Tuesday May 1
Here’s a nice little post-humous decoration for our chardonnay, Odyssée 2106 from Mâcon, the heartland of the chardonnay grape.
Trouble is, it’s sold out.
But the good news is : the next vintage will be bottled at the end of this month. |Something we are all looking forward to.
And which goes to show that old soldier never die. They just get better and better, we hope.
Friday May 4
What a terrific description of our un-oaked Chenin Blanc! “As clean and crisp as a Pyrenean mountain stream”, quite honestly, I’d like to say that we said that ourselves, but it was The Wine Society in Britain. (Which is not to say we won’t adopt it as our own …)
Sad thing is, we ourselves have none left at all. Not even for the Ambassador at the European Council who came by to buy some wines yesterday, and would surely have recognised the music notes at the bottom of the label, and the pun on its name.
Aude à la Joie was a gift of the 2016 harvest, which gave us a one-off abundant crop of beautiful chenin blanc. It leaves a very good taste in the mouth, not only for that, but also because it enabled us to contribute 50 cents from every bottle sold to a post-grad scholarship at SOAS (School of Oriental & Asian Studies at London University) for a war-displaced person to study Conflict Resolution.
A small tribute to Europe’s 60 years of peace. Which doesn’t mean you have to be a European to enjoy a good draught of clean and crisp Pyrenean mountain stream … but you do have to be a member of The Wine Society!
Monday 7 May
Caryl is asked to come and sit in dappled sunlight at a table in front of the Chateau de Flandry at noon today, for a “shooting” (as the French call it) for the front cover of a book on Limoux’s wines.
Bad hair day, as is to be expected, though, more importantly, she survived the shooting. Despite being under renovation, the Chateau is lovely, turrets and all, and the rows of neat mauzac vines in front of it are positively text-book. This is the official conservatory of Limoux’s mauzac, which is reason enough to applaud the place.
And amazingly, the sun is dappled. All organised by the photographer, Arnaud, who gathers a number of local producers around the wrought-iron table in front of the vines, leaving one chair free. ” To invite the reader to join you”, he informs.
“Artistic picture, Arnaud?”
“No”, he replies, “aesthetic”.
In half an hour, it’s all over. Because Arnaud who is an organiser, has organised it that way. And we wait to see the results with interest.
Tuesday May 8
Yesterday’s dappled sun became positively drivingly hot, until in the late afternoon suddenly the temperature plummeted. Storm clouds drew over the Pyrenees. By evening it was raining, hard. By nighttime, lightning was flashing about overhead. The one thing we do not want right now is hail. All the vines are covered in a profusion of healthy, embryonic grape bunches, which are too fragile to survive such an onslaught.
Arnaud may have organised his shooting between an overcast early morning and a stormy late afternoon, but our high altitude vineyard perched on a terrace of the Aude valley organised its position of protection against the storm equally well. Others did not get off so lightly. Today, all the local winegrowers have been invited to arm themselves with their hardware on Saturday, to go and help salvage what they can of some vineyards totally washed away by the deluge of water that fell in the valleys just south of Limoux.
Wednesday May 9
Fall out of bed and into the wine cellar first thing this morning. Big day. We’re having our final tasting of the barrels of the 2017 wines, and a battery of sample bottles awaits us there.
The mauzac for Occitania is a breeze. We all love it, every single last drop of it. There is nothing to do, other than throw the wine from those barrels together and prepare everything for bottling. Only problem is, there’s not very much of it: just about 2000 bottles or so. But there’s no magic in the world that can solve that problem right now. Jan-Ailbe heaves a sigh of relief, this one’s a doddle for the winemaker.
The Chenin blanc seems good, but not Great, or at least, not quite great enough. We love our chenin and think it has huge potential in our microclimate. So we deconstruct it and taste the chenin from the various fields and the various barrels together and separately, and then make up compositions of the various parts. Finally, we track down the problem to two rogue barrels – faux amis the French call them – which are ruthlessly struck off the list, and pulled out of the picture. There so! That’s Dédicace done and dusted, and coming up smiling. The smile on Jan-Ailbe’s face doesn’t lessen.
