la gramiere

Simply amazing photos

Just a quick link to a blog that I really enjoy.  Vincent Dancer, a vigneron in Chassagne Montrachet, has a great blog that is essentially photos.  He writes short commentaries in French, but you don't have to be fluent to glean the necessary information from them, and the pictures are absolutely beautiful.  Mr. Dancer has a great eye.  Take some time to look through some of his older posts they really are worth it, especially if you're a fan of the Côte d'Or.

www.vincentdancer.com

A natural quandry - what would Alice say?

Rosé is the thorn in our side these days.  Our first year we seemingly quite easily made a stellar rosé, naturally. It had about 3 grams of residual sugar, barely detectable but it gave it a luscious mouthfeel that many people said reminded them of a top Tavel.  Then came 2006, it fermented along just fine and then started slowing down, 22 grams of sugar, 17 grams, 15 grams, until it completely stopped at 7 grams.  That's still a fair amount of sugar, but that's not all, it was at 14.8 alcohol.  Hmm rosé at 15 degrees?? Too hot, undrinkable in fact.  There were probably things we could have done to change the results, first and foremost would have been to harvest the grapes for the rosé in mid-August.   Many people told us that we should have added water!  Completely illegal here in France, but it seems it's more common than one would think.  Another thing that is illegal here is reverse osmosis, so that was pretty much the end of our rosé in 2006.  If we only had high yields and some other varietals like cinsault or carignan, that might help too.

So here we are in 2007, thinking we were going to be sure to make a great rosé, the first grapes we brought in were used to make it, all grenache, then we added the mourvèdre to it.  It seemed to be going well with the sugars dropping, we even put some fermenting red into it to give it a kick start, then boom, it stops  - nothing,  it's not happy.  Still clinging to the idea of a rosé fermented on it's natural yeasts we waited a few days, but nothing.  So in the end we had to inoculate it with commercial yeast, something I truly didn't want to do, but in the end we had no choice.

I find this really frustrating though, over here, many many wineries don't use commercial yeasts, it's not a question of organic, biodynamic or even "natural" winemaking, it's just a question of philosophy in winemaking.  It makes me nuts that some people are able to do it and we haven't been for the past two years!  Just go have a look at Alice Feiring's wonderful blog.  She's really been on  a roll lately, writing some great posts on people who make "natural" wines.  When I met her last spring in Bordeaux, one of my burning questions for her was to know her definition of  "natural" wines.  Here in France the "natural" wine movement tends to mean that there is no SO2 added, but isn't at all a guarantee that the wines are organic, or even fermented naturally without the addition of yeasts, enzymes or other additives to help the juice ferment properly.  Alice told me that her definition of a natural wine is one that is farmed organically or biodynamically, fermented with the naturally occuring yeasts, without the addition of any "extras" and finally with low amounts of,  if any SO2.  She explained that,  of course, if there was a problem,  it would be foolish to let the wine spoil, and that the winemaker must do what is necessary to save it.  Sounds like exactly the category I would like to fit into!!! Unfortunately for our rosé, that isn't the case this year.  Thankfully we had no troubles with the reds, they happily fermented to dryness and then did their malo-lactic fermentation right away!  We are going to some of it into our old double barrels to experiment with wood, hoping that the slight oxygen exchange will soften up the tannins and round it out a bit.  We'll see what happens.

It's funny, I've been following a couple of wine blogs written by Americans, and the idea of not using commercial yeast seems to be completely unheard of.  Blogger after blogger seem to talk about their "recipes" for winemaking and for this year's wine.  Pictures of them proudly adding yeast and enzymes to the grape juice.  I found those pictures almost shocking since I, myself felt like I should hide the package of yeast and not tell anyone! Does anyone in the US use the natural yeasts?  Or all they all graduates of some big-name enology program?  Am I from Mars?  or just being completely irresponsible in their minds?  I would imagine that they would think so.

Overnight in Lourmarin

In 1992 I spent the summer between my junior and senior year of college as a luxury bike tour guide here in France.  It was a great way to spend a summer and it changed my life in many ways.  I was lucky enough to do the majority of my tours in Provence.  We started in Montelimar and wound our way down to Cassis, with stops in Rochegude, Castillon du Gard, and Lourmarin among other places.  It's such an amazing coincidence that now, 15 years later I own vineyards in Castillon du Gard one of our stop over destinations at the time.  I still see bike tours from time to time in Castillon, many popular companies still stay at the Vieux Castillon, an amazing hotel in the village.  Who'd have ever thought I'd end up back here!

