Return home
The week had announced itself as busy and it had been. Return after midday after four marathon non-stop days, practically a bottle permanently in my hand. OK, a glass too sometimes
Terrific broadcast, to really get it going, with Jean-Pierre Coffe. For those that missed it and would would like to try and listen [...]
Drawing off
One day or another, one must decide to draw off the ‘vin de goutte’. This ‘ecoulage’ completes the cycle of transformation of the juice of the grape into wine. It is to put the full stop at the end of a phrase. It is to pass in some way from one world to another, then [...]
Fermentations
If the harvests indisputably mark the end of a cycle, the fermentations mark, for me, another. Without doubt, because I am not born a wine-maker but I chose to become one, this phase of transformation always remains for me an intense moment of marvel and joy.
To sense this life, these millions of yeasts in [...]
Faites vos jeux. Les jeux sont faits. Rien ne va plus !
Faites vos jeux. Les jeux sont faits. Rien ne va plus !
"If you want ot make good wine, be the last to harvest". This adage which doesn’t date from yesterday (Virgile, that’s 50 years before Christ and I swore to read ‘Bucoliques’ this year), always seems to be current. It opens the first letter [...]
Saint-Michel and the flamboyant Carignan
For a long time, I believed that the spring equinox fell on 21 September.
Today, now that I am more in tune with the seasons and climate, I know that because of the idiosyncracies of the Gregorian calendar this date is variable (you too can improve yourself thanks to the internet and shine in society [...]
Cuts, sores and bruises
From October 3, 2005
Incredible the number of wounds, bruises, knocks and cuts one suffers during the harvest and wine-making.
In the line of fire, one feels practically nothing, except perhaps when one cuts the end of one’s finger with the secateurs, or when one steps back hitting a palette very hard, [...]
A cross between a grub and a lazybones
From Sunday 3 October, 2005
There was a time when, not making wine and not even having the idea or the hope of making it one day, I idealised a little, or even a lot, on the daily life of the vigneron.
For you see, in truth, the vigneron’s Sunday in the middle of the [...]
12 hours a day with pleasure…
From Thursday 29th September, 2005
This evening, you are going to know why, I remember this expression…
It is the title of one of the special issues of the magazine «Autrement». I must have read it when I was doing my BTS in management at the l’École Hôtelière de Nice. Which is to say it [...]
A bitter-sweet week.
From Tuesday 27 September, 2005
Good, I can see that a week has passed without my writing anything on this blog. Several reasons for that…
Firstly and above all, the main reason, is that to stir for 6 or 7 hours 70 litre tubs and to write at the same time are two completely incompatible [...]
Stop-. or go?
From Wednesday 21 September 2005
Very decidedly very complex vintage this 2005. Firstly, odd grapes, which seem scarcely ripe with so much acidity, and which nonetheless, after three or four days of maceration, give wine like black ink, which is appetising and sensual in the mouth. As for the tannins? They are essential, the key [...]
Confounded butterfly!
I know very well that «when it is too easy, it’s not entertaining», but I must acknowledge that it will be well past 80 to 100mm of water which have fallen on us this week.
Well, the advantage, when one has hills, is that the water moves around. And then a great terroir is perhaps [...]
He who was transformed into a prawn-
No, don’t insist, I won’t give you the name of the restaurant thanks to which, yesterday, within scarcely 20 minutes I was transformed into a prawn.
Some tapas, a beautiful slice of tuna ‘à la planxa’, all was going quite well, indeed, just as I was getting back into the car. I looked a [...]
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
The bets are placed. The treatments finished 2 weeks ago, the grapes are delivering their true colours even in the most retarded terroir. As every year, it thus becomes urgent….to wait.
Before becoming a ‘vigneron’, I was always making fun of these hurried ‘vignerons’ who thought, once September arrived, to bring in their grapes as [...]
A long silence
«Not to speak unless one has something to say» is a wise rule that I have trouble imposing on my mouth:) but which I swore to respect on this blog. Two weeks of silence, it was maybe two weeks of holiday, maybe two weeks of too much work to be able to write anything. The [...]