April 1, 2018
Last week’s planting was exhausting enough for the helpers who planted the chardonnay and chenin blanc vines, and then had to go around again putting perfumed rings of ribbons around the vines. Why on earth would we do that? To guarantee the aromatic compounds in the wines, of course. Obviously! Click on the picture to see the video …
Works a charm.
Beautiful Easter Sunday today, full of blossom and birdsong. Only four times in the last hundred years has April Fool’s fallen on the same day.
Tuesday April 3
In Quebec there’s. wine writer called Monsieur Bulles (Mister Bubbles) who writes about fizz, obviously. That’s all he really writes about, though he has been kind enough to mention our ‘remarkable’ chardonnay, Odyssée and to say how much he ‘adores’ our mauzac, Occitania on occasion. Trouble is, he slammed our blameless Blanquette 2012 several years ago, and we’re still recovering from the shock. Of course you know that every taster can have a bad tasting day, every wine can have a bad wine day and every bottle can have a bad bottle day. This day must have been a combination of all three: that is, it was a A Really Bad Day. Today however, he published an article about our “remarkable” Blanquette 2016, and all the pain has gone. Disappeared. Vanished. Replaced by a feeling of effervescence. But what was big of Monsieur Bulles is that he said the 2012 must have been a ‘bad bottle’, and explained to his readers how that can happen. So we’re rather pleased with this rather pleasing article, and particularly so with its most pleasing author. And we raise a glass of bubbles to Monsieur Bulles …
Wednesday April 4
Today we get an order from Lithuania, and from Latvia, and a request for a visit from Estonia. What’s going on? Suddenly, it’s awfully important to know if the French Lettonie means the Lithuania it sounds like, or is it really Latvia?? And where exactly are all these Baltic states anyway, in relation to us and in relation to each other?
Friday April 6
Jan-Ailbe, who’s a pretty good cook (and enjoys cooking: the important part) is working away today in the mauzac field, and his eye falls on wild asparagus growing along along the edges. Some one else’s eye has fallen there as well, but never mind. There are a number of headless stalks, but let’s just skate over that. So obviously, Jan-Ailbe abandons all idea of work and starts picking. Then he drops in at the neighbour, Michèle, who is our supplier of fresh eggs. There are four of them under four chickens, and he gladly takes all four.
Then he beats the eggs, but adds nothing to them – no water, no milk, no cream … maybe just a bit of pepper and salt, that’s all. And then pours them into a very hot pan.
Now the asparagus go in. Leave them there to cook until the egg begins to set. then put in a pre-heated oven for about 40 seconds or so.
Now is the moment suprème. Very carefully roll the pale, delicate omelette onto a pre-warmed plate. If it’s not brown, then you’ve done the right thing. (If it is, never mind)
Then …. and this is the big bit … open your bottle of Occitania, made from the mauzac grapes grown in exactly the same field where Jan-Ailbe found the wild asparagus… and enjoy!
Enjoy? It’s incredible! Eggs and asparagus are known to be really ‘difficult’ with wine, but this is something else. The omelette is so light and delicate, literally melts in the mouth, and then there’s the sharp tang of the wild asparagus. And Occitania pulls the whole lot together.
#ProudMum indeed!
Saturday 7 April
So the big news is, the chardonnay has started budding. So has the chenin blanc to a lesser degree. And the mauzac, to an even lesser degree. This is the first milestone pointing to Vintage 2018. We have had so much rain so far this year, so much more since ever anyone can remember, and certainly more than we had in the whole of last year, that things are looking pretty good.
That means another ten weeks to flowering (watch this spot)
Monday 9 April
The men of the house set off early for a wine tasting with our agent in the Sud Ouest department, a company with the unhappy acronym SOD. Nothing soddish about SOD at all. They supply restaurants and wineshops from Toulouse eastwards with our wines, and today’s the day they show their entire portfolio of participating vineyards to their customers. The Jans come home late at night with two bottles of mauzac from Gaillac,made by the SOD boss: one 100% mauzac vinifiedl in oak barrels like our own mauzac,Occitania, and te other a sparkling wine. We can’t wait and immediately taste the non-sparkler … which bears no resemblance at all to our Occitania. On the nose, a little bit, maybe, but in the month a completely different kettle of fish, so to speak. Terroir speaks out louder than words.
Wednesday 11 April
Cold outside, but even colder in the cellars, so we do as much of the blending tasting today as we can in the tasting room.
This is the first serious attempt to see what we can make of the 2017 wines. An exciting moment.
First we taste through samples made up of equal portions of all the barrels from one particularl field. And then we play around with them: a bit of this one here, a bit of that one there.
And then we go into the cellar to pick out the most interesting barrels and see if there is a La Trilogie lurking about somewhere in there.
And … yes! there is! (we think).
We call it a day, and will go back to the drawing board in a month’s s time, when the wines have aged a little more.