This weekend we celebrated our wedding anniversary with a quick trip to the Luberon Valley, in Lourmarin to be exact.  Back in 1992 it was at the height of the Peter Mayle A Year in Provence craze and everyone wanted to visit this beautiful ares.  Today, it is still a hugely popular destination on the  Southern France tourist route, and the villages have been practically over run with tour buses and schlocky tourist crap for sale at every turn.  Amazingly though, Lourmarin avoided that destiny and is still an utterly charming village, over run with restaurants, mind you, and very chic boutiques, but none of the cheap Provençal table clothes and ceramic "cigales" are for sale there.

As with most of our get aways, it was based around a culinary destination, or two.  We started at La Fenière a Michelin starred hotel and restaurant just outside of Lourmarin.  Reine Sammut is quite famous in the Luberon-Aix en Provence world of cuisine.  She is an expert at sourcing products from the region and show-casing the best Provence has to offer.  We had a wonderful meal based on olive oils from the Mediterranean.  Eight different courses each with an olive oil from a different Mediterranean country; from Croatia to Portugal, passing through Morocco, Greece and of course Italy and Spain. It was a quite a discovery.  The following day we strolled through the streets of Lourmarin, soaking up the autumn sun, simply enjoying the time away from home in such a beautiful setting.  While sitting at the Café de la Fontaine a huge tour bus arrived releasing 50 or so American tourists armed with cameras and guide books looking for a place to eat, and hoping to catch a glimpse of Peter Mayle.  We decided to continue our stroll through the village and come back later for lunch. 

I discovered both La Fenière and Café de la Fontaine thanks to wine négociant Michel Tardieu, who took us there last winter while we were tasting his wines for the new Bettane & Desseauve guide.  Michel is one of those rare people, who having gotten into the wine business my choice rather than by inheritance, loves the best food and wine from any region, anywhere, always searching out the people who are as passionate about their food as he is about his wines.  The kind of person I would look forward to dining with any day.  Café de la Fontaine is owned by a family from Corsica, and they specialize in all things Corsican.  There's a huge wood-fired grill inside where they have a cauldron simmering away with a daily special and where they also grill thick côte de boeuf steaks for their loyal customers.  We started off with a plate of Corsican charcuterie, which included cured ham, several different dried sausages, a piece of grilled figatelli, and even two different selections of grilled cured pork fat.  It was divine.  I know, grilled pork fat doesn't sound very appetizing, just think of it as bacon with out the pink parts  - the best bacon you've ever tasted.  I then had the "cauldron of the day" which was Corsican beans with figatelli stewed in tomato sauce.  The beans were the size of a 50 cent piece creamy and smoky with the tomatoes and figatelli, which is a kind of Corsican grilling sausage.  When it arrived, I thought to myself, there's no way I'll ever be able to eat all of this, but somehow, it just disappeared into my stomach!  Matt had the entrecôte, grilled to perfection with fire-roasted tomatoes and p0tatoes wrapped in foil served with Corsican olive oil and sea salt.  After those two amazing meals, so different, yet so perfect in their own ways, we really felt like we had escaped, even if it was for only 24 hours!   

Am I repeating myself??

As I am going about my daily activities lately, and thinking about what to write for this blog, it seems to me that I've already written it! Last year at this time, maybe a bit earlier, maybe a bit later, but I am doing largely the same things as I did then.  So I wonder, will I be boring those who have been following along since then??

This week I racked all of the new wines. Racking is a process in which you transfer the wine in a vat into another in order to remove the lees or sediment that has settled to the bottom of the vat after fermentation has finished.  This year is different in that we're doing it much earlier than we did in the two previous years.  The malolactic fermentation happened very quickly so the wines were ready to be racked and now they are settled in for a long winter's nap!  The 2007s are going to be great here in the southern Rhône.  It wasn't an easy vintage to vinify, we had strange weather all summer long, not very hot, amazingly cool evenings and absolutely no rain.  Many people (us included) chose to harvest early because the sugars were high and we had several days of strong Mistral winds that had a tendancy to dry the grapes out and concentrate the sugars even more!  Others chose to wait until the grapes were more mature, maybe even hoping for some rain to dilute the concentration a bit.  I'm sure they came up with some pretty great wines too, just a bit more alcoholic.   That said, we don't have any choice,  with only 4 parcels of  land which are mostly grenache and syrah, both of which were ripe early this year, we had to pick when we did.  Most people have more vineyards that ripen at different times and most importantly, if they are lucky to have cinsault and carignan, they are have more blending options!  All in all, I think we made the right decision, because the wines are tasting great!  Lots of luscious fruit, followed by some really nice soft tannins.  It won't be a tannic monster, but that's ok with me.  I haven't had the chance to taste much else, but soon, I'll make the rounds and let you know how it's looking elsewhere in the Rhône.

