While we weren’t looking, the weather turned cold. Too cold. In other regions, winegrowers set bales of hay alight (one big bale per half vines), or send helicopters overhead in the small hours of the morning (3 helicopters per hour per 150 ha), or light candles in the vineyard (450 candles per 1.5 ha) like a votive to the Ice Saints, to move the freezing air away. If they don’t, there’s every chance the ice on the vines will act like a magnifying glass when the sun rises, and effectively burn the burgeoning clusters of grapes and leaves away. Then you’ve lost your crop. If it happens to you once, you do everything possible to make sure it will never happen again. Fortunately, it has never happened to us – but still, we’re keeping a wary eye on the forecast.
Wednesday May 1
We hit the sidewalk running … that’s because this is New York-New York.
What a way to begin a visit to the East Coast: lunch at The Terrace in the New York’s newest hotspot, The Edition on Times Square, where all its restaurants are run by the famous Michelin-star Chef John Fraser. And all the wines are managed by his elegant Wine Director, Amy Racine. And Amy wheels out their Champagne Cart, and there we see our Blanquette de Limoux cheek to jowl with some of the biggest name Champagnes. Nice beginning.
And a very nice ending in Boston too, where we settle into our tarama and humus at a Greek restaurant called the Committee, and hear a reassuringly familiar ‘pop’ behind us. There is a happy bachelorette party playing out, and all the girls are celebrating with a bubble called Blanquette de Limoux from Chateau Rives-Blanques….
And the middle between the two was pretty good as well. A big wine tasting in a place called Kingston, somewhere along the Hudson River, whi
ch was once the capital of New York state, though I never knew that and I don’t suppose many people do. It’s a pretty place with some sweet buildings and an old Dutch church testifying to its origins – and it also houses the home of Gasko-Meyer, the craft beer company that absorbed our importer recently. That explains why we were sandwiched in between a craft beer producer from Louisiana, and a cider producer from Maine. It also explains how we met Ben their beer man, and the Magnificent Pagan Beast he was pouring (took a bit of getting used to, but improved on acquaintance – the MP Beast, that is). And it explains why the place was dressed up in multitudes of glittering and glowing lights like a mega disco, for Gasko Meyer was celebrating its 80th anniversary as one of the oldest family-run craft beer companies in the US.
The owners came by to say hello, and confessed to knowing very little about wine. We confessed to knowing very little about beer, apart from the MP Beast we had just met, that is. Then we quoted Martin Luther (“Man makes beer but God makes wine”) and their faces fell. (I immediately regretted it.)
By car through thickly wooded lands and past wooden farmhouses with porches full of rocking chairs, into Massachusetts. Visited a number of Liquor Stores on the way, and then ended up in the biggest and most famous one of Massachusetts, Julio’s in Boston. And just as our wine importer is famous for his beer, our favourite wine shop is famous for its whisky – considered to be the best not just in Massachusetts, but in the whole US of A.
Toni is their buyer, a bundle of electric energy with a head full-to-overflowing of wine facts, regions, tastes, ideas. She likes our wines and has chosen Dédicace as her tip of the month.
For a couple of small winegrowers from a small village in the south of France, it doesn’t get much better than this.
Monday May 6
Good to be home again, though it’s as cold in Cépie as it was in Boston. The vines look fine, progressing well, and little embryonic bunches of grapes are bravely raising their heads above the ramparts.
For sure they look great, but these two weeks of chilly weather aren’t helping things. The vines are clearly slowing down, not maturing as well as they should at this time of year.
But we know that Nature has a way of correcting itself, and that is what we are counting on. As long as there’s no frost …
Tuesday May 7
This is our Visitor from Heaven: Professor of Earth & Space Science at the University of Washington. We tell him excitedly about a great Washington pinot we had tasted from the Devona Estate in Walla Walla, one of the winemakers we’d met last week. He tells us excitedly about our stones – and that’s much more interesting.
“Oh my, these feldspars are beautiful!” he sings joyfully.
And yes, our groundsoil is most certainly made up of Eocene age molasse.
And so we learn that feldspars have straight lines at cleavage points, and tiny black grains of amphibole aka hornblende. The stones in our vineyard are both igneous (formed from the cooling and crystallising of hot magma) and come from deep in the crust of the earth, as well as sedimentary, brought here by water.
And a few of them, like these big boulders that have always puzzled us, were probably brought here by man.
Tuesday 14 May
Well, we’ve successfully navigated the Ice Saints. All French diaries automatically name the Saint that each day is dedicated to: last Saturday says it is Saint Estelle’s day. But of course, we all know that the 11th is Saint Mamertus, the first of the Ice Saints. Sunday is for Saint Pancras, and not Joan of Arc, as our diary maintains, and of course, yesterday should have called itself Saint Servatius, and not Saint Roland. Everyone knows that. But equally, we know that it’s only after Saint Urbain has been and gone that we can relax a bit (“apres le Saint-Urbain et passé, le vigneron est rassuré”), and that’s not until 25 May (which according to my diary, is actually Sainte Sophie).
Saturday 25 May
We forgot to send up thanks to Saint Saint Urban who came and went today, leaving us reassured.
We’re also in the plane, flying to Edinburgh for the second Outsider tasting in that city.
Monday 27 May
The Hotel du Vin in Edinburgh is something else, and the room we’re holding our wine tasting in is even more something else. It is called Bedlam, and the walls are decorated with paintings of body-snatching people in the streets of Edinburgh, snatching bodies and whisking them off to be separated from their vital organs in this very place. It has had many doubtful pasts, and is a rather quirky place for us to standing with our bottles of wine, eyeing the door to see who comes in – and hoping for a serious wine buyer … and not a purveyor of spare human parts.
At the end of the day, one such indefatigable Scotsman proposes the blindingly obvious, which none of the 12 wine producers had thought of: a whisky tasting! Yes of course, a whisky tasting!!
We grab the idea joyfully and run with it. And end up in the Scotch Malt Whisky Society, tasting three different Malt Whiskies with a Frenchman from Breton who was their sommelier… and who complained ruefully he’d never had a group ask so many 
questions. We overstayed our welcom, and still the questions kept coming: where’s the crachoir? (what?? you don’t use one??) how much do you pay for a second-hand barrel? (No, that’s not expensive, that’s cheap!!) how much do you lose to evaporation? (That’s nothing, quoi !)
And we arrived late and much better for wear, at a little corn
er of France in Edinburgh, the
Garrigue restaurant , because at the end of the day, every good Frenchman, if he’s an Outsider or not, has to have a good meal. A good French meal.
Wednesday 29 May
Get back to the vineyard in time to see the bottling of the 2018 Limoux wines, valiantly being overseen by Jan-Ailbe. There’s an air of calm, which is unusual. The bottles move steadily through the line, spinning, pausing, filling, stopping to be corked, marching, labelled, and then on into their cartons, down the ramp, onto a pallet and into the storage rom. It’s a doddle. A good way to end the month and and a good orderly end to a horrible disorderly vintage
…/to be continued next month