The calendar’s clock moves its hands from 10 to 11: enter the second decade of Rives-Blanques. The first ten years were spent establishing a name and a reputation. The focus of the second decade, starting from today like a good resolution, is to make wines that are a closer and finer expression of their ‘terroir’. […]
We had it all this month, even before the month was fully underway: unbearably minus-zero cold, and then suddenly balmy and unseasonably warm. In a sense, more of the same of what we’ve been having the whole year long. And so therefore, cold again, QED. And then snow. But the wines continue their deep contemplative […]
November lights the vines like a lamp, and autumn lies over our land in a tweed of gold and burnished brown. Most of the action moves indoors now … where most of the action is over and done with: the barrels stopped fermenting just a couple of weeks ago, and now the cellars are plunged […]
Such frenzied activity at Rives-Blanques that nobody actually noticed September passing into October. The weather was doing something – yo-yoing around more or less as it is has been all year – but we were taking it one day at a time: the awful fallibility of its forecast matched only by the unerring infallibility of […]
A heat-wave pushed our grapes over the start line and into September, as you will see on our monthly video if you click here. But in the early days of the month, it was clear that they were not ripe for the picking: acidity too high, sugars too low. So we distract ourselves, and try […]