la gramiere

Half way there!

Wow, this has been so amazing, three days into our campaign and we are half way there!  We're just a bit shy of $4000, THANK YOU!!!!  Thank you so much to all of you who have already donated and thank you to those of you who have helped get the information out!  If you're considering donating, remember, every little bit helps we are so grateful for any amount, $10, $20, $5! whatever you feel like chipping in.  Remember we don't get any of the money if we don't reach our $7500 goal!

So here's a big thank you to all those who have donated so far: OMS&MR, Beverly, Catherine, June, Scott, Alys, Russ, Jane, Ryan, Dave&Heidi, Cindy, Doug, Elise, Glenn, Max, Mellie, Tom, Dominique&Michael, Kathy&Pete, Joan, Molly, Cynthia, Thomas, Marianne&Terry, Maggie, Rémy, Jean&Harold, and Katharine!  Your contributions are greatly appreciated! 

Here's a great photo that our friend Joe McLean of Promo Vinum took of us the other night at the evening market in Saint Quentin la Poterie (our village!).

Keeping things fun at La Gramière~!

I have a short attention span.  In fact if was I growing up now, I'm sure I'd be tagged as mildly ADD or ADHD or whatever they're calling it now.  Instead I grew up as a happy, creative kid, that needed a bit of "direction" from time to time. Since buying vineyards 8 years ago, I've been forced to stay in one place and to focus on the project at hand instead of flitting around from project to project.  Which at times has been very trying for me.  In the beginning I blogged a lot, it was a fun way to communicate with the outside world, but year after year I felt like I was saying the same things; if it's January it must be pruning, April budbreak, July bottling, September harvest and so on. The novelty wore off, so I little by little have stopped blogging virtually all together.  But today is different, today I have a new, fun project and I want to share it with you!

Drum roll please!!!

Announcing the new La Gramière Super Truck!:

Well, it's going to be anyway...

We bought it way back in January and ever since then it's been at the mechanic's getting some required work before it will pass the 'road worthy' test here in France.

This is what it looked like a couple of weeks ago:

And this is what it looks like today!  It has passed the test and is now ready for the road, and a new paint job!

I know, not much different than the first photo, but now all of the lights and turn signals work, it has two new tires and all the little kinks have been fixed!

The next step is to paint it and make an opening on the side so that we can serve wine from the inside to our customers standing at the bar on the outside!  It's going to be a mobile tasting room of sorts.  We're going to do evening tastings with tapas and wine, sometimes in our vineyards as the sun goes down, sometimes in the surrounding villages!  We are also going to be inviting guest "vignerons" to pour their wines along with ours, and guest chefs to cook for us!  Sounds fun doesn't it?

When we're finished painting and converting it I hope it will look something like this, with a little more color, but it gives you and idea:

I promise to post more pictures as we progess!  But plan on coming out for a glass of wine and some yummy treats this summer! 

Oh, and we need a name for it, any ideas??

 

A little powdered sulfur

For the vines, that is!  We got up at o'dark thirty the other day to do a "poudrage" on the vineyards  that 
are in flower.  A "poudrage" is simply blowing powdered sulfur onto the vines to protect them against mildew, but also to help with fruit set.  Grenache is a tricky varietal in that it often has problems with shatter.  Shatter means that the fruit doesn't set.  Often we'll have beautiful big bunches of flowers and then the tiny little grapes will just fall off after flowering. In 2010 many wineries in the southern Rhône lost up to 30% of their crops due to shatter.  Powedered sulfur is supposed to help with that, keeping my fingers crossed that it will.  That and the fact that the weather has been beautiful here, not much wind so maybe we'll be lucky and have a bumper crop this year!

We've done it only once before mostly due to the fact that it has to be perfectly still when you do the "poudrage" otherwise it just blows away, and the temps can't be above 27 degrees C for 24 hours after you do it or it creates sulfur gases and can burn the vegetation.  This time we weather was perfect and as you can see the powder just hung over the vines.  Here's to hoping for a bumper crop in 2011! 

Note my high-tec gear to protect my nose and eyes, getting sulfur in either would be quite painful!! A pretty good self-portrait, don't you think??

A trip to the Printer, an Eco-Printer!

In five years we've now had 3 different printers, but I think I've now found one we'll stick with! Last year we switched because I received an email from a group that was certified "Imprim'Vert"  which is an eco certification that guarantees that the print shop recycles everything, from inks to papers to cleaning solutions, etc. My contact was a sales rep that I never actually met, and the actual print shop was near Carcassonne!!  Not exactly nearby.  They did a fine job, and I really didn't have any complaints, but I also didn't have any reason to go back to them. 

This year, during my visit to Sitevi, which I told you about in an earlier post, I FINALLY found a printer that has recycled label paper!!!  Last year, when I was ordering my labels the rep said that I would have to place an enormous order in order for him to be able to justify recycled paper.   At Sitevi, just by chance my friend Serge and I stopped at a small printer's booth who was also certified "Imprim'Vert", and lo and behold, they said, that they had recycled paper, in two different colors!!!   Yahoo!!!!  So this year, the rep from "Imprimerie Estrabols" actually came to our house, showed us the paper samples, talked through our design issues, and amazingly, we had a new eco-printer!  

Last week we were finally ready to print after numerous changes and final tweaks to the designs.  They suggested that I come to the shop to OK the colors as they were printing the labels to be sure that I was happy with the outcome.  The recycled paper we are using is a mat finish as opposed to the shiny paper we used for the previous 2 vintages, so the color would surely come out differently.  We were also printing a new label that is burgundy-colored, so they wanted to make sure that I was happy with it too.

When I showed up they had the Burgundy colored label on the machine, and the color wasn't bad, but you could barely see the leaf-motif in the back ground, this would not do.  So they asked the art department to make a new plate with a higher definition for the artwork.  On the second try it was way too pronounced, and ended up looking pink!  So we split the difference and it was perfect.  Now to print the 3000 labels.  (The photo shows the variations in image definition.)

Then on to the green label.  After the press was cleaned,  I got to  watch as Jean-Claude the man in charge of both printing my labels, and being my official host, got out the formula for our "La Gramière"  green and started mixing.  He filled the printer and started it up.  On the new paper, it came out looking too blue.  So he started adding more yellow, 100 grams at a time. After two attempts, he just decided to slap a big blob of yellow ink in the printer, and it came out perfectly!  He said they used to do it all by trial and error, now they used scales and percentages.  Just goes to show, sometimes you should just follow your instincts!

In the end I was there for over 2 hours watching, waiting and learning about the printing process.  It's shocking to see how many labels are wasted, as many, if not more than I had ordered!!  It's the same at every printer, that's why it's so important to me to have found one that takes recycling and the environment seriously.  I still wish I could have found someone who does recycled paper and vegetable-based inks, but apparently for wine labels, the vegetable-based inks aren't stable enough, they tend to fade.  I'm sure they'll continue to improve and in a few years I'll be telling you all about our recycled paper, vegetable-based ink labels, but for now you'll have to settle for this.