la gramiere

La Gramière goes Naked!

Last November while attending the European Wine Bloggers Conference in Lisbon, I met a crazy guy named Rowan Gormley who runs a company called Naked Wines that imports and sells wine via the internet in the UK.  When I mentioned that we didn't have distribution yet in the UK he looked at me and said, "Well, let's do it then."  Right there on the spot without even tasting the wines.  I thought he was nuts!

We all went back to home and to work and I sort of forgot about Naked Wines, but then say Rowan on Twitter and "followed" him.  Next thing I know he sent me a message saying simply; "hi Amy, let's taste your wines."  So when Matt and I were over in the UK last week, we took the train up to Norwich for the day to taste with Rowan and his staff.  By the end of our 2-hour meeting, we had worked out the details, and by the time Matt and I were back at my sister's in the London area, our wines were already being offered on the Naked Wines website!

The concept is a great one.  They have, like any traditional wine retailer a warehouse with stock that  they ship out to their regular customers at regular retail prices, but the also have a pre-order program where customers pre-order the wines at a significant discount and then when the wines arrive they are immediately shipped out.  That way there's no excessive mark-ups, sales costs, storage costs etc.  The wine goes directly to the consumer with a small percentage going to Naked Wines.  And guess what, it works!  Their business is growing by leaps and bounds, the website is interactive, customers leave their opinions and scores for the wines right on the site.  It's a social-media driven virtual wine shop!  Click here to read our profile on their site!

Naked wines is offering a 6-bottle sampler pack of every wine we've made to date it will include the following:

1 - 2005 Côtes du Rhône Rouge

1- 2006 La Gramière Rouge (Vin de Table)

2- 2007 La Gramière Rouge (Vin de Table) 2 because it was Rowan's favorite!

1- 2007 La Gramière "Peter's Vineyard Syrah"

1- 2007 Lauzettes - Special Limited Edition bottling 100% Grenache (only 400 bottles made!)

So if there are any of you in the UK that have been following this blog, you can now get our wines at a really great price!

Click here to pre-order your special La Gramière 6-pack!

Hello, it's been awhile...

No excuses, that's boring, and you've heard them all before.  So, if there's anyone still out there....

Here's a bit of a recap of the past two months:

Vinisud:  we participated in this big southern French wine trade show for the first time, sharing a stand
with our friends from Clos de Trias.  It was quite an experience, we met lots of great people and made some good contacts, and saw lots of good friends who were also showing their wines at the show.  Our stand was in a great spot, but when you see the size of Chapoutier's huge...I don't even know what to call it, it's almost a building inside the fair, we certainly felt kind of small!  But that didn't stop lots of interesting people from coming by to taste our wines!

Then there's pruning, of course! We just finished 
last week with the help over the past few months from lots of family and friends.  Our friend Gaspard Aïchelé aged 15 spent several Saturdays with us, the Swiss contingent came down from Neuchâtel, Matt's mom Joan came from Minnesota, and then on the last big weekend my whole family was lucky enough to join us! 

We've rented 2 new parcels of grenache from the people who originally sold us our vineyards, and we are very excited about that.  They are both in beautiful condition, the vines are 40-50 years old and we expect to get some great grapes out of them.  The Ecocert organic certification organization was here yesterday to register their official conversion to organics.  We will also be ripping out about 1.5 hectares of vineyards under a grant from the EU, they are offering €11,000 per hectare to help people tear out vineyards that are in need of replanting.  Our mourvèdre vineyard has a fungus called Esca which attacks the vines and eventually kills them and is producing less and less each year.  The Syrah vineyard that we rent is also in need of some TLC so we decided to tear out half of it this year and half of it next year.  Finally we decided to replant part of our largest Grenache vineyard due to a root-rot problem!!  Seems like a lot but, we thought we should take advantage of the EU funds while we can.  It will also give us an opportunity to plant some other varietals like Cinsault, Rolle (Vermentino) and maybe even some Clairette Gris, along with new Syrah and Grenache plantings. Since we are going to be tearing the vines out, we didn't prune them, which just doesn't look right when you arrive at the vineyard!

Now we're headed full force into spring and all of the work that there is to do in the vineyards!!  I'll try to be good and keep you up to date!  (once again, for those interested I often post short snippets and photos on Facebook and sometimes I even tweet so you can follow me there too! La Gramière on FB and lagramiere on Twitter!