la gramiere

A visit to Sitevi - Playground for winemakers and wine growers!

Last week was the bi-annual trade show called SITEVI (not sure what that stands for to be honest!).  It's a huge event, farmers and winemakers come from all over southern Europe to check out the latest in farming equipment and winemaking equipment.  I went for the first time this year with my friend Serge Scherrer who also has a small winery in our village.  I swear it's like Disneyland for farmers!  Anything you can dream of is there, and many things you never would have even imagined.

As always these things are a bit of a catch 22, because you see so many things that you want or "need" and that you truly can't afford.  Serge and I looked at a brand new GAI bottling line that bottles 1000 bottles per hour, which isn't a lot, perfect for our size, I can't remember the exact price but it was somewhere around €30,000.  We'd have to sell a whole lot of wine to justify that kind of investment!  But it's lots of fun to look around to see what is out there.   

We saw a very cool demonstration of a mechanical weed eater, similar to the , but it does both sides at once.  It's certainly not as powerful as the Weedbadger, but it seemed to get the job done.  There were lots and lots of tractors, you could feel the testosterone as you entered the pavilion! Burly guys drooling over the latest and greatest.  We even saw a brand new John Deere, but it didn't really appeal to me, I'm old fashioned, I only dream of the vintage models!

Then we moved on to the packaging pavilion.  Screw caps, labels, boxes, corks, glass.  Everything you can imagine.  It was fun to look at the designs that wineries are using, colors, logos, creative solutions for everything wine related. 

Amazingly we walked around to what we thought were all of the different pavilions, but forgot to visit the winemaking area!!  We missed all of the pumps, presses, tanks, filters, barrel makers and who knows what else.  It's probably for the best though, who knows what expensive ideas that might have put in our heads...

There's always next time!

Barrels, barrels, barrels

People often ask me why we don't age more of our wine in barrels, well the answer is two, maybe three
fold.  First and foremost, I am not a fan of oak.  There's nothing worse that tasting a young wine that has lots of personality and depth, only to be ruined by a winemaker that decided it needed a good dash of oak on the finish.  Ugh.  I much prefer to taste a pure expression of the fruit and terroir of a wine than the toast and tannins of a certain cooperage.

Secondly though and most importantly, I really don't like dealing with barrels.  In the tiny space we have to keep our 4 barrels, it's nearly impossible to move around.  We aren't equipped with the latest in barrel management programs, stacking systems or cleaning implements.  So usually it means that when the barrels need to be racked, emptied or cleaned, I spend a couple of days struggling to get the job done.  The barrels are located on the top of some ancient concrete vats that we don't use, about 15 feet above the level of the main part of the winery.  Think of it as a mezzanine.  We have a big ladder to climb up to access this level, but no way of getting the pump up there.  This means that two hoses have to be linked together because the longest one is about 6 inches too short to reach!!  When we purchased our pump there was a remote control option but since we have such a small area to worked in, it didn't seem necessary.  Now I wish we had gotten it!  Picture this:  the hoses and barrel filling apparatus all attached and ready to go, tank valve open, I am 15 feet below the barrels with no way to check the level of the wine from down there.  So I start the pump let it go for a few minutes, then have to climb up to see where the level is, climb back down, turn the pump back on, and so on and so forth. Until the moment when the barrel fills up, at this point I've either stopped before it was entirely full and will finish filling it with a funnel and buckets of wine, or I didn't stop in time and the wine rushes out in a veritable geyser, hitting the ceiling and running down the walls. Not delightful.

Then there's emptying and cleaning them, ugh, trying (usually alone) to empty all of the wine and lees out of them is nearly impossible and a complete exercise in frustration.  See those planks in the background of the above picture?  I was trying to roll the barrel up onto some planks and then roll in onto a tub that would catch the remainder of the wine left in the barrel, only to realize that there wasn't enough left in there to make it worth my while.  Then, there's cleaning them, I'm not even going to get into that one!! 

