la gramiere

French Winery Websites, Blogs, and internet media threatened

For several months now there have been rumblings in the French government concerning the application of a nearly twenty year old law aimed at prohibiting wine advertising to internet advertising.  They have even go so far as to propose prohibiting any websites that promote or discuss any alcohol.  Meaning that French wineries would no longer have the right to have websites or even blogs promoting their wines or their professions.  I'm not sure where I would fall in that category, but it would be possible that my blog could become illegal!  Brilliant idea don't you think?  Alder at Vinography wrote a post about this last week, you can read more about it here.

So today wine producers are protesting all over France, and French wine bloggers are too.  Just imagine if we were all shut down!!??? Seems a bit archaic to me.  Click the link below to see the future of French winery websites and blog if this law is extended to the internet:

www.le-vin-sur-internet.fr

I wish I could be out there protesting with the best of them, but I'll be in the UK for the next several days... shame!

Labor of Love: Meet our Menu for Hope Winners!

As many of you food and wine blog readers know, Pim of the blog Chez Pim has sponsored for the last couple of years a holiday fund raiser which this year benefited the UN World Food Programme.  Over $90,000 was raised and lots of great prizes were offered by wine and food bloggers all over the world.  Two years ago I decided to get into the action by offering a day of work in the vineyards or winery followed by dinner here at the house with Matt and I and lots of delicious wine to go along with it!

The winner in 2007 was Emma Buls, who hasn't yet had the chance to come to visit, we're still hoping she'll make it over here one day!  This year's winner was Kate McWiggins, a former San Francisco resident who now lives in New Zealand.  She and her husband George Hingston were here over the weekend to redeem their prize.

We decided on Sunday so that Matt could participate too, and we spent the afternoon in the vineyards.  We were so lucky to have an absolutely beautiful fall day, in fact we all complained that it was hot out there!!  Matt had some plowing to do in our white vineyards and decided that we would put George and Kate to work sowing a winter cover crop in the Roussanne vineyard.  Luckily for them, it's quite a small vineyard, so it really didn't turn out to be too much work, but we'll be sure to send them pictures as the "vetch" grows over the winter.  The vetch seeds looked just like lentils, only a bit fatter, it's a nitrogen fixing plant that is commonly planted, then mowed off and plowed into the ground in the spring. 

After all that hard work, Matt took Kate and George on a tour of our other vineyards then we headed  back to the house to give them a tour of the "winery" (which takes all of 5 minutes).  Then it was time to break out the wine.  We started with a 2003 Fleur de Cailloux from Jean-Philippe Padié, then a 2007 Château de Vaudieu Châteauneuf-du-Pape Blanc, La Gramière 2005 & 2006 and finished with a 1986 Clos du Caillou Châteauneuf du Pape Rouge. 

To go with all of that wine,we started with brousse and fresh herb crostini.  Brousse is the Corsican version of ricotta which has found it's  way across the Mediterranean and into many Provençal recipes.  We are lucky enough to have a local sheeps milk producer at the market in Uzès who makes an incredible fresh brousse in season.  For the main course I spent two days preparing a delicious Daube Provençal, a slow-cooked Provençal beef stew with orange rind, cloves, bacon, white wine and all sorts of other yummy ingredients.  It turned out to be delicious if I do say so myself, and we had a great evening together, topped off by an amazingly gooey, stinky cheese plate and a sumptuous Caramelized Orange and Rice Custard, one of my favorite recipes from my friend Joanne Weir.

We had such a great time with Kate and George, that I can't wait to see who wins the prize this year!

Full Disclosure

That's a term I see from time to time on wine blogs when they want to let people know that they received a certain wine as a sample and didn't purchase it, so I thought I'd borrow it here to tell you more about this year's inaugural white. 

