I'm always excited to tell you about the magnificently named locales that I get to explore thanks to my wine travels. Today is a great day for these nominal revelations!
Our friend Fabrice Krier at La Tache de Vin is selling O'Vineyards wine at his new digs in Belgium. He's up and running and people anywhere from Belgique to Luxembourg can dig into some O'Vineyards. Oh, and let's not forget everybody living in Wallonie. He's my Wallonie wine croney.
Sunday, we got to attend a local wine and everything festival held in Moussoulens.
Ampelography, the identification of vines based on visible characteristics, lends its name to the event because we love our winemakers here (at least when it's time to party). The amazingly named festival, Les Ampelofolies, focuses on products of the vines ranging from fine wines to plonk to distilled press juice (anti-freeze).
But, at a glance, we see that Les Ampelofolies celebrates a whole lot of things that do not grow on vines. There's a growing focus on truffles and other less pricey regional delectables. It's really a celebration of all things smellable. A festival of the nose. Smell the terroir. Smell it!
And it's fun. Oh is it fun! Eat all day. Like a carnival where everything is delicious and the vendors made everything themselves. There's pros and amateurs. Volunteer firefighters selling home made cookies. Youngsters like my neighbors and I selling fine wine. Bands dressed as enormous insects.
And of course, like all French village fests, it is a celebration of the moustache.
Video for those who hate reading or just can't get enough of the wine fest ambience.
It's been a long and windy day. I am not allowed to go outside because my mom is panicking. The department has banned car travel until further notice. We can see three healthy trees fallen from the winery loft. We assume we're going to be clearing out a lot of trees. Hopefully nothing damages the vines or trellis system. A big one fell in the Syrah.
At least I can still drink.
Sometimes I stay inside all day voluntarily. But when it's forced upon me, I go ga ga. To demonstrate, a recent Garfield Minus Garfield comic: (this is a comic strip that just reprints popular Garfield comics without the titular character, focusing instead on the grim existential masterpiece that is John)
It's an exceptionally cold winter in France this year and everybody from Paris to Marseilles is covered in an unexpectedly thick sheet of snow. We are enjoying it in the Languedoc too as the vines can always use a good frost. The plants harden and green vines turn to woody tentacles that latch on to the wire trellis system so hard you think you'll need the jaws of life.
Most of the locals who prune professionally refuse to work with us because our trellis system (four wires) supports the plants too much. They need to be doing a plant every twenty seconds to make a decent wage. That means spur pruning AND ripping off all the growth. As you can see in this video, my dad is just pruning. A future video will feature how I run around behind him tearing down all the vegetation that he has pruned. But in this one we see the solemn slow work of cutting down vines and letting them hang on the wires.
It's pretty tedious but it's sort of beautiful (especially with snow on the ground). Some people will enjoy this movie and it's slow pacing across the frozen tundra and its light sense of nostalgia for sunny Florida where I spent my December in beach-going weather. Others will think I am an artsy fart. Such is life. Enjoy the video.
Pigeage is more than just a funny word with indecipherable vowel distribution. It's a way of life. For weeks, all of our wines are going through an extended fermentation where the grapes and grape juice are turning into delicious red wine. This is a critical period known as maceration when the wine will draw its best qualities from the skin and the seeds in the tank. The undamaged grapes of harvest time impart their best qualities to the juice which will one day soon be fine wine.
But it's not smooth sailing, my friends. The tanks we hold the grapes in contain 80 to 100 hectoliters (converted to nonmetric: a lot) of grapes. And the pristine purple marbles that fall into the vat are crushed and torn asunder by the chemical forces at work when yeasts ferment the juice. What's more, there's a byproduct to all this fermenting: CO2. The Carbon dioxide rises to the top of the vat like bubbles in soda and they will lift the majority of the skin and seeds to the top, forming a thick hard cap.
Two or three times a day depending on where we are in the fermentation (determined by measuring the density and temperature of the wine in the cuve). This is hard. It's a struggle to push the grapes back down into the juice. Especially the first time. Especially the first hole. That first puncture is rough, but we've gotta' do it!
I've been looking for excuses to push back the daily pigeage ritual to give my tired arms a rest. My finely tuned ability to procrastinate led me to make a video about pigeing. And now, in an effort to avoid the afternoon pige, I'm writing a blog post about pigeing.
Now you can learn the ins and outs. See the tools I use. Learn the theory and strategies that I usually ignore. You too can use this blog post as a way to not do the work you should probably be doing right now.
I have a new video for you all. This is a little video that describes how we go about tasting the grapes to decide whether or not they're almost ready to harvest. You all know how to taste things, so it's a little basic. However, sometimes, it's fun to hear about the specifics like ... what exactly does tasting the seed show about acidity and maturity or ... how do you go about randomly picking grapes for a 200 berry sample that you'll bring to the lab.
Yes, these and far nerdier questions will be answered.
Q: Ryan, isn't it a little late in the year to be checking your grapes' maturity? I thought that the Cabardes would have harvested most of its Merlot by now. A: You are such a precocious reader! Yes, it's true that this is late. I filmed this in September and then got too busy actually harvesting to edit the video (also, I had to debug it because iMovie HD was giving me some trouble).
Q: How about a harvest update? A: Harvest is going well. The Merlot and Syrah are in and they're fermenting. We just started punching down caps today on two of the vats and it's as hard as I remember. There's a new harvester that is amazing so our quality will go up even though we are harvesting a little less by hand this year. That's awesome, because it means less stress for me and better wine for all of us. :)
I read an article about the United States selecting their competitor for the upcoming Bocuse d'Or competition (not a small deal). The golden Bocuse is named after renowned French chef Paul Bocuse, and it is in fact the biggest deal. The article linked above mentions rather briefly that individual countries will budget over a million dollars to train their selected chef for the upcoming competition. We're dealing in a realm that is hard to access on a daily basis, but this is the sort of cuisine dreams are made of. I mean, Bocuse has served individual soups more famous than the combined life achievements of my direct family.
But in my little way, I'll be adding to the long culinary tradition! I'll be making regular deliveries of O'Vineyards wines to a restaurant étoilée. Franck Putelat, the 2003 winner of the Bocuse d'Or, has started his own restaurant at the foot of the historic walled city of Carcassonne. Within a single year, his Michelin star followed him to Le Parc, and he deserves it.
Thomas Brieu, the sommelier at Le Parc, will be personally introducing three O'Vineyards wines alongside the delectable menus that Chef Putelat arranges.
This is a good way to kick of what the French refer to as CHR sales (cafes, hotels, restaurants)!
I mean, Bocuse has served 