Barrel maintenance is not my favorite activity in the winery.  So, you ask, why have any at all?  Well
that's a good question.  Now in our 5th year we've been making just one wine each year, which I think is the right thing for a winery of our size, but we want to experiment a bit, to see what the effects of longer aging can be on our wine, to see if the slow oxygen exchange that happens in barrels can benefit a small percentage of our wine which will then either be blended back into the main wine, or maybe bottled seperately, we'll see.  So, I just ordered and received two more barrels this week.  One year old Burgundy barrels from Damy that were reconditioned at the tonnellerie (cooperage), and look like new.  The barrel we used for our white was also from Damy, and I love the quality of the oak.  Our 2009 syrah is just beautiful, so I will be curious to see how a small amount of it will evolve in oak. 

I'm not looking forward to dealing with those barrels though!!!

Amazing bloggers, new faces and old...

 Last weekend I was in Lisbon, Portugal for the 2nd Annual European Wine Bloggers Conference, better known as the EWBC.  Many of you will remember I went to the first EWBC last year in Logroño, Spain, well, I decided I'd better check out round two!  Especially since it was in Lisbon, a place I've always wanted to visit.  Well, I got to see some of Lisbon, but there's much, much more to see, mostly I met loads of interesting people, and got the chance to reconnect with the friends I made last year.  

The event more than doubled in size this year thanks to the heroic efforts of our hosts Gabriella and Ryan Opaz and Robert McIntosh.  120 plus bloggers from all over the US and Europe gathered in Lisbon at the hotel VIP Grand Lisboa for 3 days of fun, oh and some serious learning, of course!  A huge thank you goes out to our many sponsors who included: Vini Portugal, The Douro Boys, Catalunya DO, Vinhos do Alentejo, Amorim, L'and Vineyards and many others!!  They helped make the conference a wonderful success.  

But the best part of the conference is meeting the people  behind the blogs!  For those of us who participated last year it was like a high school reunion, meeting up with what seemed like old friends.  We formed a bond over those three days last year, and it was such fun to catch up with everyone a year later!  Then of course, there were loads of new faces.  A fair number of Brits showed up from both the food and the wine blogging world.  It was interesting to have some wine neo-phytes join in and give their perspectives on the whole thing. 

I figured the best thing I could do for my readers is introduce you to some of my favorite people from the conference and their blogs and/or websites.  These are people I enjoyed meeting, discovering their blogs and their passions.  I'm sure I forgot someone, so if you're curious you can see the entire list of participants here.

Oscar Quevedo: www.quevedoportwine.com  - Oscar was referred to as Port wine's pin-up boy, and you can see why.  His personnality is as engaging as his smile, there's nothing not to like here.  He is a dedicated blogger, and if you enjoy my blog, I think you'll like his as well.

The Adegga Boys www.adegga.com  - André Ribeirinho, Emidio Santos and André Cid are the guys behind Adegga.com and the ones responsible for keeping us all online throughout the conference.  When the hotel's wifi connection couldn't cut it, they found a solution.  Adegga is an online "social wine discovery" site where can track wines that you like, see wines that friends like and do oh so many more things.  My description doesn't do it justice.  But every time I see them present it, I think that they are geniuses, so I've asked them to make a short video to describe how to use it so that when you sign up you can see just how smart these guys are, and just how useful this site can be!

Ryan and Gabriella Opaz www.catavino.net  They hardly need an introduction anymore, as organizers of the conference and the most ardent proponents of wine blogs and social media out there. They are doing by far the most innovative stuff out there as far as social media is concerned.  As we speak they are live blogging from the Wine Future conference in Logroño, Spain, and creating even more of a buzz than the conference itself!!

Wine on the Rocks, Finkus Bripp, www.wineontherocks.com  This is a newcomer to the blogging world having just launched his video blog in September.  I am in love with this blog and can't wait for more episodes to be posted!! These guys have some serious talent for video editing, music selection and Finkus has a great on camera presence, this blog will go far if they can find the time to keep it going!  Don't miss this one guys!!

Rocio Osborne www.rocioosborne.wordpress.com  Yes, she is a real Osborne, as in Osborne sherry,  Rocio writes a very engaging blog recounting her travels and adventures as she becomes more involved with her family's company.

