Bocuse d'Or Winner pouring O'Vineyards

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)!

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

Wine Spectator Restaurant Guide

I don't usually repost the nonsense that's zipping along the grapevine but this is good stuff. A guy made a fictional restaurant with a small Internet presence (a website, some reviews on chowhound) and a phone number.

He comes up with a huge wine list that includes some of the lowest-rated Italian wines of the past century according to Wine Spectator. He then submits his restaurant to the WS restaurant guide with a $250 application fee.

He gets an award of exellence. Nice. Very nice.

Now, what we should draw from this is that Wine Spectator is not a journalistic source in this mess. It's just a republisher of information. A real periodical would have had somebody on the ground to make sure the restaurant even existed. But it's a big magazine and they have some sections that are fluffier than others.

That said, I have a large amount of respect for The Wine Spectator because they rated the wines I sent them. They had no obligation or financial incentive. They just have some reviewers who were willing to taste and evaluate some new wines from O'Vineyards. That means that they're cool in my book.

blog post by the award-winner: http://osterialintrepido.wordpress.com/
wine spectator's response: http://forums.winespectator.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/6826053161/m/835102245

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!

Wine Tasting with Winemaker - Truly Majestic Saturday

Sometimes, I take a weekend day off and just do a nice all-day wine tasting with one of my retailers. Which retailer depends on where I'm staying and what I want to do that night. This past Saturday was at The Butcher's Block in Sarasota. I got some video footage that should demystify my job and help people realize exactly how glamorous and fantastic being a winemaker can be. ugh. :D

Cinco de Mayo and Paper Work and Paper Play

Today is a day of deliveries. I expected to get started sooner because somebody at Whole Foods was registered to be in at 8:00 AM. The wave of relief when I called in to find he wasn't there that early is best left hidden. But I'm going to leave the computer soon for a long list of deliveries around Tampa and St. Petersburg.

Tomorrow will be a day of paper. I will have a lot of fun finishing a birthday present for a new friend and I will have a lot of boredom writing up tax reports and compliance papers for the state auditors. It's a glamorous life, the life of a winemaker. :-( Saturdays buried in paper.

All the whining aside, we had an excellent Cinco de Mayo celebration. Some of my spoiled wine that's not in a condition to sell but is in a condition to enjoy got mixed in with some fruit and ginger ale and cinnamon. We had ourselves a time. (Legal disclaimer: we had all this wine cleared through a licensed vendor in the state of Florida blah blah blah blah blah.)

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.

Still running

I've been back in Tampa a couple days now and I'm starting to miss mom's cooking. But it's good to be in the city that raised me, checking out the old stomping grounds and living in the house I was in before we started this crazy vineyard thing. For those who don't know, I'm from Tampa so this is where the wine's marketing and distribution is headquartered for the time being.

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Home, Sweet-Mother-of-@#*!, Home.

[[VIDEO REMOVED]]

The video isn't working entirely right... I'll have to get my mom to reupload it. Regardless, that's a glimpse of the house my parents built before going into wine. They made the houses like they make wines WAY BIGGER THAN MOST PEOPLE WOULD EVER EXPECT.

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Anyway, I'm in Tampa and I'm ready to start selling wine. A lot of new contacts from the Sarasota Wine Festival. I met David and Deb Hunt from Hunt Cellars, several of the family member at Stanley Lambert including (Jim Lambert, self-proclaimed wannabe winemaker), the lovely family behind Silkwood Wines, and the Michael half of Michael-David Winery (who make Earthquake, Incognito, Pride, 7 Deadly Zins and many many more). They were all fantastic people and I will be keeping in touch with each of them.

I also got to snoop a little behind the scenes, sneaking around the service corridors of the Ritz Carlton, salvaging floral arrangements from the hotel's trash, and pouring more than a thousand samples in three days. I even got invited to an after-party thrown by one of the bigger distributors and it was fun drinking behind (what some refer to as) enemy lines. At the end of so much good wine, everybody can be good friends.

Hit the ground running

I landed (finally) and my luggage didn't. Oh well. I'm in Tampa. I got a few hours of sleep. I'm going to pack the wine and bring it (past deadline) to Sarasota. We'll see if we can salvage the expo experience despite the Airline conspiracy to destroy my itinerary. I've always thought that Charles de Gaul had it out for me (the airport, not the General/President).

Sarasota will be a hoot if I can make it there on time since the wine had to be delivered when I was originally scheduled to land like a day and a half ago.

