Easter Sunday April 2021
One of the really positive things about this quasi locked-down monochrome existence is that we’re being driven to entertain ourselves. So we celebrated Easter al Argentino, Rives-Blanques style. Mallman substituted by Panman. And with a proper sandpit, and an Argentine-sized leg of lamb hanging from a tree, all organised by Jan-Ailbe. Trouble is, first you have to climb your tree to and hang your lamb. (Does Mallman do that, himself?) Then the lamb hangs … and hangs … and hangs. Three hours the famous Francis 
Mallman said, but in our case, 7 hours, and still not totally cooked. But because you are not actually Mallman yourself, just a mere Panman, it is must be your fault and not his: fire not hot enough, lamb not close enough, who knows? But when finally served, as the lamb unilaterally rescheduled itself from lunch to dinner, it was positively the most delicious ever. Sadly, no red wines from our own production to do justice to this obra, nor an interesting Malbec from Argentina, so we opened a bottle of Terrasses de Larzac to go with it, and that was a good choice.
And then topped it all off with our very own Lagremas d’Aur with a with a most delicious artisanal Easter egg made by our local Serrat-Pujola patisserie in Limoux.
No tree climbing involved in that one. No hanging, and not even any hunting.
Thursday 8 April
A beautiful, bright blue, blameless sky belies the ravages wrought by last night’s sub-zero temperatures. How can the world look so benign in the face of such brutality? What’sApp has been pinging all day with news of huge losses of Chardonnay, then of Syrah, then of Picpoul, then Grenache blanc … Corneilhan … old vines … newly planted young vines … the pings just go on and on, all the way from Costières de Nîmes to the Côtes de Roussillon, from Montpellier to Limoux.
But not us. We’re basking in beauty, as if God’s in his heaven and all’s well with the world. Nature is not very democratic. Or perhaps just too democratic, because there’s no notion of privilege, just a random distribution of destruction. Sometimes you have to be lucky, regardless.
Knowing full well that next time you won’t be.
But in the meantime, nearly everyone we know is suffering. Apparently about 80% of the French vineyard was affected, every single appellation. In Hermitage they used helicopters to ward off the frost, in the Jura they relied on snow to keep the vines insulated, and all over the country growers were burning straw fires. Just across the Aude river in Saint Hilaire, all the vineyards burnt fires in a communal effort, but according to one of them, without any effect at all. Never in living memory has this happened, even areas that have never seen frost before have been devastated. Temperatures of minus 6 … minus 8 … minus 9 even! And that in the Languedoc.
Friday 9 April
Our Sandra, Housekeeper of the Vines, has brought some friends to help her weed (by hand) around the young plants. One of them, keffiyeh-headed with an impressive beard under, tells him that his speciality is foraging for wild flowers and plants. He transforms them into all manner of things, though sadly Jan didn’t ask what, exactly. He was too distracted by the tag line: and I also make Kim-chi.
You make Kim-chi?
Ah yes, he’d learned it in Mongolia. He would bring a pot for Jan on Monday.
Jan told him how much he loved Kim-chi. How he’d seen people making it in the countryside when we lived in Korea. And suddenly our young friend seemed a lot less keen on selling him a pot. Yet we wait for Monday with high hopes …
Tuesday April 13
We spent this morning bending and tasting the Odyssée 2020. The plate glass windows of the tasting room open up on to a magnificent view of our Chenin
blanc basking in the sunlight. Inside all is concentration. Why does the chardonnay from the right-hand side of a field taste so brilliant, yet the left-hand side is pretty mundane? What if we take 20% of this one and blend it with that one, to balance out the acidity and bring in a bit of body? How about if we eliminate these two barrels? And so it goes on until we find the right recipe. Sometimes the blend of wines from different fields is less than the sum of its parts … some times it is much, much greater.
And while we’re analysing and discussing the nose, the mouth, the finish, Benson is down there with his nose right on the job.
Monday April 19
Even a septuagenarian can cause sexual confusion.
Rives-Blanques was the first vineyard in the Languedoc to use pheromones to confuse the grape vine moth, poetically called Eudemis (a good name for a bit-part in Tchaikovsky’s Nut Cracker Suite, I always think) into not being able to find a partner to lay the eggs that produce little worms who bore into the ripening grapes, and ultimately destroy them through resulting oxydation. Get the picture? Up until then, that is the early 2000’s, the solution was to blitz them to smithereens, because The Only Good Eudemis is a Dead Eudemis. We experimented with pheromones, and not a single Eudemis came our way. The trouble is, there were no Eudemis that year. Tried it a second year; same result. So we abandoned the project, which was very expensive, and being new, unsubsidised as well. No Eudemis at Rives-Blanques for years and years. And then suddenly they reappeared.
So this year we went back to where we started from, and tied bows around our vines that emit smells the Eudemis finds confusing and unattractive. The amazing thing is, it doesn’t have that effect on other species, not even on its cousin Cochelis. So now we wait and see how effective this 70-year old Mauzac vine will be, wearing the bow of sexual confusion .
Sunday April 25
Another sad day at Rives-Blanques. We had a trio of chickens, the Supremes they were called, named after that iconic ’60’s Motown group, starting with Diana (Ross) the star of the show, who showed her independence in chickenhood as in life by walking down the road and going it alone. The subsequent and supporting Supremes, named after members of the group in order of appearance, formed a lovely orange cloud that drifted over the vineyard, wafting from the front lawn down to the tasting room, and then up towards to the vines, and exuding a gentle zen-like aura of industrious peacefulness. At night they put themselves to bed, in their highly luxurious two-storey accommodation, and every morning presented us with three fresh eggs, one per chicken.
And then yesterday morning, there were but two chickens … and three eggs. We hunted all over for Florence, but she, of the unusually yellow feet, had disappeared, leaving no more than a flurry of feathers in her nesting space – and an egg.
And this morning, there were no chickens at all, and no eggs – but a lot of feathers. The wonky-beaked Betty and the gentle Mary had been taken, leaving not a single clue who did it.