It’s my Vineyard

The start time for the vendanges is getting close. Today G and Didier who have been helping us all along came this morning to examine our grapes to assess their maturity and quality.

We walked through each parcel of vines, looking, tasting and discussing each grape sample taken. We were extremely pleased that it seems, in spight of the bizarre mixed weather that we have been experiencing recently, the grapes are in excellent condition! Slightly acid but with a good flavour and very little rain damage. Some of the stalks of the bunches are quite tough and this is why our pickers should use secateurs as pulling the stems by hand will without doubt bruise the fruit and start the fermentation process too soon.

The soil or ‘terrain’ varies from parcel to parcel, some clay and on others more sandy. Grapes that grow on a clay based soil will produce wine that is more ’structured’ as the French say, perhaps deeper more rounded flavour whilst the sandy soils will give a fruitier wine. This is why we mix the wine from different cuves before bottling to make sure we have a good balance of characteristics and qualities.

We are in the process of doing exactly that at the moment. A bottling is arranged for 8 thousand bottles on the 30th August of our super 2006 vintage, to make room in the cuvage for the new 2007 wine. Two cuves will be mixed, filtered and bottled on the premises; this will take one whole long day and I will take photos of the operation for you to see.

Tomorrow at 8.0 am the team from co-operative at Quincie will visit us to do the same sort of inspection. They will take samples of our grapes, sealed and carefully marked for analysis and let us know when they think the picking should begin as, you remember, we hope to sell half of our production in grapes to them as we cannot cope this year with double the wine production to sell.

In between all this activity today, Fernand helps us seal a cuve, or vat, ready for the 2006 wine that will be left unbottled for the moment. This involves pressing a special red coloured putty around the edges of the lid. We must then thoroughly clean the inside of the cuve, with the high pressure hose. Cleanliness is of paramount importance and this will continue right the way through the production of the next lot of wine which very soon will commence.

It could be the 3rd of September but we now await the second opinion tomorrow.

By the way there is a saying that the time of flowering of the ivy plant will give the date of the next years harvest. We have ivy outside our front door in full flower at the moment so 2008 may be an even earlier vendanges!