la gramiere

It's in the bottle!

Mise en Bouteille
Vidéo envoyée par lagramiere

Here's a short clip of bottling yesterday. As always we couldn't have done it without our friends! Thank you Anne-Elisabeth, Léonore, Jean-Marc, Fatima, Kirstin, Nicolas, Moon et Lise!!!

A busy week!

It's going to be a busy one!  We're bottling the 2007 La Gramière blend on Wednesday so it's rush, rush, rush getting everything organized.  Mostly it's rearranging things in the cellar, moving the pallets of bottles out into the courtyard, and getting rid of all of the junk that has accumulated over the past year. It really is amazing how much we seem to be able to amass here at La Gramière. So I suppose it's good that once a year we  have to clean it out!  

Then on Thursday Matt is leaving for K&U's annual open house in Nuremberg, Germany.  We'll be splitting up this year,  I am going to Paris for Bettane & Desseauve's  Grand Tasting on Friday and then out to Laurent Baraou' s tasting  at his store Les Vins de Saint Antoine in Bû, a town not far from Paris.  Laurent came to visit us last spring and will be selling our wine in the Paris region for us, which is a great help, since we don't have enough time to do it ourselves!  He has a great portfolio of wines and some great customers to boot, so we're excited to be working with him.

Then on Monday it's off the the Big Apple for me!  Well, almost.  I'll be spending 3 days in Brooklyn, to visit our one and only retailer in NY, Thirst Wine Merchants.  I wanted to take the opportunity to meet Michael and Emilia, who amazingly had our distributor bring in 25 cases of our wine never having tasted it!  Michael and Emilia have been reading the blog since the beginning and have been huge supporters of our project.  So I'll be in the store for a " meet and greet"  as they say from 6-8 on Tuesday November 24. I'd love to meet you if you live in the NYC area!

I'll be flying home to Colorado on Thanksgiving and then will head up to the mountains the Baroness trade tastings in Vail and Aspen.  Baroness is our Colorado distributor and I was very happy to be invited to be a part of it!  

FInally before flying back home, I'll be spending the afternoon on Saturday December 6th at City Wine in Denver for another  "meet and greet".  Anyone in Colorado that is interested, I'd love to meet you guys too!  Contact City Wine for more information at 303-393-7576. 

Bottled by hand

Now we're talking artisanal.   In 2007 our favorite vineyard called "Lauzettes" which is 100% grenache planted in the 70s, fermented very quickly, we put it in the tank and within 5 days it was dry, aside from a daily pumpover, we didn't have time to do anything to it.  It just happened, and it turned out to be delicious!  So delicious that we decided to keep 300 liters out of our 2007 blend and bottle it separately.  That made for 400 bottles.  So, right smack in the middle of harvest, there was, according to the biodynamic calendar,  a fruit day in a  descending moon, and we had people around to help, so we decided to bottle it.  By hand.  It was too small a quantity to do with a big machine, and we had to give the stainless steel tank back that we had borrowed from our friend Serge before he started picking.  So we decided to go for it! 

Our friend Even loaned us his manual corker, and we used food-safe tubing to syphen it into the bottles.  It would have been impossible to get the level just right by syphening it, so then my parents sat at a table with pitchers of the same wine and carefully topped them up to exactly the right level, then Matt corked the bottles.  Even Matt's mom Joan, who bless her heart, doesn't drink and doesn't even like the smell of alcohol helped by wiping down the bottles once they were filled and corked.  It seemed like a great a idea when we started, and I really didn't think it would take that long, but by the end we were all miserable and couldn't wait to be finished!! 

 

I hadn't tasted the wine since we bottled it, due to the fact that I had added a bit of sulfur, I wanted to give it a chance to rest.  Last week though, when our German importers were here, we decided it was time to see how it was tasting.  It's such an amazing wine, with a richness and elegance that we haven't acheived until now.  It is drinking well now, but I think it has excellent aging potential too.  With only 400 bottles we have decided to only sell it at the winery, that is if I can bring myself to part with it!!  So, if you want to taste it, you'll have to start planning that trip to southern France!  I can think of worse things to do, can't you?

And then they celebrated...

The call went out around noon yesterday, and everyone wanted to join the celebration. Champagne was drunk and we all raised our glasses in jubilation!