“C’était une très agréable visite pour nous, surtout parce que nous n’étions pas les seuls à nous amuser–eux aussi!”

(It was a very enjoyable visit for us, especially since we were not the only ones having fun, [the O’Connells] too!)

This morning, I had the idea to reread my TripAdvisor review from when I first visited O’Vineyards back in September 2010. I was not surprised to rediscover my first impression of this place–it hadn’t changed one bit. Since day one of my current stay, I have been telling myself the same thing every day: the O’Connells have way too much fun making wine. Their joy and passion is contagious, too.

So we would like to take this opportunity to send out a special thanks to all the guests who have kindly left a review on the “Domaine O’Vineyards” TripAdvisor site. We greatly appreciate your praise, compliments, feedback and striking photos of our vineyard (see below for a few of our guests’ own snapshots). Above all, it helps us keep all the memories alive too!

Whether you stayed at our Bed and Breakfast, dined with us at our Winemaker’s table, or simply popped in for a tasting, we’d love to keep in touch through the TripAdvisor site. Donnez-nous de vos nouvelles…Don’t be a stranger!

 

Cette photo de Domaine O’Vineyards est fournie gracieusement par TripAdvisor

Cette photo de Domaine O’Vineyards est fournie gracieusement par TripAdvisor

Cette photo de Domaine O’Vineyards est fournie gracieusement par TripAdvisor

We planted a grapevine garden in front of the winery this spring. One day, this vineyard garden will showcase all the different types of grape vines that can be found in this part of France. People will be able to tell the difference between Syrah and Grenache and Merlot and Cabernet by seeing the vines right beside each other.

But for now, the vines are tiny and all pretty much look the same. So this year, we’ve been using them to show visitors and tourists how grape vines look when they’re first planted.

It’s an interesting process since we rarely plant from seed anymore. Instead we use bench grafts that connect the variety we want to grow to a rootstock suited for that soil and rainfall.

When young, the graft is sealed in wax.  We show everybody this waxy bit and get to use the young vines to illustrate the notion of grafting and rootstock. This can naturally lead into conversations about how deep roots go, why virtually all French vines are planted on American rootstock, and so on.

Photos of young grape vines

Click on any of the photos below for a larger view:

So, I’ve been pretty cagey about this but here’s the official announcement:

Ryan O’Connell is moving to California for part of 2012.  The company I’m working with in California is looking for new wines and new business opportunities and they think I can help.  I think I can help too. 🙂

I’m leaving tomorrow.  I’ll be travelling back and forth from the US to Languedoc all year, so I’m not totally detached from the vineyard and the region I call home.  And my very competent parents will continue their stewardsship of O’Vineyards in my absence.

I’ve started a new blog called kidnapa (because I’m being kidnapped to Napa) which will probably have a lot of articles comparing France and California or just talking about the west coast of the US.

Love That Languedoc will continue (largely as an aggregator site).  I am also accepting guest posts so let me know if you’d like to contribute to that blog.

This blog will continue to have posts about O’Vineyards and all the random wine junk I think about that doesn’t fit on my other blogs.

Wish me luck.

I saw some birds of prey locked at the talons outside the winery and had the camera nearby.  It reminds you how O’Vineyards is pretty rural/wild.  Hawks just wander up and use our front deck when they feel like it.

Now there’s a debate going on about whether these birds or fighting or mating.  My money is on fight, but that’s mostly because I don’t want to fathom that I’ve interrupted their cloacal kissing.  If you don’t know what that means, look it up.

Here’s some video. You be the judge!

Has our wine driven these birds to violence or made them lusty?

Oh I was listening to Camille when this all happened so excuse the bizarre but pointed soundtrack.

2011 Vintage Report

People have been asking me about how the vintage is going to turn out since back in August.  I’m always hesitant to guess at quality that early in the game, and this year is a perfect example of why we shouldn’t be too confident in our speculation.

