A little last minute, but I decided to have a party on Monday in the middle of the day.  I’m not expecting hundreds of people, but if you can tear yourself away from work (or your relaxing vacation), come to O’Vineyards and join me for Sud de France’s SYNCHRONIZED GLOBAL TASTING in commemoration of their 4th birthday.

They sent kits of wine to 50 different people around the world. And they’ll be running tastings with all sorts of journalists and wine lovers at the Maisons du Languedoc in New York City, Shanghai, London, Milan, etc.  And we’ll all be tweeting and blogging and video conferencing and all sorts of nonsense.  So tune in on June 21st. Wine is going to be tasted.

And when we run out of the preselected wines Sud de France sent me, we will drink other wines from the Sud de France.

If you cannot come, please do your best to go out and find a bottle from the Languedoc Roussillon and open it on June 21st!  With good friends, if they’re around!

The tasting starts at 11 AM but you can come before or after.  If you know my mom, you realize that there will be food.

Here is an events page for the tasting (but it is not an events page for my party. It is the GLOBAL events page).

All tweets should use #WorldTastingSync and/or #SudDeFrance

It is with great pleasure that I announce Domaine O’Vineyards is officially on board with a very cool group in the UK known as Naked Wines.  Thanks to Naked, you’ll be able to get delicious O’Vineyards wines without any unnecessary expenses and wasteful middlemen.  I don’t know if it’s the traditional definition of direct shipping, but it’s pretty close (and possibly better?).

I strongly encourage you to visit our winemaker profile at Naked and follow us (button in the top right coner).  THANKS.

And no worries, we’re still wearing all our clothes. If you found this blog post with a google search, you’re probably looking for something more along the lines of this lady:

Or maybe this music video for “Naked as We Came” by Iron and Wine?

Is it weird that the Naked Lady and the little girl in the music video have the same hair and are framed the same way in the youtube still?  Let’s not dwell on that.

Anyway, what you found is the O’Connell family making wine at O’Vineyards. And you’ll thank your lucky stars we’re fully clothed. It’s the wines that are Naked.

And if you read all the way to the bottom of this post, you might still be looking for pictures of girls’ bottoms so here is a gratuitous link to I Love 2 Cook Naked which is totally NOT safe for work or for people with any sort of  hygenic cooking standards.

Wow, the last couple of weeks in the vines at O’Vineyards have been absolutely mind boggling! After some nice warm weather and the ideal  rains  the vines have kicked into overdrive with the Syrah leading the way. We found it necessary to temporarily leave the Merlot to attend to the Syrah where the growth has been phenomenal, and that is why you have not seen my wire-lifting in the Merlot as of yet.

I probably would not have thought to include this little lesson for you if everything had gone as planned, but the Syrah is very unpredictable and also very fragile.  Is it possible that is something to do with the fact that the syrah is one of the only feminine grape variatels? (just kidding ladies). Anyway, when the Syrah grows in a sudden burst like this, we have to immediately raise the wires to support the new growth or the heavy winds in the region can often break some of the new vines.

We finished lifting the wires in the Syrah and  we are now lifting in the Merlot. I have taken photos of our galvanized posts with the attachment holes to show our capabilities to ajust the height of the wires. Every winter, we lower these wires to the ground after the pruning. Once the vines grow, they start to droop a little bit and we can lift the wires to support their growth and encourage vertical growth. We will go back and lift the wires a few inches higher in just a few weeks to match the plants’ continued development, but this will take much less time than the first lifting. I have posted photos of two rows of Merlot before and after the lifting to illustrate the difference before and after we pass through and lift wires.

Lifting the wires is an important process. The shoots holding the grapes are now “trained” by the wires to go upward which allows us to maintain a well balanced canopy of leaves to feed the grapes throughout the growing season.

Thanks for following and I hope this gives you a little better understanding about how much time and labor go into the making a bottle of good wine. Next week I plan to show you the flowering of the grape buds.

I feel really good when my wines receive positive comments and I brag about them in this blog.  However, I still feel strange bragging about nice things that get said about me.   But my parents assure me that the Internet exists in large part to brag about your exploits.

So uhm Robert Joseph, who wrote/edited a lot of the reference materials we used long before we ever owned a vineyard, was contributing to the Grenache Symposium.  And then we met again at a Sud de France event.  And he said something very nice about me on Twitter.  So I’m going to use this space to blush and say thank you to him and that I’m very flattered.

