Sunday April 1 No April Fool Second on the left, front row: our neighbour – a retired grape grower who keeps bees. A very nice man, an old-world Languedocien. He has a field that for historic reasons lies in, but on the edge, of our vineyard, right between our two top chardonnay fields. He is […]
We asked for winter last month, and promptly got snowed in. Now we are almost afraid to ask for rain, because heaven knows what we’ll get – but we do need it. What we don’t need is this string of balmy, bright blue days pulling the vines joyfully into springtime … when, as everyone knows, […]
We’re always careful of what we ask for. But it seemed certain that we had to ask for winter. January was so balmy that colleagues in (lower) parts of Limoux were reporting that their vines were already beginning to stir. Further afield, the first little buds were already beginning to show on the vines. You […]
This sunset was too awesome, too prophetic, too full of promise and portent to be captured by a humble little Samsung, but here it is, closing the first day of the first month of the new year; the view from the tasting room was so stunning that we all piled out and gaped open-mouthed at […]
Nothing like the gentle warning that Christmas is only two weeks away to illustrate how Rives-Blanques managed to slip into December and clamber half way up the month before any of us even realised it. And yet the month seemed well and truly done long before its undoing actually began. So much going on! Unusually […]