Here's a bit of a recap of the past two months:
Vinisud: we participated in this big southern French wine trade show for the first time, sharing a stand
with our friends from Clos de Trias. It was quite an experience, we met lots of great people and made some good contacts, and saw lots of good friends who were also showing their wines at the show. Our stand was in a great spot, but when you see the size of Chapoutier's huge...I don't even know what to call it, it's almost a building inside the fair, we certainly felt kind of small! But that didn't stop lots of interesting people from coming by to taste our wines!
Then there's pruning, of course! We just finished
last week with the help over the past few months from lots of family and friends. Our friend Gaspard Aïchelé aged 15 spent several Saturdays with us, the Swiss contingent came down from Neuchâtel, Matt's mom Joan came from Minnesota, and then on the last big weekend my whole family was lucky enough to join us!
We've rented 2 new parcels of grenache from the people who originally sold us our vineyards, and we are very excited about that. They are both in beautiful condition, the vines are 40-50 years old and we expect to get some great grapes out of them. The Ecocert organic certification organization was here yesterday to register their official conversion to organics. We will also be ripping out about 1.5 hectares of vineyards under a grant from the EU, they are offering €11,000 per hectare to help people tear out vineyards that are in need of replanting. Our mourvèdre vineyard has a fungus called Esca which attacks the vines and eventually kills them and is producing less and less each year. The Syrah vineyard that we rent is also in need of some TLC so we decided to tear out half of it this year and half of it next year. Finally we decided to replant part of our largest Grenache vineyard due to a root-rot problem!! Seems like a lot but, we thought we should take advantage of the EU funds while we can. It will also give us an opportunity to plant some other varietals like Cinsault, Rolle (Vermentino) and maybe even some Clairette Gris, along with new Syrah and Grenache plantings. Since we are going to be tearing the vines out, we didn't prune them, which just doesn't look right when you arrive at the vineyard!
Now we're headed full force into spring and all of the work that there is to do in the vineyards!! I'll try to be good and keep you up to date! (once again, for those interested I often post short snippets and photos on Facebook and sometimes I even tweet so you can follow me there too! La Gramière on FB and lagramiere on Twitter!
Yay! You're back! I was beginning to worry. All the best to you as you tackle the big projects in the vineyards.
Posted by: Pat B | April 22, 2010 at 02:23 AM