Vine Lines, November 2014 Picture above: a fermenting barrel, one of the main actors in this month’s Shakespearean drama (“Bubble bubble toil and trouble”) Incredible that exactly a month ago we were sitting down to our harvest lunch, back-slapping and smugly congratulating each other on a very good harvest. Since then, we have […]
The countdown to Harvest 2014 is on! September is already on its final lap, but our harvest hasn’t even got past the starting block. True, we did a bit of moonlighting and quickly nipped in for a drop of zesty machine-harvested reserve for our country wine one night last week, but as for the […]
The grapes are almost at ‘veraison’, which puts our harvest start date in the second week of September. Luck has nothing to do with the stars. Luck is just a question of a few hundred metres. And luck was against the Languedoc winegrowers of the Minervois, Cabardes, Carcassonne and Malepere regions, growing their […]
JUNE 2014 A Very Good Year The breaking news from Rives-Blanques is that the vines have started flowering … just a few of them, and then only just – but still a giant stride towards Vintage 2014. What we need now is good weather over the next few weeks; no more of that thunderously […]
March 2014 Winter was late, Spring was early – and we are just in time! Twenty hectares of perfectly pruned vines basking in balm and birdsong, as we get down to the nitty-gritty of chopping up and ploughing the cuttings back into the soil. Vintage 2014 is on the way! And proof of it, […]