la gramiere

Chicken

Well, I went into Uzès tonight, by myself, since Matt is still in Shanghai. They were serving our wine at "Terroirs", but I chickened out.  I didn't really have the guts to walk up to the table and ask to take their picture!  I did see the manager and asked him how the wine was being received. He said very well and that it was  "delicieux"!  Great! That means if he likes it, then he will sell lots of it! 

There wasn't any room at Terroirs for me to sit, so I went to our favorite crêperie in Uzès, La Bolée. (sorry the photo is kind of dark, but you can see the TV on the wall.)  Lo and behold (this is very American of me) France was playing Spain in the World Cup.  It really is contagious.  I am not a person to sit around and watch sports, but even in Uzès, every bar and even some restaurants have flat screen televisions for all of their customers to watch the games.  Someone must be making a lot of money on television rentals right now, if every terrace of every bar in Uzès has TVs. Imagine what it's like in the bigger cities.  The owner's little boy had come to watch the game, and as I was alone, I offered him a seat at my table.  His father was beside himself with excitement and tension. His mom had to come help his dad with the service since once the game started he was all but useless.  The little boy, whose name I think was Tristan, explained why Zidane had missed the last game and a few other important points to me.  He was obviously a big fan, and I was obviously clueless.  When Spain scored the first goal on a penalty kick, the whole town went quiet and you could have cut the air with a knife.  Then France came back with a goal, and everything was better. Cheers went up from around the city. "Allez les Bleus"  (Go Blues) was shouted from every bar, every house.  There's something magical about a whole country, even a whole continent, that stops for a brief moment to cheer their respective teams.  There's nothing quite like it in the US, besides maybe, the Olympics, but that's several sports and several teams, not simply one country against another.  All of France was watching, as I'm sure all of Spain was as well. I left the restaurant at half time and finished the game at home.  France went on to score two more goals, one on a penalty kick, one more by Zidane.  In the end I felt sorry for Spain, but thrilled at the same time for the home team!  Next round Brazil, now that should be a tough one.  "Allez les Bleus!"

Deliveries!

I was looking through the "recent posts" list on the sidebar of my blog, and it seems I either end everything with an exclamation point or points of ellipsis.  Funny, huh?

Anyway, just thought you'd like to know that our rosé is now officially available for purchase at the restaurant and wine shop called "Terroirs" in Uzès.  In fact, I delivered 120 bottles to them last week.  That's quite an order! The owners, Tom and Corrine, have become good friends and supporters of our wines.  As of Saturday Tom hadn't had time to change the by the glass list for the café-restaurant, but as soon as he does, I plan to stalk the place until someone orders the first bottle. As soon as it is served, I'm going to ask the unsuspecting people if I can take their picture!  Do you think I'm going too far???   

This week it will also be on the winelist at the restaurant Bec à Vin in Uzès, they were the first people to order it, remember?   I can't wait to see people acutally drinking our wine! 

Coulure...

Remember how I talked about the risk of coulure (or flower shock, or "flower abortion") ?  Well, that's exactly what happened a couple of weeks ago when the wind blew hard for a week straight and the temperatures dropped overnight from in the 80s to the 50s.  Grenache, as I said is quite prone to losing it's flowers and our grenache took a pretty hard hit. See all those little black dots? They used to be flowers, or potential grapes. (click on the picture to see it upclose.) So that means we'll have a small harvest again this year, but in the end, that's not such a bad thing. If it's anything like last year, we'll have small grapes, with lots of concentration and color.  It's been really hot here lately and we haven't had much rain at all.  We're headed for another drought season. We're keeping our fingers crossed for some rain, though I don't really expect any...

The Visit...

Ok, sorry for the week-long delay.  After finishing the bottling, I had 3 days of wine tours in the Northern and Southern Rhone.  It's funny, when you're stressed and tired, you really don't feel like blogging... go figure!

Anyway,  back to the visit... I rushed home 15 minutes before Kermit was supposed to arrive, jumped in the shower, got dressed and then tried to relax and take a few deep breaths to shrug off some of the stress of the day.  Luckily for me, he ended up being about an hour late, so I had some time to prepare myself.  Molly had prepared some nice bowls of olives and our favorite almonds roasted with rosemary, sea salt and a touch of Aleppo pepper, as well as putting a brand new bottle of rosé in the fridge to chill.  All I really had to do was get the glasses out and the sample bottles of our red wine ready.  I had pulled the samples from the vats early that morning so that they had time to breath.  I then aerated them by pouring the wine roughly between two large pitchers in order to get as much air into them as possible.  When you draw a sample from a large tank of wine it's often quite closed, so it needs a little oxygen to open up the nose and the flavors.

