la gramiere

This is not Napa - Redux

Lately I have been once again reminded how different winery visits can be in France as opposed other parts of the world.  A couple of weeks ago we decided to have an open house and invited two other small producers to join us.  I felt like it would be more fun if we had more wines to pour, and that it might attract more people.  So we invited our good friend Serge Scherrer who for his first two harvests had less than a hectare of vines.  (a hectare is roughly 2.5 acres so he makes miniscule amounts of wine under the label Agarrus)  We also invited our friend Carole Leblanc who is from Quebec, she has 4 hectares not far from us, her winery is called "Les Cabotines". 

So, we opened up the big iron gates in front of  our house, rolled a barrel out onto the little island across the street, put a sign up, and waited for our faithful friends to show up. The previous day we had all distributed flyers, at the market in Uzès, in the mailboxes of our village (Serge's full-time job is a mailman here in Saint Quentin) and we sent out all kinds of emails to anyone and everyone we knew!  I prepared some snacks and Matt (as always) saved the day by turning my failed pizza dough into some wonderful foccaccia that we all devoured at the end of the day. 

There was a non-stop flow of people all day except for a small down-time during the hottest hours (when everyone takes a nap!)  Friends, colleagues, neighbors and many people just passing by.  There were 9 different wines to taste so it was worth it for them to stop by.  I think it's a great way to do it because almost everyone found a wine they liked, and no one felt funny  about leaving without making a purchase.  We all sold lots of wine, and we all had a great time.  It wasn't polished, or catered or posh, just a fun afternoon spent meeting new people and spreading the good word about 3 new-ish small producers that are all juggling other carreers while trying to pursue their passion and their dream!

Unfortunately things were so busy that I didn't take any pictures when we had a big crowd, but just try to imagine the courtyard full of people dying to taste our wines!!  

Meet Elmo, our newest La Gramière team member!

 Here he is!  It's been a couple of weeks since we picked him up now and he's fitting in very well.  On a bit of a whim we decided that Daisy needed a playmate and Elmo just happened to be available and ready for his new family.   We drove up to Alsace to pick him up and then went to spend the weekend in Switzerland with Matt's brother Brian and his family.  It's been lots of fun having a new member of the family, Daisy has finally decided that he'll be a pretty good pal.  He's the same breed as Daisy, a Hovawart.  They exist in three colors, Black and Tan, like Daisy, Blond like Elmo and all black.  Daisy's mother was blond, and ever since I've wanted a blond one too. He's growing like a weed!   If all goes well, we may even have Daisy and Elmo puppies in a year or so!

Meanwhile in the vineyards... The first grapes are starting to turn from green to red, we were down there last night and saw maybe one or two bunches that had some color.  What you notice the most though is the hail damage from a storm we had about a month ago, the bunches are scarred with ugly brown wounds on the top  dozen or so grapes and the leaves are tattered and torn.  It doesn't look very pretty, but the damage isn't too drastic.  The bunches are currently quite small, it hasn't rained in several weeks and the vines are starting to show the first signs of stress.  Hopefully we'll get a shower or two before harvest, but for now all we see in the forecast is sunshine.  Better than tons of rain I suppose.

It's already July??

This month just flew by.  The past 3 weeks I've been home for a total of 4 days!  Busy, busy busy here!  The vines are growing, growing, growing, and suddenly it's HOT!!!  35 degrees for the past few days.  Ugh.

Let's see, what has been going on?  Well we'll start with our trip to Italia!  We were invited to be a part of a trade tasting in Italy called Terroir Vino sponsored by the Italian wine website www.tigulliovino.it, and organised by Filippo Ronco who I met at the European Wine Bloggers Conference last year.  It's a great event that takes place in the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa, the setting is breath taking.  Over 120 Italian wineries were present and us, La Gramière, Matt and Amy.  At first things were kind of slow, there were lots of people tasting and visiting the other winemakers and we were sort of a curiosity.  Then things picked up and we met some really great people and got some great response to our wine.  One wine-blogger even wrote a post about it here in Italian.  We met and tasted with these three crazy guys who love natural, organic and bio-dynamic wines, they write a blog about the wines they taste and the music they love. Marco even found a song to publish along with the post called "Colorado Girl"!  I love it! 

The following week was our big winery-blogger tasting in Bordeaux.  The location was great, just a few short minutes from downtown Bordeaux, a bit more from Vinexpo.  Chateau Luchey-Halde is in Merignac, on the outskirts of the town, but within the Bordeaux metro area, and there are vineyards all around the château.  It was a wonderful setting, we had a great conference room that was all windows on one side opening up onto a terrace that looks out onto the vineyards.  It was light any airy and the weather was perfect, sunny but not too hot.  The turn out was less than we had hoped but good for the our first effort. There's talk of repeating it next year at ViniSud, we'll see if it happens!  In anycase, it was a great opportunity to meet the people behind the blogs and above all to get to taste their wines!  The overall quality of the wineries present at the event was exceptionally high, which I suppose is to be expected since only the most passionate "vignerons" are willing to take the time to write a blog and share their experiences to the point that we all seem to!

Finally, this weekend we took a few days off to visit Matt's brother Brian and his family who live in Neuchatel, Switzerland.  It's always fun to go visit, but it's especially nice at this time of year when it starts to get really hot here, and up there it's sunny and warm but not hot.  We also had the chance to meet with a potential importer based in Neuchâtel, which was very exciting!  André Crelier has been importing and selling wine in Neuchâtel for 27 years.  He has the tiniest shop you have ever seen, but he sells lots of wine from it, lots of great wine.  It was one of the most interesting meetings with a wine seller/importer I've ever had.  André is definitely old-school, he buys wine from his procducers and then he actually ages it.  He's currently selling Santa Duc Gigondas from the 2001 vintage.  He explained that he feels it's his duty to offer his customers wines that are at their peak and that even though he has to hold the wines for several years, his prices are only slightly higher (we're talking a franc or two) than they would have been when he originally purchased them.  He liked our wines very much so hopefully we'll soon have an importer in Switzerland!

Now it's back to work.  We have to bottle the 2008, some 2007 syrah that we didn't blend into the main cuvée and then start getting everything ready for harvest 2009!  This will be our 5th harvest, I can't believe we've been doing this for 5 years already.  It seems like we're still learning so much, when will we feel like we actually know what we're doing??