For those of you who are new to this blog , I just want to back up a bit and give you some background on our farming and winemaking philosophy.  We do our best to do everything as naturally as possible, from farming to winemaking to bottling.  That said, we don't want to go overboard and loose 90% of our crop or end up with vinegar, so we do fall back on things like copper and sulfur in the vineyards and SO2 in the wine.  And, up until this year we have never used commercial yeasts in our wines.  For the reds this has presented no problems, our fermentations may take a bit longer to start and they may last a few days longer than the average ferments, but we have never added yeast, and don't intend to start.  For the rosé and whites however, this presents a different problem due to the fact that the juice doesn't have extended contact with the skins, which is where most of the wild yeasts come from.  In our first year, 2005, our rosé fermented just fine and was a big hit, everyone loved it.  In 2006 and 2007, the ferments didn't start and didn't finish, to the point where as a last resort we tried to get it going again by adding yeast, but by that time the wine was so weird that in the end we didn't even bottle them and they ended up at the distillery. 

Enough already, at some point you have to realize that you're being too idealistic and that you grow   grapes in order to make wine, not to pour the unfermented juice down the drain!  So this year as I said in an earlier post, I decided to give the white 5 days to start fermentation, if not I was going to yeast it.  Well, it turns out I had to yeast it.  After 5 days there wasn't a bubble, not a thing just grape juice and I would be damned if I was going to ruin it.  So we added half the recommended dose of yeast, and off it went.  It fermented nicely in our one year old Damy barrel that smelled so good I wanted to bring it in the house.

This year I look at our white as an experiment, we only have one barrel, less than 300 bottles so we're playing.  It may turn out that it's too oaky, and lord knows I really don't like oak, but I feel like experimenting.  So, it's a blend of Roussane and Clairette, which is a great combo, fermented and aged in oak, AND we are going to let it do it's malo-lactic fermentation.  Normally here in the South most wineries block the malo in order to keep the freshness of the malic acid,  since often southern French whites can become heavy and flabby due to their ripeness and low acidities.  If you don't want a wine to go through malolactic fermentation, you first have to add a good dose of sulfur to stop it, then you have to sterile filter it at bottling, neither of which I  want to do.  

So we'll see how it turns out this unconventional Rhône white, I'm not sure that I will love it, but I'm sure I will learn a lot from it. Next year we may approach it differently, we'll see.  If you want to taste it, you'll have to make a trip over here, since there is so little we plan on selling it only at the winery!

Hey with the exchange rate going in your favor, that trip may not be out of reach!

Putting the wine to bed

Well, that's it, it's finished, we've now pressed everything off and put it back in a tank to rest for the winter, and hopefully do it's malolactic fermentation.  I say hopefully because everyone is saying that the malos aren't happening quickly this year, and we may have to wait until the spring. We even filled 3 barrels, one with pure grenache that we pressed last week, and two with the syrah that we pressed on Saturday. 

It's always a good feeling to press, that means that the fermentations are mostly done, you no longer have to do one or two pumpovers a day and no more delestages (I recently learned that the American term is "rack and return" which is pretty logical.)  A delestage consists of pumping off all o f the free-run juice from the tank into an empty one and then letting the cap of skins settle for 15 minutes to a half hour, then pumping the juice back into the tank over the top of the skins.  It's another way to extract more from the skins, and we tend to do it 2-3 times during the 3 weeks of fermentation. The bummer about pressing is the clean up, once again you have grape skins everywhere!  Cleaning the press is no picnic either. 

This year, pressing was a bit disappointing though, because it's not until you're finished pressing that you know exactly how much wine you made.  Well, this year we have a new record for low yields, 46.5 hectolitres, which is less than half of what we made last year.  The mildew attacks that we had in early spring really did their damage.  I was hoping for 50 hectoliters, but we didn't quite make it.  We're pretty happy with the quality though, so in the end I consider ourselves lucky.  We know people that lost 80-90 % and we also know people that are completely unhappy with the wines this year.  So, we may not have much, but it's tasting good, and it will be interesting to see how it evolves over the next 9 months.

