VINE LINES
WINTER – SPRING 2018
PREVISIONS:
ADDITIONS
Thankfully, the rain gave us a two-day window to plant chardonnay and mauzac this month. But don’t hold your breath: there won’t be any wine from these vines until 2022. All planted by hand, cared and cossetted for by the Rives-Blanques siblings, plus Ian, husband/brother-in-law … and Bacchus too, of course: a family investment in the future taking root before our eyes.
The back-breaking work of a new plantation.
ADMISSIONS and EMISSIONS:
So how to ensure that these vines will bear the trademark Rives-Blanques bouquet of garrigue, stone fruit and lime blossom? Well, here’s our break-through secret recipe, a guarantee of aromatic quality in only two easy steps. Here’s how:
But seriously, wild boar adore the fresh, sweet-smelling earth surrounding young newly planted vines; and there is nothing they can do more effortlessly or with greater gusto than uproot two hectares of carefully planted fledgling chardonnay and mauzac vines. So indeed, we have doused the vines with a truly terrible perfume, offensive to the finely-tuned boar nose, and that seems to do the trick (so far). And that of course is what the video is about!
DECISIONS:
It will take four years for those vines to produce. But how long will it take for our 1.5 ha. of truffle oaks to declare their truffles? Planting of the trees is scheduled for this autumn at a Very Secret Location on the property – and then we hunker down for the long haul (with a shotgun at our side … against the boars, of course).
REVISIONS:
It is true, we have flip-flopped for years between organic accreditation, sustainable accreditation, or following our own path between the two with no accreditation at all. It is true too, that all three have worked well for us: none is perfect, though our own path seemed to make most sense to us. But now we have decided to start the long and lengthy administrative process back towards official organic accreditation again, the fact that all our treatments are organic anyway making it no less arduous a task. Just to keep you informed.
EDITIONS
| This is what la Revue du Vin de France said about some of our wines when they published the result of a visit to Limoux in the January-February edition: |
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