This is the month when the grapes form tight little bunches and start growing. It’s a major milestone on the road to the harvest. It’s also the month of the Tour de France, passing not through our village this time, but through Carcassonne, which is close enough. It’s the month when the Music Festival of […]
The big event this month is the flowering of the vines – an event as evanescent as our effervescents, with the smell of their blossoms floating like bubbles on the wind. Wine-vines are hermaphrodite, so good weather conditions are more important to them than wind or insects for the important business of producing fruit, and […]
Monday May 1 In January we were invited to present three wines for Jeb Dunnick to taste. Jeb Dunnick is the famous Robert Parker Wine Advocate Languedoc specialist. He was confronted with a battalion of some 900 bottles when he got down to work here. We are very pleased indeed that the “three beautiful whites” we […]
Friday April 1 As usual Rives-Blanques conspires to be at its most beautiful just as we are on the way out (though New York’s not a bad destination). Cooling weather has slowed the vines down, and we’re pretty much getting back to ‘normal’ – what ever ‘normal’ is. We leave full of confidence and in […]
Little buds on the vines bravely raise their tiny, tender heads above the parapets, there to find rain … howling winds …. a five minute burst of hail … and a bewildering alternation of balmy breezes and malicious icy winds. But so far so good. Things are moving at speed, in their own slow way. First […]