And maybe this is a place to mention that I am only interesting in this region thanks to the support of my friends and community that allow me to get their message out on the web.  In a way, this is about how cool YOU all are.

Here’s to discovering many others of greater import to this beautiful region! 🙂

And follow Robert Joseph on twitter or follow some of the projects he’s involved in like DoILikeIt.  I swear that he’s interesting when he’s not talking about me.

Joe and Ryan O’Connell are ascended fanboys.

Why do I always say that, and where does the phrase come from?  TV Tropes.

TV Tropes is a wiki-styled site where people store away cultural references and catalog the use of certain recurring tropes in fiction.  The scope is large and its users proudly forgo wikipedia’s notability guidelines.  Any trope that is used in film, television, literature, animation, comics, or even reality can be added to the database.

A lot of the tropes are humorous or at least they’re humorously named and you can easily spend hours clicking from trope to trope, putting names to age-old story telling traditions.

And this one trope has become a part of my regular vocabulary.  The Ascended Fanboy.

The trope describes a character who is totally obsessed with a topic when he is suddenly sucked into his obsession and gets to be the subject of his own fantasies.  (SOUND FAMILIAR?)  You can talk about The Last Starfighter, TRON, or that dude in the Judas Priest tribute band who ended up replacing the lead singer of Judas Priest.   Or Eli Wallace in the new Stargate Universe where a college dropout is recruited into a top secret government project to explore new galaxies because he solves a puzzle in a video game.   I guess we’re less passive than most of those examples.  More like Monkey D. Luffy from One Piece who is so obsessed with the world’s greatest pirates that he ends up becoming a really bad ass pirate.  .  . I’m rambling.

At O’Vineyards, you’ll find two ascended fanboys.  My dad and I just really love wine.  We liked drinking it and hearing about how it was made and where it came from and the trials and tribulations of the people who make it.  And we just really wanted to immerse ourselves in wine.  And now we do that on a daily basis, sometimes literally.  We’re the wino fanboys who get to run a vineyard.

I feel weird adding myself to the tvtropes page as “real-life” examples of ascended fanboys… although there is no notability guideline.  Maybe I will add myself … what do you think?

As a lot of you know, I got to attend the London International Wine Fair where I spoke about the Internet and winery collaborations with Oscar Quevedo.  After the conference, I took the opportunity to visit my dear friends at Borough Wines to do some tastings at the legendary Borough Market.

It’s a really interesting atmosphere, and most of the shoppers have a totally different attitude than the people at your average American market or French foire.  For one thing, I think Londoners have a tendency to buy one or two bottles for tonight.  Whereas French folks go to foires to get discounted six packs and Americans tend to walk out of stores with entire 12 packs, the Londoner shops for dinner.  Or for the next meal with friends.  This is a generalization, but I’ve heard it from other people and I really believe it’s true.

But the market doesn’t just consist of Londoners shopping for tonight’s wine.  You’ve got some tourists and looky-loos too.  It’s important not to spend too much time with idlers, but it can be fun to teach folks a little about wine and contribute to the atmosphere of discovery that surrounds Borough Market, a foodie heaven.  Plus, having one or two curious tasters can often draw a more serious crowd to your stand as crowds tend to draw crowds.

It was a hot day as London was experiencing its first bout of really nice 2010 summer weather.  That makes it hard to taste red wines so we also poured Chateau Grezan’s 100% Cinsault rosé.  Borough Wines knows I’m a sucker for Languedoc so I was only too happy to show off the Cinsault which presents as a dry, sturdy rosé.  Far from the watered down wimps some people expect from other parts of the world, Grezan’s wine can cool you down and give you some flavor.

And then for the serious folks, we could taste through the entire O’Podium gift set to learn the difference between three aging processes.  Cinsault is nice.  But I wanted a bigger, drier red to go with my boar sausage lunch.

Anyway, it was a really positive experience. And I got to be a part of this really cool market, playing behind the curtain, and drinking all the wine on tap I could handle.

Everybody who works at Borough Wines is a delight to be around and we had a good time after closing up the shop.