Melanie Tarlant www.champagne-blog.com  The brother-sister duo of Melanie and Benoit Tarlant have been on the blogging scene ever since I can remember and they maintain their blog in both French and English.  From harvest to pressing, to blending and bottling they are avid bloggers and lots of fun to follow on their blog and on Facebook.  It should also be noted that Mélanie can really get down on the dance floor, she put us all to shame on the last evening of the conference!

Voilà  just a few of the super interesting wine people that I befriended and discovered at the conference. Sorry to those I didn't have the time and space to include!!  I hope you take the time to check out their blogs and discover some of the amazing things that are going on out there in the blogging world!!

Hand Made Wine

Every little bit counts right?  Well it seems we took that to the extreme this year.  Since the weather was beautiful and our Mourvedre seemed to be hanging on, I wanted to leave it as long as possible this year.  So we checked it about once a week and it was doing just fine.  Then 2 weeks ago when we thought that it was now or never, we realized we had waited a little too long!  Ugh.  The boars had come through and sampled a fair amount, and then even worse, we had a late out break of grape worms, that ate through quite a few of the bunches!! So Matt and I went back down the next day to salvage what we could, leaving or throwing away quite a bit, which wasn't very much fun.  We put the grapes in a plastic bin, crushed them with our feet and hoped that they would start to ferment.  In just a couple of days the tell-tale signs of fermentation were there, but the bin was cold, only about 16 degrees C, and I was worried that it would never really take off before turning to vinegar.

 
 I had the brilliant idea of putting an electric blanket underneath the bin, which helped a bit, the temperature started to rise slowly.  Then, Matt made my idea even better by surrounding the bin with some old lawn chair cushions so that the whole thing was insultated.  Now we were cooking with gas, as they say!  The temperature shot up to 27 C and it formed a nice cap that we punched down daily. 

Last night we decided to press it off into a barrel since due to the small quantity of wine, there wasn't enough CO2 to kill off the fruit flies and I was having trouble getting rid of them.  So, how does one press such a small amount of wine?  By hand, of course.  Me with my strainer squeezing out each bunch of grapes, Matt with the press mats from our real press, standing on the skins in the bin!!  We ended up with a whopping 35 liters!!!  It tastes pretty darn good, so I'm glad we did it, but I'm not sure it will make a lot of difference in the final blend!

All three colors this year!

I forgot to share the very exciting detail that we have made wine in all three colors this year!  Small quantities of white and rosé (500 bottles of white and 700 rosé) but we did it!!  The white which is a blend of Roussanne and Clairette (90% Roussanne though) was half fermented in barrel, half in tank.  Unfortunately we did end up having to add yeast to it, which I really didn't want to do, but after three days there was no movement at all, and I wasn't willing to take a risk.  This year, come hell or high water, we will bottle some white.  For those of you who have been reading this blog for a long time, you will remember that we made a barrel of white last year.  A barrel.  Barrels are tricky, they require more attention than a big concrete vat full of wine.  Over the course of a year wine slowly evaporates out of the barrel, so you have to "top it up" every few weeks.  Last year when we filled our barrel we had about 30 liters left over that we put into a carboy and several empty wine bottles, so that we could use this wine to top up the barrel.  The problem was keeping that leftover wine from oxidizing, and I wasn't very successful.  Details are not my strong point, and I would often forget to top up the barrel or I would open the carboy or the bottles to find the wine inside oxidized and not know what to do.  In the end we just weren't very satisfied with the wine, the whole barrel was pretty much oxidized in the end.  I know many wineries would have bottled it anyway, saying that they were aiming for a richer, nuttier (oxidized) style, but I'm just too honest and I have a hard time pulling that sort of salesmanship off.  Most of all, I don't want to have to sell a wine that I, myself wouldn't want to drink!  So I'm going to try my best to keep this years as fresh and lively as possible.  We even bought a new 500 liter stainless steel vat to keep the half of the white that isn't in barrel in, that way it will be easier to top off the barrel!!   (I hope I'm not confusing you!)

