Sécheresse is the French for drought and we are getting to know lots about it! Some welcome rain at the weekend has left the foothills of the Alps snow-capped, but with only two or three weeks to go this year we are well short of normal rainfall totals. On average here we expect about 750-800mm a year. 2014 was very wet with 1082 mm, well over a metre! 2015 was a little on the wet side of normal with 827mm and 2016 a little on the dry side with 736mm. This year however we are only at 455mm. … [Read more...]
It’s all in the mix
Blending day is always great fun. An afternoon at the lab with our oenologist and a sample bottle of everything in the winery. After several hours trying this and that and a bit of this or perhaps a bit of that we have agreed on the blends for the La Dame Anglaise, L'Essentiel and Esprit du Nord 2016 and also for the Terra Firma 2017. As you can see it's tough work, but someone has to do it. … [Read more...]
Murmuration
Each Autumn the starlings gather and provide us with a great show. … [Read more...]
Winter is coming
As we look across the vines towards the foothills of the Alps we can see the fist snow of the season here. The last couple of weeks the weather has turned colder, the heating is on and we have even had a little rain, although not nearly enough to alleviate the drought. At the moment with only about seven weeks to go we are at half the normal annual rainfall so we are keeping our fingers crossed for a wet winter. … [Read more...]
Press for Wine
The fermentations of the reds have all been finished since the start of October. We then leave the wine in the tank with the skins to extract colour and flavour. Once they have sufficiently extracted, we need to press the grapes and skins to extract the wine. We did our first pressing last week and pressed again last Sunday. We'll finish up by pressing the Cru Vinsobres Grenache at the beginning of next week. Here's a photo of the press in action. The grapes are pumped into the perforated … [Read more...]
Winery update
All is going well in the winery. About half of the tanks have now finished fermenting and the others will finish in the next few days.The exception is the rosé Carpe Diem which we keep chilled and therefore it ferments much more slowly; it's only about half done. For the reds, even once they have finished fermenting we keep pumping them over twice a day to extract the colour and flavour from the skins which are now floating on top of the wine (as you can see from the picture below). Then once … [Read more...]
All done
It was a beautiful hot autumn day yesterday and we brought in our last plot, the Grenache in Cru Vinsobres. Focus now turns to the winery where everything is fermenting fast and there's lots of work to do! … [Read more...]
Fermenting strongly…
Here is the Cru Vinsobres Syrah I referred to yesterday. This shot of the foaming wine is taken whilst pumping over. It's important whilst the wine is fermenting to "pump it over" regularly to keep it well mixed and extract the maximum flavour from the grapes. It also looks great and smells delicious! … [Read more...]
Harvest update
We had a busy day of harvesting on Tuesday bringing in about 25 tonnes of grapes, principally for our rosé Carpe Diem and red Terra Firma. For the rosé, the juice is drawn off from the skins into a separate tank, chilled to 10 degrees and then left to settle. Yesterday, after 48 hours, we blended the clear Grenache and Syrah juices in a chilled stainless steel tank and added the yeast. Now we let the temperature rise to 16 degrees and the fermentation will gently start over the next two or … [Read more...]
Harvest!
Here we are early morning yesterday ready to go for the first day of harvest. Yesterday we hand harvested the Syrah in Cru Vinsobres. The grapes are in great condition and now safely in the tank in the winery. We allow the fermentation to start naturally rather than adding commercial yeasts so it takes a few days to get going. Today we were meant to machine harvest the grapes for the rosé Carpe Diem, but the harvesting machine is broken down and can't be fixed until Monday so that has been … [Read more...]
The waiting is nearly over….
At the end of August we thought that harvest this year would be particularly early, but the first and only summer storm on 31 August marked a rapid change to Autumn. September has been unusually cool and that has dramatically slowed the end of ripening. Although cool the weather has stayed mostly dry so we have been able to leave the grapes to ripen and have just had to be patient! This morning has been the coolest of the season, down to about 6 degrees up here on the plateau, but now all of … [Read more...]
Testing times
Harvest is approaching fast now. The end of August was very hot - 37º - but we had a proper summer storm on the 31st and the weekend was much cooler which has slowed down the ripening a bit. We sent samples from all of our plots to the laboratory yesterday. It looks like we will wait until at least next week for the reds, but we may start with the harvesting for the rosé this week. We'll keep you posted. … [Read more...]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- …
- 12
- Next Page »