Friday June 1
Last week we saw the very first sign of blooming. Not the roses, not the daisies and other wild flowers, not the fruit trees … but the vines, for they bloom too. it always starts with the chardonnay, our early bloomer, and ends with the late blooming mauzac, and it’s a critical time. If blooming goes well, all goes well. If not … well, we’d rather not talk about it. You really want the temperature to hover between 26 and 32 degrees, you don’t want high wind, you don’t want heavy rainfall, you certainly don’t want hail. It’s a milestone moment and we are feeling just as susceptible and vulnerable as our vines.
Saturday June 2
Odyssée, our Limoux chardonnay, again comes home with a gold medal from Decanter, and a nice 95 point score. Funny thing, that: we’re not great fans of wine competitions in general, but we get a real kick every time Odyssée wins a gold at Decanter. It doesn’t necessarily mean the 2016 is the best Odyssée we’ve ever made, or that it is very much better than some other chardonnays that didn’t win gold, because they are necessarily flawed. Wine competitions are, that is. But it still spreads a nice golden chardonnay glow over us, and we’re as pleased as punch, even if we haven’t got a single bottle of it left to sell. Or to enjoy ourselves, for that matter.
Monday June 4
The mother of a friend and fellow Vinifilles who runs a large family vineyard in Saint Chinian, comes by and we stand at the edge of the Garden of Eden looking at and lamenting the weather. “Eight treatments!” she hisses incredulously, “We’ve already done eight treatments so far this year! It’s unheard of!”
Today we’re doing our fifth treatment against mildew, so we’re not far behind.
And then later in the day, another Vinifilles drops by, this one from the Minervois. “Oidium’s bad this year” she sighs. We’ve also seen the first signs of it. Her preferred treatment is essence of orange oil, but the results of that are still unproven. We tried it last year. Unfortunately no one has come up with a definitive something that can handle this year’s conditions.
The big problem with organic viticulture is that you have to treat your vines against the twin humidity-borne diseases of mildew and odium before the rain. And then again after the rain, if it rains shortly after the treatment, because the rain washes it all off. But you have to wait for the leaves to dry out before you can spray again. And in the meantime, the soil has probably become so soggy and clogged up that your tractor can’t get through anyway. And then by the time you get going again, it starts raining again …
Vintage 2018 is shaping up to be very, very challenging.
Tuesday June 5
Our importer from Curacao and his partner arrive at Rives-Blanques to spend a few days with us, he’s a genial, jovial guy and we know it’s going to be fun. He brings a lot of laughter with him, but alas, no Antillian sunshine. No one has ever seen so much rain, and it just keeps falling.
So we keep him busy indoors, with a full-scale tasting of wines made by the Vinifilles, a nice rainy afternoon’s work cut out for him.
The Vinifilles are the female winegrowers of the Languedoc and Roussillon, an amazingly dynamic collection of collectively-minded and collaborative women covering the length and the breadth of the region – and Curacao is going to be treated to a six-bottle case of their wines, hand-chosen for them by Arie and Esther on a rainy, cold day in Cepie, in the South of (sunny) France.
Friday June 8
Will it ever stop raining?
Saturday June 9
Dire notice received today from the Chamber of Agriculture, all about Scaphoideus Titanis, the vector carrying Flavescence Dorée, and the “disturbing progression of this disease over the last seven years”.
It’s a bit akin to the dread phylloxera, which wiped out the European vineyard in the 19th century.
So everyone is obliged by law to join in a Titanic battle against the Scaphoideus Titanis, which despite its name is minuscule in size – and infinitely even smaller in comparison to the damage it is capable of wreaking. Everyone, but everyone, is obliged to spray three anti-Scaphoideus Titanis treatments if they’re organic or not. But if you’re not, there’s a chance your commune has special dispensation that allows you to spray the chemical version only once or twice – which is regularly reviewed, of course. If you use organic products, that doesn’t apply.
Years ago, when Rives-Blanques was fully organic, there were no remedies other than chemicals. That is why the vineyard took a step back to sustainable viticulture, when our fields were threatened by an outbreak at the neighbours. Today fortunately, there is a remedy: just one, produced by one single company, it is only 60% effective at best, and it is expensive. So in that we trust.
But a tour of the vineyard today showed no sign at all of the dread disease or its nasty little carrier.
Monday June 11
We’re in mid-floraison, and all the flower clusters have exposed their nectaries, ovaries, stigmas, anthers and attendant whatnots to the elements .. and all the pollen grains are floating from the their anthers into their stigmas, down the pollen tubes to the eggs at the bottom of the embryo sac … and we’re keeping our fingers crossed. This is the first big milestone that has to be negotiated. The wine grape vine is hermaphrodite, but it still needs a bit of help from its friends. In the shape of lovely dry sunny days
And it just keeps raining.
