logroño, in the beautiful Rioja region of Spain.  The conference was organized by Ryan & Gabriella Opaz of Catavino and Robert McIntosh of The Wine Conversation.  We spent three days eating drinking and getting to know each other, 40 wine bloggers from all over Europe.  It was a blast!  Ryan, Gabriella and Robert did such an amazing job organizing the whole event, we all owe them a huge round of applause for a flawless conference. 

Between all of the wine tasting and delicious meals, we did actually do some work.  There were three very interesting round table discussions all with the participation of different participants, bringing varying perspectives to each topic.  I was on the panel that discussed the use of point scales on wine blogs and whether they were appropriate and/or necessary.  Ryan led the discussion and we were also joined by André Riberinho of Adegga.  It was quite a lively discussion, and I for one definitely walked away from the discussion of whether or not points are important for a winery.  In my ideal world, I could sell my wine simply based on the fact that it's imported by Kermit Lynch (USA) or Martin Kössler (Germany),  that it has a nice label, that I write a funny blog, and that the wine is good!  Apparently though, there are people our there that like points though, big points.  It seems if you can get your wine rated by someone who counts at 92 points or above, that gets a lot of people's attention, and you can even sell your wine for more money.  Interesting.  Sometimes I forget that we're actually trying to make money doing this, Matt and other people often have to remind me. 

Speaking of making money, that was another round-table discussion, throwing around ideas of how, as bloggers we might be able to make some money from our musings.  We have a ways to go on that subject, but it certainly was interesting.  The other round table was on wine blog writing, the ways in which it is different from print media and the similarities. 

We also visited several wineries in the region and had the opportunity to understand the terroir and the different philosophies behind winemaking in the region.  There are many similarities and many differences when comparing it to southern France.  We saw multi-million dollar installations and smaller more humble wineries, some dating back several generations, others only a decade or so.  One thing that is really quite different is that almost without exception, the wines are aged in oak barrels, and are released several years later than we release them here.  I could go into all of the rules, but I don't want to bore everyone!

All in all, it was an amazing event, and I think that everyone left feeling like they benefitted from their attendance.  We all made lots of new friends and contacts, we all have new acquaintances in other wine regions and countries of Europe.  I was disappointed that I was the only representative of the French wine blogging community, and that was a shame because there are lots and lots of excellent French wine blogs out there!  I guess I'll have to rally the troups for the next edition!  If you read French and are interested in discovering some new blogs check out Vitiblog.

Once again congratulations, and a huge heart felt thanks to Ryan, Gabriella and Robert!

PS: you can see some great footage and interviews with some of the participants at : Vinus TV