It’s the end of carnavale. Carnaval? Whichever way it’s spelled, the masked dancing is hilarious. Also, it means that I’ve had lots of themed meals built around cassoulet and sad clowns dancing down the streets of Limoux. Aude is home of the longest carnaval celebration on the planet. (Maybe a bit too long?) We go [...]

For every good idea I have, I get at least three ridiculously bad ideas.  And some of those bad ideas make it far beyond the planning stages. So, last week, I was joking about the rhetoric we terroir-lovers tend to use.  We get very wrapped up in the importance of a wine reflecting a sense [...]

Last week, I had a delegation from Naked Wines customers visit the vineyard. The “angels”, as they’re called on the website, tasted several wines from the region the day before. And they had expressed some curiosity about the term garrigue that comes up all the time when tasting wines from this area. Garrigue refers to [...]

What better way to bring you a breath of fresh air than Suzy Delair singing about Trah lah lah?!

Hey everybody!! My Flip UltraHD came in the mail. I’m really excited. This camera is gorgeous. I celebrated by traveling to Carcassonne and shooting everything I could including this pensive pigeon. I will do a lot of random picture posts to share the vineyard and the region with you.  Hopefully they won’t all be Nouveau [...]

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 [...]

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 … [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]