Tuesday June 12
This is our son-in-law Ian Madison, the new Rives-Blanques secret weapon, pouring our wine at a South of France wine tasting today, in the Maison du Languedoc in Central London, just off Manchester Square, and looking every inch the French vigneron.
In Real Life he’s an academic, but issues of parallel governments (of which there are many, once you are alerted to their existence, and of which he knows quite a lot about) are far removed from this. But that doesn’t seem to have stopped Ian from taking to this parallel life as obviously as some countries have to parallel governments.
Don’t know who the lady is, but she looks happy enough with this alter-Ian, And so does Ian, for that matter
In London the sun is shining, but in the south of France, it is not.
Wednesday June 13
Please, please stop raining!
Tuesday June 20
Hurrah! Sunshine!
Flowering is over, but it is still too early to tell how successful it has been.
Sunday June 24
A moment in the sun for our Mauzac, Occitania 2016. The respected UK newspaper The Independent selects Nine Whites for the summer , and we immediately spot our friend Occitania,
right on the right.
At this very moment, we are lunching on the lawn with a number of friends, having the self-same Occitania with our tomato and burrata salad. They go down a treat together, and the writeup in the Independent gives a nice opportunity to do a bit of gentle boasting about this “first wine I’ve encountered that recognises the name of the region” (rather than the region recognising the name of the wine, which is actually a bit more accurate …)
“Fragrant, light tantalising flavours of apricots and peaches” says the Independent’s wine writer, Terry Kirby. I’ll second that.
Monday June 25
Outsider meeting at Clos Gravillas today, home of Mr Carignan and Mrs Tennet. The Outsiders are winemakers who have come into the Languedoc from elsewhere, but as the car heads down the hill from cool(er) Limoux to the wide open spaces of the Minervois, it feels more as if we’re coming out of the fire and into the frying pan. It is hot, hot, hot everywhere … excepting under the tree sprawling over the entire space of the yard of Clos Gravillas.
Inevitably, the meeting is highjacked by this year’s extraordinary conditions. Robin says he’s heard that historically the worst year for mildew was 1997, but this year has already outdone that. Everyone around the table, has done at least six anti-mildew treatments, expecting for the one who is in ‘sustainable’ mode and has had to do only two. Lucky duck.
The sleepy labrador under the table takes great interest in all this, and none at all in the magnificent, very large chicken strutting out of the doghouse she apparently shares with the dog, to join the party.
The house of Nicole and John Bojanowski is large and rambling, dark with miscellaneous arms and legs of chairs and of wooden horses sticking out of the gloom; eclectic, with old beams holding up the ceiling. John takes us next door to see the work on his new cellars and we find ourselves in a different world: here all is modern and pristine, and there is a lovely fresh vat cellar in the making, and a barrel cellar-to-be with a lazy, jazzy nightclubby feel to its black walls and subdued lighting. We look and admire, a touch enviously.
Then lunch under the tree, more talk about wine and things related to wine, and about the Outsiders and things related to the Outsiders, before stepping out into the blazing heat and driving through a landscape being quietly grilled, back home. It’s good to take time out now and then and see how other people do things. Even if you’re just the teeniest weeniest bit jealous of the pristine new cellars …
Tuesday 25 July
La Cima art group comes back to Rives-Blanques for about the tenth year, to paint the vineyard in the sunshine. There are always lovely paintings that result from the expedition, and this one really brings the scene in front of the tasting room into focus. What it doesn’t show, is how hot it is, almost unbearable.
When oh when will it rain (just kidding)
Thursday 28 July
The month is winding up, and so are we. Yesterday we bottled the last of the 2017 wines. Didier, the mobile bottler comes up to the office with a grim face: “there are not enough labels”, he says.
“I don’t think there are enough corks either” says he.
So in order to be safe for la Trilogie, the last wine we’ll be bottling today, Jan decides to save the remaining corks for that. The last one or two hundred bottles of Occitania goes label-less, and with a two-year old cork brazenly saying 2015 on it. We won’t be able to sell those bottles, or even give them -away – even though it is probably the best Occitania we have ever made.
Not a great bottling day, yesterday.
And today a group of sommeliers from the USA comes to visit us and meet our wines. The weather all month has been hot – hot – hot. Today it is cold – cold – cold. We walk through the vineyard, visibly shivering, there to admire the view … which can hardly be seen behind a veil of gentle haze. But we all enjoy it , along with a crisp and bracing sip of Blanquette de Limoux.
The best way for this month to end. Who knows what July will bring?
To be continued next month…..