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.

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.

Behold punch downs:

Wine punch down – Pigeage

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

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.

Tasting Merlot before Harvest

Pre-emptive Q & A:

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)!

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

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

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.

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!