O
n to the chardonnay. We need a minimum of 20,000 bottles. It’s clear we are not going to get them: one set of barrels has failed to work its magic, and try as we may, there is no combination that will happily incorporate them. These things can happen – you just hope they never will.
Heated discussion. “I say we chuck it all together! We’ll easily sell it.”
Travesty.
The family is united. There Will Be No Compromise On Quality. So if we were tight on chardonnay before we started this final round of tasting, now we’re even tighter. But although it’s very limited, at least it’s very good. But there’s a furrow in Jan-Ailbe’s forehead.
And now. And now … And now, is there a Trilogie in all this, we wonder? We re-taste the blend we put together last time. Universal agreement. Don’t touch anything. This is as perfect as it gets! Hurrah! Habemus Papa!! Smiles all round.
And what a great note to end on.
So we pile down to our local butcher’s lunchtime restaurant for a late lunch and devour huge plates of home-made charcuterie before even exchanging a single word. Blending is hungry business.
Thursday May 10
So this is our chief organic pest control officer.
He has one, two, three, four, five, six, seven black spots on his back, hence the name Cocinella septempunctata. He lives knee-high to a vine, unlike his close cousin with two spots (who lives in trees, apparently). And unlike his distant cousin the fearsome and often horrible Harlequin Lady Bird, he thrives on the larva and worms that thrive on our vine leaves, rather than on his own kith and kin.
A good guy and a welcome co-inhabitant on our property.
Experts say you can actually get ladybird taint in wine, just as you can get cork taint or smoke taint, but that sounds like the answer to one of those imaginative wine quizzes designed to show how clever the quiz master is and how stupid you are. Besides, our hydraulic press is so soft, we once we actually saw a lady bird come out of the winepress unharmed and un(im)pressed when it accidentally went in with the grapes. Someone must have had an awful lot of Ladybirds for this term to even exist.
Friday May 18
This month is flying out of hand. Has flown out of hand. Yesterday the Inter Oc organisation, home of the Pays d’Oc label, hosted a promotional-celebratory event for the wines that were chosen to be Ambassadors of the brand last year. It’s quite an honour for a small vineyard like Rives-Blanques to weigh heavily in as one of the Ambassadors representing the quality of such a huge and diverse production – in fact, one that outproduces the total production of a whole country like New Zealand. So yes, we’re proud indeed. And chuffed. And flattered … and all the rest. but no one has any time to go to Montpellier to wave the flag. Because this month is slipping uncontrollably through our fingers.(
Friday May 25
A customer from Toulouse comes by with his wife. He’s been coming by about once a year for at least twelve years, or probably more, and we’ve got to the point that we ask about what the children are doing, then the grandchildren. (Over these years, he has acquired rather a lot of grandchildren, and they all seem to be girls.) His wife is famous for her raw foie gras and encourages me to use her recipe – which I have been desisting for over a decade. We call each other Monsieur and Madame and ‘vous’, but they feel like old friends. This time he is here to buy a selection of wines for his wine club, of which he is an avid and active member.
“The trouble is” he said, “last time we met, in fact shortly after I’d been here, we did a Burgundy tasting, and everyone was crazy about a particular pinot. I thought it was okay, but nothing special” he said with a gallic shrug, “and there they were, all raving about this wine. And then I began to notice, that nothing really seemed to smell or taste particularly interesting. I’d lost my sense of smell!”
This must be pretty much the end of the world for a wine buff such as this particular Monsieur. But he bears it manfully, and still returns to Rives-Blanques for his annual stock up. Excepting that now it’ s Madame who does the tasting.
I wave them off, feeling very sorry for this undeserving victim.
Thursday 31 May
Oh my goodness, how we have looked forward to today! We have been out of a trademark chardonnay, Odyssée for way too long, and it’s being bottled today! So is Dédicace, the Chenin blanc, also currently sold out. Oh Happy Day …
But not so happy.
All the Odyssée that we got is already sold, and we don’t have a single bottle to spare until this time next year. (Please dear gods of the vine and wine and weather and sun and rain and wind and all the wanton whimsies of Nature, please give us a nice big fat French harvest this year??!!)
Even so, today calls for a quiet moment of reflection and celebration : three’s good company with just the two bottles and me.