I'm Franco-American again!

I usually tell people I'm an American making wine in the south of France but the truth is that I'm a dual citizen or at least I was born that way. It gets tricky because I let my French passport expire, and trying to convince the French government that I'm still French was a hoot and a holler (a phrase I'm afraid to teach anybody over here since they'd probably pronounce it:"Ay 'oot an' ay 'oh-lehr").

To get a new passport I had to show them a National ID. To get a National ID I had to show them a passport. You know the drill. Well now I can show them both! In the end I had to prove to them that I had NOT renounced my French citizenship after turning 18. As it turns out, it's rather hard to prove an absence of an act, but surrender isn't in the French dictionary. ...not when it comes to bureaucracy!

Somebody remind me when this is about to expire.

So, above is my mandatory sourire-sans-dents face. The photo booth encouraged me to look happy but reminded me that smiling is not allowed if the photo is to be used for an official government ID. And those joint stipulations were thought-provoking. I reflected quietly upon the true nature of happiness while the photo booth timer ticked away. First photo was a botch.

What was even more distressing was the second photo when the photo booth knew I was smiling. I guess the computer in there can tell the difference between my pearly whites and my wan face.

The third picture I tried keeping my eyes wide and my teeth hidden, while expressing some degree of joy. That sickly smirk is now my official identification in France. I got the best of it in the end I suppose... unless this is all a roundabout way of getting me to look exceptionally smug in my official French ID. Clever system, clever.

Guide Hachette selection Cabardes

We got reviewed in the guide Hachette. I'll add this to the media portion of the website eventually but it's pretty low priority since it's in French and in the middle of harvest. The 2009 Guide Hachette talked up our wine a good deal. We weren't quite the Coup de Coeur for the region, but nobody expects a wine called "Les Americains" to wine the favored spot in such a prestigious French review. It's an honor to be in the pages of this renowned wine publication.

Here's a link to the actual article for anybody who reads French:

Guide Hachette

As always, the rest of the media clippings can be found in the Press section of the website:Press

French wine in Sweden

Good news for all our Swedish readers. A Swedish wine club that you can join online will be making several of our award-winning O'Vineyards wines available to households around Stockholm (and maybe beyond). In addition, I'm excited because I get to write and read an unprecedented number of umlauts in my day to day affairs.

torstig.se

rudimentary English translation



Hurrah for International cooperation. Hopefully it'll go far better than the encounter between Swedish Chef and Jacques Roach.

Vine Tucking

Okay, so the team (currently consisting of my dad, Joey Quigley, and me) is out in the Cabernet Sauvignon lifting wires.

In a nutshell, we want the most leaves possible on each plant since leaves with direct sunlight get energy for the plant, but we want to avoid crowding or dense packs of leaves because leaves stuck in a pack won't collect energy AND they increase the chance of mildew and rot on the grape clusters come harvest time.

The best way for us to guarantee greeaaat foliage coverage with a lot of vertical surface area (horizontal is good too except that it would bump into the plants beside it and get undesired crowding) is a moveable wire trellis system with high posts. We went through the whole vineyard and ripped all the old posts out of the ground to make place for new posts. The new posts have lots of hooks on them so you can adjust how high the wires are set.

When the plant is just sprouting, we drop the wires. The leaves and vines grow in on top of the wires. Then we go around and lift the wires and hook them to the post. This lifts all the foliage up at once and guides the plant upwards while also providing support to grow extra long without snapping (this is especially important on more fragile varietals like the syrah which has vegetation that can easily snap under its own weight when unsupported).



The other cool part of this video is just talking about a peculiarly pesky weed called Les Americains (the Americans!) which we have to rip out of the ground whenever we see. It kind of looks like grapevine and it tends to sprout near the base of the vines and leech off of their root system. Left unchecked it destroys everything and suffocates the grape plants.

They're called Americans because they were introduced when France took in a lot of California plants after a blight devastated most of their own vines. The American clones apparently introduced this previously unseen weed to the countryside. Enjoy the irony of Americans ripping up Americains.

Questions and comments are appreciated on the blog or at the youtube video itself. Thanks for keeping up with our adventures!

Some vineyard footage

I finally had a bit of time to compile some of the vineyard footage. Please excuse the low quality. I'm recording all of this with my laptop's built-in webcam and the macbook icam is not meant for these sweeping outdoor shots. Add Internet compression to that and some psychotic time-lapse editing and you have video that I hope is just on this side of watchable. Anyway, people have been requesting some outdoorsy footage and some footage of the town around the vineyard. Hopefully these clips will satisfy.

The music is "quelle classe!" by Les Auditeurs (my friends and I just recorded it this week!).



You can see the town hall of Villemoustaussou, the fruit orchard on the vineyard, Muse the Wine Dog, and some pretty blossoms. Excitement abounds on the outskirts of Carcassonne, France.