When Kermit arrived with Dixon Brook, his French office manager, I had had ample time to get everything together, and then pace around the house for awhile.  Luckily, their late arrival also gave Matt enough time to finish working, so that we were both able to welcome them and taste with them.  After we chatted a bit about our house and the renovation, I took the plunge and offered to open the first bottle of 2005 Domaine de la Gramière Rosé.  Drum-roll....

What a day...

Remember those bottles we were promised?  Well, it turned out to be a total nightmare.  I called the supplier at 9 am to confirm that we were the first on the list for deliveries and the woman said that he had already left and that he shouldn't be too much longer.  In the mean time, the bottler showed up and I led him to the bottling site. He started to set up shop and I told him that there was a slight problem, but that the bottles should be here by 10.  He explained that the time it took him to set up, even 10:30 or 11:00 would be fine, as long as it was before lunchtime.  There was another winery that was bottling some red just after us, but we had to go first since we had rosé.  We began our wait for the truck.  At 10:30, still no sign of the bottles. The bottler asked for the labels, corks, capsules, and an empty bottle similar to the ones we would be using so that he could get everything ready.  In the mean time, a whole team of people had showed up to help the other winery bottle their wines.  Everyone was hanging around waiting for us, so the pressure was definitely starting to rise.

Matt (whose trip to China was delayed) called the bottle supplier to find out where the truck was and she said she would call him back.  Ten minutes later when they still hadn't returned the call, I called back and literally blew a gasket.  I'm not a person that gets angry very often and I do everything I can to avoid conflict, but this was too much.  They were completely unprofessional and I was extremely angry, especially since they had been highly recommended to me by a friend.  Finally, I get the call I was waiting for and what does she say?????  The driver did the route backwards and he won't be at our house until 1:00.  I wanted to cry. I felt like a total idiot.  Here there were at least 10 people who had wasted their whole morning and now we weren't even sure if our wine would be bottled.  I asked the bottler and he, clearly reaching his limit, said that if they were there right at 1:00 he'd still do it.

At this point, everyone split up for lunch. The tension was a bit high.  We invited the bottler (his name is Mr. Fraison) out to lunch and he gladly accepted.  It was a bit of a difficult lunch. He was trying to be nice, but it was obvious he wasn't happy, and who could blame him?  Finally, the hour came and Matt went back home to wait.  Sure enough by the time we got back the driver was there unloading the bottles.  Everyone jumped into place and we got started.  Our friends Peter and Lucy were there, as well as Nick and of course, my dear sister, Molly, who flew down to help.  It was so very exciting to see the wine actually going into the bottles, the corks getting stuffed in, capsules going on, then the labels.  In all it took about 30 minutes to bottle our 550 liters. Incredible.  720 bottles is what we ended up with, not bad!

How exciting it was to have some of our wine finally in bottle, especially after that awful morning...

I'll save the rest for the next post, but I will tell you one thing about Kermit's visit.... 

He liked it!

The Very First Bottle

Here it is...

Merde!

Well, originally this word was to only have one meaning for this post, but today's events have forced me to use both meanings.  What??? you're asking is she talking about?   Let me explain.  Merde is the French equivalent of our 4 letter word sh*t.  So far, everything has gone very smoothly. We got the corks last week as well as the boxes.  Saturday, I went and approved and picked up the labels, and the capsules were delivered today.  I called this morning to confirm that the bottles were going to be delivered and the woman told me yes and that it would probably be in the afternoon.  Well, when 5:00 came around and I still hadn't heard anything from the driver, I called again.  No, they'll be delivered tomorrow, the woman on the other end of the phone tells me.  MERDE!  No, I say, that's not possible I need them at 9 am tomorrow.  Silence.  I can promise you that they will arrive in the morning, but at what time I can't tell you, she says.  No, I say, I need you to promise me that I will be first on the delivery list and that I will have them by 10.  (Knowing that the bottler probably won't even be set up and ready to go until 11.)  Ok, she says, I'll ask the driver to make sure that he starts with you. Merde, we'll see. I have a very bad feeling about this. Merde.

