la gramiere: 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....

As I had expected, the rosé wasn't its most vibrant that afternoon. Kermit's first question was: "What has this wine been through in the last 2 days?" Very good question. Kermit, I imagine had a pretty good idea of what it had been through, but I explained anyway. The day before it had been sulfured, then transferred from its original vat to a different one to get it ready for bottling. Then, it was lightly filtered and bottled. None of this is a very pleasant experience for a young wine, and it showed. There is a term for this, it's called "bottle shock". Every wine goes through it just after bottling, they don't really taste as good as they did just before-hand. Kermit also asked how we made it. I explained that we had not let it go through malo-lactic fermentation in order to keep the acidity. He said this was how most wineries in the southern Rhone make their rosés, with the exception of some of the provençal rosés, ie: Domaine Tempier. Deciding that this wasn't the best day to taste the rosé, we moved on. In any case, it's really too late to ship the rosé to the states. By the time it would arrive it would be September and with only 700 bottles, we won't have much trouble selling it over here.

On to the red. I pulled samples from all 3 vats, knowing that Kermit would be interested in tasting all 3. I poured the first glass, "Hmm, nice color." He swirled the glass around, "Hmm" (in a positive way), he smiled and took a sip. I hestitate here to quote him directly as I didn't take notes and frankly don't remember exactly what he said. He remarked at the freshness of it and the pretty fruit. Having just been at another winery where the wines were super dense and alcoholic, he was quite happy with this. We tasted through the other two, one of them wasn't tasting as good, largely due to the fact that it's in a fiberglass tank, which is less desireable than concrete. At the end, we made a quick blend of the 3 and tasted it again. Smiles all around, we had done a pretty good job. All in all he was quite pleased. We then gave him a quick tour of the "winery" which, given it's size, lasted about 2 minutes. Given that it was almost 7 pm, we made plans to meet for dinner at their hotel.

It was a great evening of conversation. The meal was, maybe, the worst I have ever had, but that's another story. Not wanting to talk business after such a hectic day and such a pleasant soirée, we made plans to talk the following week. So, no concrete order, but some very good impressions and great feedback. Hopefully we'll be able to sell him some wine....