Love That Languedoc

I just got back from a long two weeks of tastings around Western Europe. We went as far north as Normandy (Cherbourg) and we went all the way down to Logrono in the Rioja region of Spain. We drove past a lot of vineyards on our tour, and I have to make a confession. I love the Languedoc.

I cannot deny the beauty and character of every wine country we drove through. I can't deny that there are talented winemakers everywhere we traveled.

But I have to admit that I love my region, the Languedoc-Roussillon, more than any other place I've visited.

Every beautiful place we visited sort of made me miss the Languedoc a little more.

What makes us different? Obviously, there's a great terroir. But the wonderful thing about terroir is that EVERY wine country has its own unique terroir. Ours isn't necessarily BETTER than the others. It's something else that draws me to the Languedoc.

I think it's the opportunity. The Languedoc-Roussillon is one of the largest wine producing regions in the world. We're responsible for something like one third of France's wine. And a decade ago, we were producing 10% of the GLOBAL wine supply just in this one area. But despite this vast size and importance, we are one of the least recognized areas.

Well I'm going to change that. Check out www.love-that-languedoc.com where I'll be running around the Languedoc-Roussillon with my camera. I'm going to be interviewing everybody I can find. We're going to show the Internet and the New World that the Languedoc is a vibrant place full of opportunity and energy. If you're reading this, I'm very grateful that you've been following my vineyard adventures. But NOW, I'm hoping you'll want to follow my Languedoc adventures as we rediscover every wonderful part of the Languedoc-Roussillon.

Punch down the cap - How to pige wine

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.

Behold punch downs:

Wine punch down - Pigeage

oh, music by Phunt Your Friends available for free download at songfight.org

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.

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.

Pizza Sandwich - Ep. 1 - Italian Pizza / Dirty Downhome Southern Pizza w/ Fried Okra in the Middle

(warning: mild cursing)

Okay,

This is only peripherally related to O'Vineyards in that I am O'Vineyards and I made this delicious dish with my friends.

We just made an enormous, decadent pizza sandwich. That's a sandwich where you put something delicious in between two large slices of bread except that each slice of bread is a full-sized pizza!

The pizzas were delicious. We had one pizza with mashed potatoes and gravy. One classic Italian pizza with black olives, tomatoes, onion and peppers. We clasped them together with some fried okra inbetween. Yum. All vegan too.

I'll probably be making more of these, and I'll try to work wine into the picture in the future.