What I was really planning on writing about for this post was the other meaning for the word merde.  It's the French equivalent of "break a leg".  The first time someone said it to me, I just stared at them with a blank look on my face. They explained that it was for good luck.  So when you are walking out the door for a job interview, or an audition, or something like that your friends will say "Merde!"

So tonight when you go to bed, or tomorrow morning when you wake up say a little "merde!" for me. We're really going to need it! 
1. for the bottles 
2. for the bottling   
3. for our visit with Kermit Lynch

Merde!

Baby Grapes!

Take a look at these lovely little syrah grapes.  The flowering now finished, the grapes are starting to really grow! The grenache isn't far behind. I'll take some pictures tomorrow.  I haven't been down to check out the mourvedre in a few days , so we'll do that too. Last week the wind blew for 6 days straight.  Often people ask me if the wind on a certain day is considered a "Mistral" and I tell them that any time the wind blows over, say 30 km/hr and out of the North, people call it a Mistral.  Last week was exceptional though, it was 6 days of winds with gusts up to 95 km/hr the temperatures dropped 10 degress celsius overnight and stayed quite cool for the whole week.  That's not great for grapes in flower...it causes what we call "coulure".  In my handy little French-English wine dictionary (written by Paul Cadiau) called "Lexivin" in French or "Lexiwine" in English it says that in English it's called  "shatter" or flower abortion.  These poor little flowers didn't choose to shatter or abort, they were simply blown off, all the way to Morocco perhaps...  The syrah seems to have withstood it pretty well, we'll see how the grenache fared.

Two Big Weeks! - Week 2

Here's the big news coming up next week:  Monday, they are printing our labels. I have to go over to approve the final colors as they are printing them. I can't wait to see them actually printed out on the right paper and everything.  The same day they are also delivering the bottles. Hmm that will be interesting since Matt is going to Shanghai for two weeks. Who will be here to meet the receive the bottle delivery?  I'll have to work that one out. Oh wait, my sister, Molly, is coming to help out, so she can take the bottle delivery.

Tuesday is the biggest day of all! We will be bottling our rosé!  Taaa Daaah! How exiciting is that?  Finally, a real bottle of wine from our very own vineyards with a label, cork and capsule (providing they all are delivered in time!). 800 bottles, that's not so bad.  It's just that we (meaning myself, my sister, Molly, and hopefully some very very good friends) have to then put the bottles in boxes, tape them up and transfer them to our garage which will become our storage facility.... It's going to be a fair amount of work, but not as much work as when we bottle 12,000 bottles of red. Oh, did I explain the bottling truck?  There's a nifty service here in France for wineries that aren't big enough to have their own bottling lines.  They take a semi and install a bottling line on the back of it, then they go around from winery to winery (there are lots here) and bottle the wine at the "domaine". 

Then, that afternoon, is the biggest event of all... 

Kermit Lynch is coming to taste our wines!!!! I am so excited, and so nervous at the same time!  Kermit, for those of you who don't recognize the name, is my former employer, and the person responsible for a very large part of my wine education.  Working at his retail store in Berkeley, was the best wine education anyone could ever hope for. He's the kind of person who loves to taste wine with his staff, so when he was in town we did it often.  What an amazing job.  Anyway...he's coming, here, to my house, to taste our first vintage. I debated on whether to announce it on the blog, in the event that he doesn't decide to buy any, but in the end I've been sharing everything else with you so I might as well share this too.  I tasted the red again yesterday and you can tell that the malo-lactic fermentation is almost finished. It's tasting better and better.  I think he'll like it, but who knows....we'll just have to wait until Tuesday to find out.

(Photo from the recent SF Chronicle article about Kermit.)

Corks and Boxes!

Well, surprise, surprise! The corks didn't show up until today, but the boxes were delivered yesterday, so at least there was still some excitement.  It's starting to feel as if we may really have everything we need to bottle the rosé next week.  It's going to be down to the very last minute for the labels, which are to be printed Monday.  I don't expect to have the capsules until then either.  Since I decided on a custom color, they are taking a bit longer than planned... Keep your fingers crossed for me.