Daily Flip w/ Jim Kukral

I tried to do an elevator pitch for Jim Kukral at the Daily Flip. He's doing an educational contest / promotion where people can get feedback on 15 second pitches about their product or company. I don't verbally identify myself or my brand so he kind of rips me a new one, but that's what learning is about sometimes! A big thanks to Kukral for running a series like this.

Here's the pitch:

Cheesy in the Lap of Luxury

I made a sister video to accompany the barrel music video. It wraps up the barrel trifecta with a couple of shout outs and an answer to one of the questions I got from the Vayniac forums.

Blog shoutouts

I got written up by a Master of Wine living in the Languedoc. Juliet Bruce Jones dropped the O'bomb when talking about noteworthy vineyards in the Cabardes region of France. Thank you, Ms. Jones.

Read more here: http://www.aude-vie.com/page19/page19.html

Also, we've been getting some good feedback from the Vayniacs at the winelibrarytv.com forum. If you've never checked out Gary Vaynerchuk, do so. I won't guarantee that you'll love him, but you'll have an opinion. And one of the many nice things about his wine reviews and his rabid fans is that you can access them for free unlike elitist publications that don't even have issues in bookstores/newsstands/libraries.

Winemaking killed the radio star

We just moved a ton of wine barrels onto the oxoline shelving. Full barrels are really, really heavy so we actually put empty barrels on the shelves and then pumped the wine from a full barrel in the middle of the room into an empty barrel on the shelf. This is a tedious and lengthy process, but it's kind of cool to see it in action.

With that in mind, I tried to stay interesting in this video. Now, what's going on is pretty simple.

• Put an empty barrel on the shelf.
• Fill it with a barrel from the ground.
  
• Clean the barrel from the ground.
  
• Put the newly empty barrel on the shelf.
  
• Repeat for like three days of your life.
  

Because it's so simple, I decided to make it an artsy fart music video. I put it to the tune of "A Tear" by Phunt Your Friends which is a collaborative effort between Drew McCarty and I. This also has lyrical contributions from Kate Keelen. The song was originally submitted to SongFight in April 2006.

Pruning methods

I posted a youtube video about the different pruning methods. There's spur pruning and cane pruning. These are known here as Cordon Royat and Guyot, respectively. At O'Vineyards, we're in the process of converting from Guyot to Cordon Royat and this video explains why we think this will be good for the wine.



PS - I'm confirming this blog's entry into Technorati. Technorati Profile It's a site that catalogs blogs and helps spread the word.

Soutirage Update

We spent most of the day doing soutirages on some of the Syrah for the 2007 Reserve. It had a lot of lies (that's pronounced leez and has nothing to do with obfuscating the truth) and it was exceptionally important to make sure that this grape deposit should be separated from the wine at this time.

We also took advantage of this move to put some of the barrels in the center of the room on that new oxoline shelving I was bragging about a couple days ago. It took a long time, but it should be easier on the remaining barrels we have to go through.

More to come!

France in April

I just celebrated my 23rd birthday at the beginning of the month and after an incredibly busy pair of weeks in Florida, I flew back to the vineyard. I am currently typing from my office above the winery and I am excited to announce that I finally got around to making a short vineyard video. Hopefully, I'll keep these coming as a web series on O'Vineyards that can shed some light on some of the cool things we get to do, the way we tend to grapes and wine, our love for this work and this area, all the sweet toys I get to play with, etc.

This installment is on a topic I'm very excited about. I've been gone since crush at the end of 2007. In my absence, my parents installed a brand new oxoline system to shelve our barrels. This actually sounds a lot like an ad for them, but I'm not getting paid. (We should look into the sponsorship opportunities, but) This is just a friendly look into one of the cool new gadgets I get to use.



For people who can't see the video cause they're at work or on dialup or somesuch:
My barrels used to be stacked on top of each other which is the way it's been done for a long time. Once they're full, they're exceptionally heavy and it's a little difficult reaching the bunghole (that's the hole in the barrel, not the naughty part of your body). The shelving system uses space age innovations like wheels and tubes to shelve each barrel independently. This makes the hole accessible, makes it possible to turn the barrel around while full with minimal effort, and turns the difficult process of emptying the last bits of the barrel as easy as turning it upside down. I'm sort of surprised it took centuries of winemaking before an affordable shelf with wheels was invented, but at least we have it now.