It’s my Vineyard

We have 600 bottles of wine to label and box up ready for the transporter next week. We decide to go for a bike ride, before it gets too hot. The Beaujolais landscape is surprisingly hilly.

Before too long outside Regnie Durette there are steep climbs and I struggle to make the ride without dismounting, and walking up the incline approaching the pretty village of Lantingnie. We admire on the descent the beautiful rolling landscape.

Our theme for the cave is ‘Leisure activities’ including of course drinking wine but also of motoring, and cycling, we have a few pictures to decorate our bar area, all bought from the wonderful second hand store of ‘Troc de L’ile’ fame, withought which we would have no furniture at all in the house!

The posters and pictures suggest a fashion theme too, with women decked in 30s evening elegance, to suggest that Regnie is also quite ‘a la mode’.

Back to work in the cave we finish the labelling and boxing of our recent order, The cool interior is wonderful after the heat of the bike ride. We have an efficient system, and we make a good team, between us we can complete the order in a couple of hours, unless the labelling machine decides to have a mad moment.

The bottling and corking of the wine has been done previously at Maison des Bulliats on a seperate occasion, by professionals who arrive with the specialist equipment needed to filtre the wine before putting it in the bottles. We place the capsules over the corks and feed the bottles onto the machine, where the capsule is pressed onto the bottle top and then, in one fell swipe, the labels, front and back, are stuck ingeniously firmly onto the bottle. Boxes are made up, bottom first, filled, closed with a sweep of the Regnie decorated tape then placed on the pallette ready to go!