Well almost. As the calendar turned into September we were congratulating ourselves on our magnificent grapes. Impeccable! Round, clean, healthy, beautiful grapes hanging in happy fat bunches. Hanging just as happily as on these paintings by an amateur group of artists on their annual La Cima Painting Course. The harvest approaches and it looks […]
“We presume an excellent millésime 2011” says Limoux’s wine syndicate, pointing out that the grapes are glowing with health and happiness, weigh about 30% more than last year, and look really good. So we are presuming too. It’s been a curious lead-up; some say all the up/down weather we’ve been having is because of this […]
The weather continues erratic, one day hot one day cold, one day clear one day cloudy, and the wild flowers are spreading like wildfire. More important, the grapes are perfect. Beautiful, big, fat, bountiful bunches hanging like fresh laundry on the vines. The vines themselves are lush, verdant, even edible to look at. So far […]
Flowering’s finished! Plummeting temperatures at the beginning of the month were too late to nip our grapes in the bud, and torrential downpours only helped to fill up our reserves of groundwater. The flowering of the vines is really, really important, and it went off without a hitch. Textbook perfect. Now we can set our […]
Temperatures fell in the first week of May, and thank goodness for that. The vines have been soaking up all that sunshine and unreasonable, unseasonable warm weather, shooting up like adolescents who grow half a meter the minute you turn your back on them. As the month opened, the beginnings of bunches of grapes could […]