It's very exciting to see our name and logo on something real, like a box and a cork.  The guy tried to deliver the corks yesteday, he called and we were on the phone and then claimed that he couldn't find our house, so he went on his way.... arrgh, delivery drivers. Oh well, now they are here and I think they look oh so good!

Two Big Weeks! - Week 1

Yes, it's true everyone, this is going to be a big week here at Domaine de la Gramière.  We should be receiving our corks today, directly from the producer in Portugal, tomorrow the rosé bottles should be delivered, and later in the week we will be spraying copper and sulfur in the vineyards. 

Corks were a tough decision.  There has been a lot in the American and British press lately about the use of corks and cork alternatives such as screw caps.  I thought long and hard and asked a lot of people what they thought.  I really wanted to be bold and bottle all of our wines the first year with screw caps, but I wimped out.  Too many people simply said that screw caps remained to them a sign of a cheap plonk and not high quality wine.  I know there seem to be more and more quality wines out there with screw caps, but I just wasn't brave enough to jump on the band wagon.   The French especially, seem to be against it, the argument mostly being about the ritual of pulling the cork on a bottle of wine.  I must admit, I agree with them.

One of my worries was though, that being such a small winery and just starting out, how on earth could we guarantee that we would get great corks from the salesmen buzzing around in the region?  It seemed nearly impossible.  Well, in talking with our friend Dunja Ulbricht of K&U (our German importers),  I found the solution.  Dunja told me that the one winery that they never had cork problems with was Poiera.  Poeira is a small winery in Portugal run by Jorge Moriera, that makes incredible wines in the Duoro region.  Dunja suggested I contact him and ask him where he got his corks.  Jorge kindly directed me to Susana Ferraz at a company called Uva Portugal.  I looked it up on the internet, and it turns out  she's a cork expert that inspects various lots of corks for you and in a way guarantees that they will be of top quality.  I called Susana and she was wonderful! 

She sent us prices from 3 different suppliers for 3 different qualities of corks and asked if we wanted her to send samples.  We didn't really have time to have samples sent, so we told her that we would trust her opinion, but wanted to understand more about the differences between the prices.  Apparently , according to Susana, the only difference between the lowest price-range and the highest price-range qualitatively is the visual aspect.  The occurence of TCA, which causes a wine to become corked is the same for the highest priced corks as it is for the lowest.  Many wineries prefer to have a perfectly smooth-surface cork that's very pretty and that 's why they pay the highest amount of money.  Wow, I had no idea. When I explained to her what kind of wine we make and what price it would be selling for, she recommended that we choose one of the cheaper grades, assuring us that they would be of excellent quality for our wine.  So, we'll see how they turned out! One of the best things about it was that we also were able to have our logo and "La Gramière"  fire-printed onto them! I guess when you're starting out like we are, it's the little things get you excited.   I'll post a picture as soon as I get them! (This one is from the Uva Portugal website.)

Thanks so very much to Susana for her expert services! 

The perfect Vineyard Vehicle!

For those of you who don't know me, this will provide you with some insight to my personality.  Yes, it's true, in my mind, this is the PERFECT car.  It's a 1978 Renault 4L, affectionately called a "quatrelle" (the word for 4, quatre, and L all run together pronounced cat-trelle.)  I took this picture yesterday after I had finished the "suckering" in our big vineyard.  As I was walking towards it, my heart swelled up with love just looking at it.  A little lopsided, dented and scratched in many places, not to mention that the seats are falling apart, I just love driving around in it. It's so French! and since I am an American (though most of our friends say that we are more French than they are) it's nice to have a little putt-putt car to get around in. It fits the dog, all of our pruning gear, bags of cement, even wine lees to take to the distillery, really what more could you ask for!  Everyone that comes to visit loves to drive it too, and they all want their pictures taken in it. 

As I was leaving my house this morning the plastic thingy that holds the sun-visor cracked, and subsequently the visor hung down so that it was right in my line of vision.  I ran back in to get some packing tape to hold it up, that didn't stick, so I tried duct tape, that worked for a bit, but I had to stop once or twice on my way to re-stick the tape.  Finally when I got there, I took a screw-driver out of the handy toolbox that Matt put there, and started to unscrew the plastic holder, but when I did, the whole roof-liner came unscrewed with it!  So in the end I just twisted it until it popped out!  What a great car!