August is when everyone in France is rightfully on holiday. There’s not much to be done in the vineyard: the die is pretty much cast. It’s countdown time to the harvest now . So there’s a lot to do in the cellars, polishing, cleaning, scrubbing, unwrapping, setting up, revising, and checking all our harvest equipment.
You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, Bob Dylan once memorably said … err, sung. In our case, it’s blowing east and it’s blowing west. It’s blowing hot and cold. It’s blowing dry and wet. This is the year of dizzying differences, huge falls in temperature followed by meteoric rises – a year quite unlike any other.
At the moment, it looks as if harvest will begin more or less on schedule, normalement, that is, completely out of kilt with its recent predecessors. There’s nothing about normal about normal any more, normal itself has become an abnormality.
Tuesday 17 August
We drive to Barcelona to put large part of the family on the plane, passing through the border without so much as a by-your-leave or backward glance: no Health Certificate checks here. This is going well.
Then we drive back again, and we’re hardly back in France when we grind to a halt. This is not going so well after all.
Two hours later, we’re still there… in fact, this is going very badly, we’re hemmed in fore and aft, port and starboard by trucks and other cars, all at an irreversible, inescapable standstill the whole road long from Spain to Narbonne.
This is the second bush fire we’ve met along this road within a month. At the same time, in Provence over 7,000 ha are also blazing away, destroying property and vineyards, and taking some lives as well, all started by a carelessly dropped cigarette butt. It’s frightening, alarming and sobering, and not something we can cast out to Australia or California.
We hunker down expecting to sit it out until dawn, but get off lightly, and are released after only three or four hours. This is exactly what fellow vigeronne Sophie said, when we were talking about the hasards of the business a few months ago. “Fire” she said, “it’s fire that really worries me.”
Thursday 19 August
Bless the eminent Jancis Robinson, wine writer and ‘decideur’ par excellence, for publishing our article about Mauzac on her Purple Pages.
This unsung historic grape variety, with its feet so fully grounded in legend and history, really deserves some attention, and if this doesn’t do it, then nothing will.
And of course we’re pleased and so very happily surprised that our contribution was published by her.
You can read about the Mauzac growing in the parcel we call le Jardin here, and hopefully will agree that there is even more to Mauzac than meets the glass.
Monday 23 August
Our neighbours are harvesting, and that brings it home to us: we have about only 14 shopping days left to Christmas! Our own tests, taken from randomly picked Chardonnay, give us a bit more breathing space. We’re watching this space like a hawk.
Wednesday 25 August
Nice news today. The granddaddy of all wine guides, the Guide Hachette des Vins, has bestowed stars on three of our wines in its 2022 edition, which will be published next month.
Two stars for Dédicace, the chenin blanc; and one star for Odyssée, the chardonnay: a repeat of the last edition, last year. But this time, there’s another wine of ours that’s joined the ranks of the star strucked: our entry level Chardonnay du Domaine.
Very encouraging news on the eve of the harvest.
Saturday 28 August
Everyone seems to be harvesting, and that makes it difficult to sit on your hands. We took our acidity/sugar test and see that we still have some time to go, maybe about 10 or so more shopping days to Christmas.
Then we weighed some sample bunches. My, what a beautiful bunch of Mauzac, weighing in at 500 gm on the kitchen scales! But it’s not completely representative. We count bunches on sample vines, multiple by number of total vines and come up with an approximation of the yield: we reckon about 38 ha/hl. Why we should get it right this time, when we never have in the past, is a mystery – but we remain optimistic and hopeful. The same for the sugar/acidity readings: sometimes the refractometer goes right against the reading your tongue gives you, and then the lab disagrees with both. A very inexact science winemaking is.
Monday 30 August
The American wine magazine, Wine Enthusiast has partnered with the Languedoc to highlight the region’s wines. How flattered we are that our Chenin blanc, Dédicace 2017 was chosen as one of the special wines for their Languedoc Challenge. Devin Parr, a well-known American wine story teller (can her name really be DeVin??) made this video, putting Dédicace in the league of … Bruce Lee. Personally, I had always thought of it as being a Nureyev of a wine, but Bruce Lee will do just fine, we take her point about packing a punch with style …
To be continued next month….