Monday April 16
We’re promised a week of extreme heat, which means we can expect the vines to race ahead. They’ve had a good dunking of water, and now sunshine and hot weather will really wake them up. It’s a gorgeous day. A Californian garagiste called Hank Skewis and his wife, Maggie, come for lunch, and sit on the terrace looking at the our snowcapped peaks glowing in the the sunshine as if it is the most normal thing in the world.. We say it is. “It’s always like this”, we say. Overhead, the wisteria pods pop like pistols and send their seeds shooting across the lawn.
Hank has an iconic reputation for his pinot noir.
So guess what the conversation is about at the lunch table?
And guess why?
Tuesday April 17
it glimmers, it shimmers,
it rides, it glides (it flies!)
it rises … it’s full of surprises:
a joystick … sunroof ….hydraulics … control panel … latest safety factors …
AW COM’ON GUYS, IT’S JUST A TRACTOR!!!
No! they say, “it’s the engine of this place!”
and nothing can keep that smile off Jan-Ailbe’s face.
His new all-purpose multi-mod-cons-with-gold-plated-taps tractor has arrived. It’s called a Fendt. As the Dutch might say, a Jolly Good Fendt.
Thursday 19 April
Some ten or fifteen years ago or so, a writer for the English wine trade magazine, Harpers, came to spend a couple of nights with us. As the night drew on, we became more confidential and friendly.
“Tell me”, he said, looking into the last drops in the bottom of his glass, as if the answer were there, “what are you ambitions? Where do you think you will be in ten years time?”
Well, we weren’t going to tell him that, now were we?
“Tell you what”, we said, “we’ll write it down, stick it in an envelope, and send it to you in ten years time. How’s that?”
And we diligently did. What’s more, we even wrote down where we wanted to be in five years time as well. And we put the envelope somewhere safe.
Well, Stuart has since long left Harpers, so there’s no need to disclose the over-ambitious pretensions of a pair of parvenus on the winemaking stage. Besides, no one has a clue where that envelope is. So the secret is safe. But I will tell you where we hoped to be in five years time.
“In five years time” we wrote, “we hope that a leading, internationally respected wine writer like Jancis Robinson might recognize the basic quality of a vineyard called Rives-Blanques in Limoux”.
I look at our breathtaking immodesty with shamed amusement.
And yet. And yet, how pleased to finally get a copy of that seminal and wonderful work, The World Atlas of Wine by Jancis Robinson and Hugh Johnson, 7th edition, published in 2013. It covers all the wine growing regions of the world. It includes a chapter on the West Languedoc, and that chapter includes a paragraph about the appellation Limoux. And under the map of the West Languedoc there is … a picture of a Rives-Blanques label – Dédicace 2010, actually – with a casual comment that this is “one of the admirable wine producers set up relatively recently by in-comers”
Pretty much on-time and on cue for our overstretched ambitions of a decade ago …
Friday 20 April
Louise Hurren, the evil genius behind the Outsiders, spends the night here tonight. She’s terribly well-organized (as we know) and sends us a message ten minutes before the expected arrival time to say that she’ll be ten minutes late. Jan really really likes that sort of thing.
She arrives with a lovely bunch of white roses, which she had bought in a small town called Trèbes.
Trèbes, she repeats significantly.
Of course, Trèbes: a pretty décontracté sort of stopping place on the Canal du Midi for cyclicts and canal boaters, just 10 minutes to the east of Carcassonne. A place full of happy holiday makers jostling alongside locals who quietly go about life minding their own business.
Trèbes, where last month, to the day tomorrow, an Islamist terrorist stormed the Super-U supermarket, and killed two people. He also killed the noble and valiant Lt Col Arnaud Beltrame, who offered himself as a substitute for one of the hostages. The Lt Col had conducted an exercise not long before, replicating this exact situation. He must have been confident in the competence of his men – and perhaps was even following his own protocol when he shouted ‘Assault! Assault!” into the mobile phone he had purposely left open for his colleagues outside to hear, after trying to disarm the man. Khalid, armed with a handgun, a hunting knife and three homemade bombs, recovered, and gave the brave Beltrame a fatal stab to his throat before the police were able to break through.
And before getting to the supermarket, the 25 year old terrorist had shot two occupants of a car in Carcassonne, killing one; whereupon he hijacked the car and drove to Trèbes, taking a pot shot at some soldiers on the way.
This was witnessed by Dries, son of Ahmed, who used to work at Rives-Blanques with his father, but has since gone up in the world and is now an electrician. He saw the hijack from the rear view mirror of his car as he was setting off from Carcassonne for a job in Trèbes, and understandably got out of the way as fast as he could. The second he witnessed first-hand, as he was doing the electrical repair job he’d been called out for, at the Super-U.
What are the chances of that?
“The flower lady was still traumatised” Louise said, “she told me about all the bouquets she had to make for the people who died there. She couldn’t get over it”.
Monday 30 April
W
ell, April’s a wrap-up.
We’ve had the wild asparagus.
We’ve had our first serious blending session of the 2017 wines.
Jan has been to wine fairs in New York, Belgium, and Gaillac, promoting our wares.
It has been hot, it has been cold, the sun has shone a lot and it has rained a lot. The vines are flourishing and look full of potential fruit.
And if we think we got a lot done this month, just consider the action of a mauzac vine in the course of a single week of sunshine …
….. to be cont’d next month