Convention dictates that we all are happy and positive and looking forward to a big, brilliant and beautiful year. But despite nagging doubts – after all, we’ve been here before, haven’t we? Just one year ago to the day? – we can’t help believing that this finally will be the vintage year we’ve all been waiting for. A long overdue and much-needed Vintage Year in every sense of the word…
Saturday January 1 2022
And the year begins like a good omen. All blue skies and sunshine, beginning as surely it intends to end, and with blue skies and sunshine all the way in between as well! We raise a glass of our best, finest bubbles … and hope.
Monday 10 January
One of the highest high points in the year comes early, right at the very beginning of it. 
We spent the entire morning tasting near on one hundred barrels of Chardonnay picked in 2021, one by one, parcel by parcel, barrel by barrel.
Our master blender came over to help us with this huge task. He sees right through the wine; is very good at predicting its final destination.
Benson, the Springer Spaniel, looks on attentively; is still desperate to step into the shoes of Bruno, his Springer predecessor 
who was once memorably billed on the inside back cover of Decanter magazine as “the best nose at Rives-Blanques”.
It was a hard morning well-spent. Afterwards. we went down to our local canteen in the village, and wolfed down the man-sized portions of everything (mostly meat: grilled, patéd, sausaged, jellied, jerked, hung and dried) that was put in front of us. Really hungry business, this wine tasting.
It’s still early days, but we’re pretty happy and pleasantly surprised by the results of that very, very complicated vintage. As Andrew Jefford said so succinctly in a recent edition of Decanter, every bottle that comes out of the 2021 vintage should be seen as a miracle. And we are indeed happy, somewhat surprised, and hugely relieved to be honest, to know that we have about 25,000 miraculous bottles of very good Odyssée coming up, and that the harvesting decisions made on the hoof and in the heat of the moment were the right ones.
We’re also very tired too, and ready for a siesta, come to think of it.
Wednesday 12 January
Today our main Dutch importer celebrates his 100th birthday, and hangs the royal seal of approval over his door.
We have been working with them for 19 of Rives-Blanques’ 21 years of existence. They were one of our first three importers: one was the Great Western Company in Bath, lovely working partners who, alas, were bought out by a massive drinks business about ten years later, which changed everything for us. The other belonged to the “great nose of Belgium”, who nosed us out that same year at our first-ever wine trade fair, and who died, sadly, also about ten years later; and the third was Colaris, still very much alive and kicking, and part of the family.
So we made this wine for their celebrations, with its new 100-year label hot off the press just in time.
Monday 17 January
Terre de Vins, a high-circulation, high-gloss, good-looking wine magazine for consumers and professionals alike, publishes the results of its blind-tasting of high altitude wines from the Languedoc in its January-February edition. We were invited to submit one wine, so off Occitania went, sweet as a lamb to the guillotine. The expert team of executioners delivered their verdict, and Occitania lives to see another day: this wine really deserves our coup de coeur, the experts said.
Still don’t know how to translate coup de coeur. But it’s good, very good, as good the excellent 18 points they gave it.
Friday January 21
Today we tasted all the barrels full of Occitania and Dédicace. Oh happy day! Dédicace is shaping up nicely, and Occitania is … stunning. Or, at least, we think so, but then maybe we’re influenced by Terre de Vins. I reminded Jan that his new outsourced team of harvesters chose to “forget” to come the day we were supposed to harvest these grapes, so they were picked two days later than planned. Happily, the forecasters got it wrong, as they often do, and it didn’t rain as forecast. Could those two extra sunny days have made a difference? I doubt it, but happy is the Mauzac that comes out of it all sunny-side up. And happy are we too .
Monday January 31
According to Maria Thun’s sidereal calendar used by biodynamic growers, today’s not the best day in the world to bottle your wine: a root day. And it’s raining to boot.
But the first 2021 wine to be bottled of that benighted, black vintage got through its last trauma effortlessly today. It gleams and glows in the glass like a bright light in that dark night.
We look at each other, smiling.
The wine smiles back.
It’s the best thing, this is: to be able to enjoy the fruit of your labours.
And it’s good to have our Chardonnay Pays d’Oc back in stock.
…./ to be continued next month.