Well, we knew  the warmer weather had to come eventually and our beloved merlot is finally off to the races. I don’t  know how familiar you happen to be with “normal” Carcassonne weather but I was telling a local that the past couple years we seem to have only 2 seasons. Sping and fall have somehow disappeared. After a little contemplation I came to the conclusion that this recent climate trend has been benificial to our type of winemaking. We have always harvested later than most in our area and this is especially true for the past 2 years when we found ourselves bringing in the grapes at temperatures between 3 to 10 degrees. We keep the grapes at these low temperatures for a few days and find ourselfs with a fresher fruitier wine. Meanwhile the slower starts we have had at the begining of the growing period seem to have little to no effect throughout the vineyard. On the contrary the slow starts have helped us to keep pace easier and have also limited the number of times we treat our vines. In the year 2009 we treated only 2 times and believe me this is well below the norm. As you can see from the photos we finally got the growth I expected  a few weeks back. By next week we will need to lift the wires on the trellis sytem,which are designed to keep the growth going upward. I will cover this in detail next week. Thanks for following

Awesome!  Google Maps updated its satellite images of Domaine O’Vineyards and several other estates in our area.  The satellite images are in much higher detail than they used to be.  And the new images of O’Vineyards includes the winery which didn’t exist in the old images from 2005.  COOOL.  Check out the map yourself by googling O’Vineyards.

I really like Google Maps.  I haven’t checked our map in a little while, but I think this is a very recent update.  It appears to be an early spring photo which could mean I caught it just a few weeks after the photo was taken.

For some reason, the map updates seem really important to me.  I remember a few years ago (2007?) when Google updated its images of New Orleans and you could see the blue tarps still covering the leaky roofs all over town.  You could see some parts of the much publicized lower ninth which had been so destroyed by the canal break.

Now, a more cheerful memory has been built into the Google Map.  Domaine O’Vineyards!  The winery is built and life has been restored to these vines that were once destined to be ripped out of the ground.  Hurrah for new beginnings!

I hope you enjoy this little French wine map from O’Vineyards and Google.  The Languedoc deserves a lot more of these updates because there’s a lot of beautiful french wine country.  If you find some other vineyard satellite images you like, please let me know and I will post about them too.

welcome to week 3 of winemaking 101. To begin this episode I would like to apologize for my often inept ability to convey my thougths clearly  in writing. It has been brought to my attention that the  literary  skills, I aquired at U-Mass Dartmouth sometime back in the 70’s, may be deteriorating a bit. I have promised myself to make a more conscience effort from this point forward but what the hell its all about the content N’EST-CE-PAS!

OK back to the vines. There has been no recognizable change in the vines this past week, probably due to the cold weather and SNOW that I wrote about last week.  I have never seen such little activity in the growth of the vines at this time of the year but things appear to be back to normal with plenty of sunshine, warm days, cool nights and steady winds.

The winds of the langaudoc region help to keep the vegatation dry which limits the risk of diseases and should limit the amount of treatments (chemicals) used on the vines.  By simply following the advice of the local chamber of agriculture  we seem to treat half as much, if not less, than other grape growers in the area.

But I digress, and the treatment story should be an entire post on its own. Anyway, although there was limited change visible in the photos this week, I have a strong feeling next week’s photos will show impressive growth. Thanks for visiting and feel free to comment.

note from Ryan: I was just driving back from Montpellier and the vines closer to the cost are like ready to lift wires (i.e. way ahead of us). It’s crazy what a huge difference there is between our medium altitude micro-terroir and the lower plains on the way to the coast.

Another post from dad as he chronicles the freak snowstorm that we had in the south of France on May 4th. SNOW IN MAY?!

This is Joe the Winemaker with a special bulletin in my continuing coverage of the O’Vineyards Merlot saga.

Normally, these blog updates are weekly. However due to the unprecedented May snow storm, you get two updates this week.

It snowed at O’Vineyards in Carcassonne on May 4th! Unheard of!

People ask, “Should red wine ever be served chilled?” I’m asking if red vines should ever be chilled! We were very worried because there is already a lot of growth on the vines and a late frost could harm them. Additionally, the heavy, wet snow that fell for over an hour could cling to the new growth and break it off. Luckily, the snow failed to cling to the young shoots.

You can see in these photos that the snow mostly stuck to the wooden posts and to the trunks.

By pure speculation (my son calls that “making shit up”) I am going to say the warmth of the ground and stones due to the normally warm temperatures we have experienced over the last two weeks was enough to melt the snow. Anyway, it appears the parcel of Merlot I’m blogging about has escaped any significant damage.  But we still have to see how the freeze affects growth over the coming week.