All year, the vines were ahead of schedule and carrying a pretty bountiful crop of grapes.  But in the last stretch, conditions changed drastically and how winemakers responded to those changes will lead to  a wide spectrum of results.  I think that quality of 2011 Languedoc wines will vary wildly depending on yield, microclimates, and harvest strategy.  While this variance is always something to consider, it’s especially crazy this year.

O’Vineyards 2011 Vintage

The grapes were tasting great since mid August which is unusually early.  We taste them daily with the tour groups that come through to visit the vineyard.  Normally they don’t start tasting good until closer to harvest.  As I explained to the tour groups, the flesh of the fruit tasted good but the seeds were still green.

As we continued tasting, I felt confident that the ripeness would be there by the second week of September.  Muse the dog was also eating grapes in the second week which is usually a good sign!   The lab was telling us to wait and was predicting that the grapes would be ready late in the third week or fourth week of the month.  I thought that was ludicrous and we went ahead and started harvesting on the night of the 14th.

Grapes came in very well and very ripe.  In retrospect, we sort of look like genius wine wizards.  People who followed the textbook guidelines on how to harvest may have been taken off guard by several of the unusual circumstances this year.

Unusual circumstances of 2011 harvest

It was a very late summer with tshirt and shorts weather through most of September and part of October. This had an incredible effect on the late ripening period for the grapes in my area.  Lots of shriveling and therefore less water and higher sugar content.

There was also a special kind of late season mildew which knocks out the youngest leaves on the plant.  This wasn’t a problem for us because we had low to moderate yields and lots of healthy leaves.  But if you had a lot of grapes on the plant, you might have needed those young leaves in the final stretch.  Then again, most of the producers that really push yield also treat more against mildew and it seemed like my neighbors weren’t much affected by this.

It seems like there were less pips this year.  We didn’t really notice this until decuvage, but it seems significant.  2-3 seeds per grape instead of 2-4.   The grapes also stained our equipment a lot less than usual which might be related to the fewer seeds observation.

It’s also worth reminding you that the vines were very far ahead of schedule earlier in the year.

All this combines for a crazy late season.  Winemakers who harvested later might be facing extreme concentration levels.  The grapes started shriveling very quickly in the record-breaking heat we had at the end of September.  Judging by the dates some people were harvesting, I imagine some of my neighbors were bringing grapes in at 17% and 18% potential alcohol.  These concentrations are obviously TOO high to be making typical terroir wines.  Independent wineries can counter this by illegally adding water (although that’s not an alternative that fills me with joy).  And this sort of cheating can be harder to pull off in larger more public wineries like cooperatives (depending on the visibility and honesty of the winery).

On the other hand, winemakers who brought things in early might face some other issues.  For example, if you prune for high yields, you were looking at exceptionally high yields this year.  But exceptionally high yields can mean it takes longer for the seeds to ripen.  So if you brought in your harvest early, you might still have green seeds.  But if you waited too long you might have ripe seeds but you’ll also have huge sugar levels.

Anyway, we hit some kind of magical middle path.  We pruned for low yields.  The bumper harvest just meant a normal amount of grapes on our vines (floating around 40 hectoliters/hectare).  So we got seed maturity early enough that we could bring the grapes in at a reasonable 14-15% potential for the most part.

And there are lots of other variables I’m probably not noticing or forgetting to mention.  Components like surface area of foliage, depth of roots, deep water reservoirs, and so on.  And there are much finer variables that people hardly mention like leaf attrition, cane width, migration of African swallows carrying coconuts by the husk, etc.  😉

Hopefully this has been helpful and gives people some insight into the 2011 vintage.  Should be a fun one. 😉

We started the machine harvest on September 15, 2011.  The weather’s been perfect and the grapes came in very cool as we started predawn (4h45AM).  A few surprises but lots of good things to report.  High hopes for the rest of harvest and the potential of this vintage for the entire Languedoc Roussillon!