I've also been over at Denis Gayte's winery helping him press.  He sometimes finds himself one person short, so I go over and give him a hand when he needs it.  He's down in the vat shoveling the skins onto a mini conveyor belt, his dad Philippe mans the press, and I shovel the pressed skins into the trailer.  Denis has been so great helping us out, that I am more than happy to give him a hand too!

Finally, I've been spending some time sticking labels and capsules on bottles! Wahoo, now that is a fun way to spend an afternoon. Our new organizational system was great at the time we actually bottled the wine, but now we've got over 12,000 bottles that need labels and capsules!! I've been doing some by hand,  thinking that maybe we could work our way through it, but it takes too long!  So we are going to rent a machine for a few days and then just crank through it, otherwise we'll still be working on it next spring!

So that's a little wrap-up of what's been going on here.  Not overly exciting for the time being, but things are starting to pick up again, so I'll have more to tell you about soon!

Kids welcome here!

Recently there was a bit of a debate over at Dr. Vino as to whether or not kids should be welcomed at wineries.  Tyler decided to hold a photo contest with pictures of kids at various wineries.  I sent one in, so go check it out!
I can certainly tell you that here at La Gramière we couldn't get along without kids!  They are always an enormous help to us during harvest, and they add such a wonderful esprit to the whole event.  So here are some of my favorite kid photos from our past 3 harvests... 

And some more:

Our Provence

Kermit Lynch wrote a great article about us in his October newsletter, so I thought I'd share some photos of our local markets so that you can get an idea of what they are like!  Kermit and I spent a Friday morning in August browsing around our farmer's market here in Saint Quentin la Poterie.   He was simply amazed at our wonderful local produce.  I stress local here, because I only buy from actual producers not from stands that re-sell produce that could come from just about anywhere.  There are several stands that do this, and it's not all that bad really.  Their produce is still very fresh, but I prefer to buy directly from the people who grow it.  Most of what we buy is organic, but not all of it.  Some of the smaller guys use hardly any chemicals, but they still aren't fully organic.  In the end for them, chemicals and fertilizers are very expensive, so they use as little as possible.  I would prefer that it was 100% organic, but I also refuse to buy organic produce that has been shipped across the continent, or worse the ocean.  For me that negates the whole idea of organics. 

We checked out the local goat cheese, tomatoes, and new stand that is a "traiteur" - someone who make all kinds of yummy things that you can take home and re-heat, kind of like high-end take-out, just not that expensive.  We have a guy that makes falafel and brandade (a regional specialty made from salt cod).  Every week we stop to get a dozen of my favorite falafels and some accras, which are little spicy balls of fried salt-cod! Yum!  Then to see our "Chicken Man", as I affectionate call him.  Sylvain raises free-range chickens right here in Saint Quentin.   He says that the only reason he isn't organic is that he has to buy the chicks from an organic chick-farm and that it's too complicated to get them for the moment.   Next to Sylvain is our local goat cheese producers, who you have already read about here.  They're the ones who give us the whey for our biodynamic preparations.  Also pictured here is our "Honey Man" .   He has bees all around in the hills, so we get fresh honey too!

There are so many other wonderful people here, and this is just the Saint Quentin Market.  We also have two in Uzès, one on Wednesday and one on Saturday!  I'll tell you more about those soon! - and more about those potato chips!

And more pressing...

It seems that this year I was meant to spend a lot of time shoveling grape skins.  Last weekend Matt and I pressed our two largest vats.  Usually we have some help, but it turned out that our normally reliable friends were all busy!  Imagine that?  Who wouldn't want to spend their weekend covered in grape skins and wine, doing back breaking work??  Well, it wasn't so bad.  We were tired at the end, but we go it all done on Saturday.   On Sunday we spent the day cleaning it all up.  That's the worst part of harvest, all the clean up.  It seems like you'll never get rid of all the little bits of grape skins that are stuck to seemingly everything!  Power washers are the way to go.  I can't imagine how wineries got by before the invention of the power washer.  Especially when you're cleaning out the press.

Once you've finished, there's a mountain of grape skins sitting in the back yard, that luckily, here in France, are disposed of for you by the friendly folks at the distillery.  Well, in fact, we don't really have a choice, we are required to supply a certain amount of either grape skins, lees or wine to the state each year, as a sort of tax that is levied on the wineries.  The distillery then turns all of these lovely skins into alcohol.  This is in some ways a good thing and in some ways not.  The good thing is that your skins are disposed of quickly and the fruit flies disappear soon afterwards.  The bad thing is that if we weren't required to give them to the state we could compost them and use them as fertilizer for the vines, but that means that we'd have to clean it all up ourselves, so in the end I might be able to live with that!