As for the rosé, we had a bit more luck, after three days, it took off like lightning, so we didn't have to add any yeast!!  Hooray!!  I was thrilled.  We added a bucket of fermenting red juice and it just took off.  It is almost 100% grenache with a few buckets of syrah that I added in to give it a bit more body and color.  We picked the grapes early in order to keep the alcohol down and the acidity up.  In fact the acidity might be a bit high, so we're thinking we might see if it does it's malo-lactic fermentation to round it out a bit.  Usually in the south the malo-lactic is blocked by adding SO2 to keep the wine from becoming flabby, since we often have low acidity.  So, we'll see!!!  Another experiment, but we have made rosé, it's all gone very well and we will be bottling it this spring!!

2009 is in the tanks!

That's it, we're pretty much done with 2009 harvest.  We pressed off the syrah tank last weekend, so it's all resting hopefully getting ready go through malo-lactic fermentation before it gets cold!  For now though, the weather is divine!  For the past 2 weeks we have had nothing but sunny days, 25-27 degree temps.  Warm but not hot.  Perfect fall weather.

Harvest lasted longer than any other harvest to date. Well, with 5 years now under our belts, that's not a long

history, but so far as our history goes, it was quite drawn out.  We started with the whites at the end of August, then proceeded to pick our big vineyard of Grenache.  After that we decided to wait a few days.  The ripening was really uneven.  The syrah, just wasn't tasting right yet, and our other vineyard of Grenache was super sweet but the skins were very bitter.  So we waited a few days.  Then we picked half of our second Grenache vineyard which was really suffering from lack of rain and decided to leave the other half for a bit longer... Complicated, but a nice way to harvest, we got to have a day off here and there, which is great.  A week later we finished the syrah.  It was odd to be picking Grenache, and waiting on the Syrah, but this year was a little backwards all in all.

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Once again, we were amazed by the willingness of our friends and family to come out and help.  This year the medal goes to my parents' neighbors (John and Jean Buss, Axel and Gerlinda Markert, and Michel Berberian)!  They were our core group of pickers this year along with our good friends Lucy Till and Sophie and Gaspard Aichele, who are always our heros and pick as many days as they can!  It was once again a very international crowd.  We had Germans, English, American, French, Dutch, and a whole gaggle of dogs! 

Matt and I are off to Paris for a weekend of fun with my sister and brother-in-law.  After that we will hopefully return to our normal programming!  Lots of fun events coming up this fall: the European Wine Bloggers Conference in Lisbon, the annual trip to Nurenberg, Germany for K&Us yearly open-house, wine tasting and overall excellent food and wine event, and lots of other fun things I suppose!

And the harvest begins!

We've picked the Roussanne and some grenache to make rosé! Not a lot of time to chat right now, but here's some photos and a short video of pressing the Roussanne grapes.  Making white is a lot more work for us than making red, our press just isn't that well adapted to pressing fresh grapes.  We spent the whole day on Saturday only to get 400 litres of juice.  That's not very much!!!  We are starting in earnest on Thursday, the weather has cooled off and we only have sunny days ahead of us, so hopefully we'll be able to get it all in by this time next week!  I'll try to keep the pictures coming!  A big thank you to those  who left comments on the last post!  It made me realize that there are still people out there reading this blog!!

Don't fence me out!

A few years ago I wrote, what I thought at the time, was a funny post about judging the ripeness of the grapes by when the boars started eating them.  Last year when they pretty much cleaned out our roussanne vineyard on the eve of harvest, I didn't think it was so funny.  So this year we are trying to protect the roussanne by putting an electric fence around the small half-acre vineyard.  I took the video with my new i-phone, and I found watching it that it made me a little motion-sick.  I'll have to work on my video techniques.  But it sure was easy film and then upload! 

As you may or may not know, virtually all of France goes on vacation in August, I may not have taken a real vacation, but as those of you who are still reading this blog have noticed, I took a vacation from blogging.  Harvest will be starting as early as Thursday with the whites, so I'll do my best to keep the blog up to date, especially now that I have a fancy phone that will allow me to directly upload pictures!!

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.