I don’t really have time to wax poetic but there were some take away points worth mentioning:

• After much talk about increased yield, Syrah seems to come in at a very low average of 35 hectoliters/hectare
• WWOOFers are very helpful around harvest time
• Merlot came in very clean with this new harvester
• Syrah was a lot of work at the sorting table (mostly snails) and I think we should do more by hand
• Everything tastes great showing a full maturity despite slightly higher yields in some parcels

Some harvest photos

The grapes are getting ripe enough to start talking about harvest dates.  I’ve been tasting grapes in the Cabernet and Merlot multiple times a day with everybody who comes through on the winery tour.  I go out to the Syrah once every couple of days to taste there too.  And of course, the real expert tastes the grapes every time we let her outside.

My dog, Muse.

Nobody believes me until they see it for themselves.  Muse loves to eat the grapes once they’re ripe.  I’ve even sworn to that in a recent harvest update published by the Languedoc Pages.

People say grapes can kill a dog, but my dog eats grapes all the time.  I can’t stop her once they’re ripe.

It would appear they’re not quite ready yet though as she’s just giving them a brief sniff before moving on.  We’ll have to wait a couple more weeks before she starts gobbling up all the profit at O’Vineyards.

Just more proof that harvest won’t be as early as I expected it to be when people asked me in June.

I had to reorganize all the photos on our computer systems and I found some real pearls from the first few years at O’Vineyards (some of them are back when it was le Domaine du Thou! and not even called O’Vineyards yet).

Nostalgia time

The first year we were at O’Vineyards, there wasn’t a winery or anything.  And then we had a really hard time obtaining a permit, so we had to install our wine tanks, barrels, cooling system, and everything on a slab outside.  And then the municipal government kindly let us build a winery/hangar around the slab we had already poured.

So the picture at the top of this post is of me cleaning off equipment after decuvage… but the crazy thing is that the winery is being built around me.

6 Years Ago – Back in 2005

The photo data shows it’s from October 19th 2005.  I was only 20!  I look like I’m 14.  Also, this is just a couple months after Hurricane Katrina hit my city and my school.  I had only just discovered YouTube a few months before this photo was taken, and I thought “this is really cool but there aren’t a lot of videos on here”.  .  .  Back then, the US had only been in Afghanistan for 4 years. Back in 2005, I thought selling great wine would be easy. 😀  HOW YOUNG WE WERE.

Here are some more photos to take us down memory lane.

 

We were very proud to se that the Magazine l’Express released a special wine issue with a full page feature of O’Vineyards and several references to our websites (the issue had an extensive spread on wine blogging and wine websites).

I’m including the article about us below, but I highly recommend picking up an issue before they’re out of stock because the section on blogging and wine websites is very well-written.

 

Elin McCoy wrote her Bloomberg column about my UK importer Naked Wines, and her article uses a lot of my personal experiences with the company.

It’s a bit strange referring to Naked Wines as a wine importer.  The more I work with them, the more I realize they have many many roles in the wine trade.  Calling them a wine importer almost feels like I’m neglecting their role as retailers, financers, communicators, and innovators.  Some of the projects described in Elin’s article like the MarketPlace can’t be classified as a traditional ecommerce site.  Naked isn’t buying wine and then selling it.  They’re instead providing a platform where other people can sell their products like eBay or GroupOn.  If this project succeeds and draws enough attention, it could totally marginalize the import and retail side of the business.

Anyway, it’s always fun talking to journalists about Naked Wines because they’re constantly trying new things.  So every interview, there’s a slough of new questions and answers.  I never get bored! 😀

I met Elin last October at the European Wine Bloggers’ Conference and she got to taste some of my wines back then.

She had this section in her article about O’Vineyards:

Domaine O’Vineyards

Joe, Ryan, and Liz O’Connell at their winery Domaine O’ Vineyards in Cabardes, France. The O’Connells, from Florida, purchased the vineyard in 2004, and their cabernet-merlot blend Trah Lah Lah has won fans among Naked Wines’ Angels. Source: O’Vineyards via Bloomberg