As always we have friends that are interested in what we're doing, so this weekend we had some visitors, and of course they wanted to help!  Here's Lise and Nicolas giving it their best effort, pulling the grape skins out of the vat.  There's a lot of them so it's always nice to have help.  Our second-hand basket press is still plugging along and giving us some great press wine, which we almost always blend right back in with the rest. 

As I mentioned earlier, we acquired some used barrels from Burgundy that are 2 years old.  We've wanted to experiment with aging in oak for the past couple of years but didn't really have the opportunity.  We bought 10 used barrels, hoping to do a bit more experimenting, but due to the small quantity of wine this year, 3 is all we can do.   We have a 40 hectoliter tank that is full, and has to remain that way until bottling and then there was only enough to fill the three barrels and that's it, c'est tout, basta! 2008 should be a good year, miniscule quantities, but delicious, drinkable wine, and that's we have always wanted to make!

A short harvest video

Pressing white 2008
Vidéo envoyée par lagramiere

Here's a video I shot of us pressing the white grapes. It took me awhile, since I was having trouble getting my computer to download it! It was taken with my handy dandy little Flip Video Recorder, it works great! I just need to be patient when trying to figure these techie things out. You'll see Even Bakke, Matt and Even's friend Woody in action, and at then end, even my dad. And for your listening pleasure you have Daisy barking in the background... I have one more video to post, let me know if you find them interesting or not!

The sorting table at Clos de Trias!

PICT0018
Vidéo envoyée par lagramiere

Here's the new sorting table in action at Clos de Trias. The picking bin unloads onto the table by gently shaking the grapes. The sorting table vibrates to move the grapes down the table and then into the de-stemmer. A very gentle process which enables the sorters to eliminate any unripe or less than perfect grapes! Pretty fancy!

Lending a hand

Since we have a small operation and our harvest tends to be a bit earlier than some of our friends, they often come to help us pick and then I often spend a few days helping everyone pick too!  Last week, I was all over the place picking grapes, as if I hadn't had enough of that already!

On Monday I helped our good friend Denis Gayte pick a small parcel of old vines cinsault that is part of his vineyards that he takes to the local coop.  Most of these vineyards are now picked by machine, but the goblet shape of the old vines doesn't allow the machines to pass without doing some serious damage to the plants.  The weather here has been glorious, and it was a great way to spend the afternoon.

Thursday was Even's day.  So I got up at o'dark thirty to drive the hour and a half to the foot of Mont Ventoux to help out at my friend Even Bakke's new project called Clos de Trias. Even and his wife Marie-Caroline bought a property just before harvest last year, it's quite a bit bigger than ours so I wanted to see how it all worked.  Even worked in the California wine industry for over ten years with some of the top wineries and he has invested in some amazing equipment to make top-notch wine in the Ventoux, so it's very exciting to see how the pros do it.  He has been a great help to us, offering us knowledge and advice, and is an invaluable ressource for my under-educated enological mind!  As you may remember Even was generous enough to loan us his destemmer and must pump, so that we could see the benefits of this fancy equipment, even if we can't afford it quite yet!  This year he has added a sorting table that is making the sorting process go much more smoothly.  I'll post a video of it next!  Mrs.  Bakke (Even's mom) is a former restaurant owner and caterer, so they are lucky enought to have her come for the entire harvest and cook for them.  We had a great lunch under the mulberry tree looking out over the syrah vineyard that we had picked that morning.

Finally, yesterday  Matt and I spent the day helping our friend Serge Scherrer pick his .80 hectares of grenache and cinsault (that's about 2 acres we have 5 times as much - and we think we're small!)  Just last year Serge bought this vineyard, and like us, spends all of his free time and weekends tending his vineyards and making wine.  Last year he made about 1500 bottles, this year he's hoping there will be  a bit more!  The weather was perfect, even a little hot at lunch time!  Here's a shot of how Serge and Matt did the sorting of the grapes!  Not quite as technically advanced as Even, but a good way to do it if you only have one tiny vineyard!  It's been a fun week, harvesting at 3 very different places, all for friends and all in the spirit of helping each other out and trying to return the many favors that they have all done for us!