One Brave Soul in O’Vineyards Kitchen…

One brave soul dared to spend a few hours in the shoes, or rather apron of Chef Liz to participate in one of O’Vineyards’ fascinating Food & Wine Workshop. Katie’s parents hungrily observed the process as she learned how to prepare a multiple-course meal under the guidance of none other than Chef Liz herself. Katie began by testing her skills at preparing Chef Liz’s unique sweet-and-savory hors d’oeuvres:

• Pear-Roquefort Crumpets with almond slices and coconut shavings
• Homemade Spring Rolls and Chef Liz’s garlic and lime soy sauce
• Melted Goat Cheese and Herb Crumpets, starring rosemary and thyme from O’Vineyards very own herb garden (yes, they do grow plants other than grapevines!)
• Black Pudding Stuffed Apples

Not dainted by this initial challenge, Katie dared to attmempt the second step: preparing Liz’s internationally inspired main dishes, including:

• Bami (an Indonesian national dish composed of vermicelli noodles, spring onions and other vegetables)
• Roasted turkey à la crème fraîche with leeks
• Perfectly grilled Merguez, the celebrated lamb- and beef-based sausages typically enjoyed in North African dishes
• Mashed Potatoes with Melted Brie
• Twice-Baked Potatoes à l’Américaine, with fresh chopped bacon, melted brie and chives from the O’Vineyards herb garden

The second-to-last challenge in Katie’s Workshop involved learning which herbs go best with which cheeses. She found that some of the best pairings were sheep’s milk cheese with rosemary, and the brie with a sage leaf.

To finish “avec une petite douceur” (with a little touch of sweetness) — as Mom and Dad’s tastebuds could hardly hold out another minute — Chef Liz walked her through the process of making the perfect Tarte Tatin, a sort of carmelized apple upside down pie, if I may dare. This final challenge proved to be a difficult one: properly carmelizing sugar is no easy task, and neither is the scary-impressive-pie-flip-over step, but Katie pulled off these final stunts with flying colors.

Katie was very proud (and after surmounting the challenge, quite hungry too). The other guests around the table were delighted to taste the end result of Katie’s culinary escapade, accompanied with none other than Joe’s pairing of O’Vineyards delicious wine! Having personally experienced all of these dishes and many more delicious meals paired with O’Vineyards wines at the Winemaker’s Table, I can only say…

“Way to go, Chef!”

This morning, the Cabardes did one of its regular organoleptic test flights.  That’s a pretty fancy way to say we get together and taste newly bottled Cabardes wine.

The primary purpose of these tastings is quality control.  We want to make sure that everybody is putting their best foot forward with their Cabardes wines.  But it’s a pretty intimidating prospect.

You get there in the morning and you have a little desk set up with paper, pen, spit bucket, etc.  It feels a lot like I’m back in school except for the two wine glasses and plate of bread.

There are five of us on the tasting panel.  We have a flight of 12 wines.  The tasting is partial single-blind.  That means that we, the tasters, don’t know what cuvées we’re tasting.  Although they do tell us the vintage since that is pretty important to determining whether or not it’s up to snuff.  There is a third party organisme d’inspection that is hired to make sure all of the tasting is legit.  They also do our field and winery inspections throughout the year.  They report the results to our ODG Cabardes and they also forward it on to the INAO, the national body that governs AOCs.

If we find one of the wines to be flawed or not Cabardes-y enough, we could declare it NON CONFORME and the winemaker would be admonished.  If the wine is already on the market and it’s a first offense, the winemaker would be followed very closely on his next vintage.  And if its a second offense, we can even call for the wine to be removed from the market.  That’s a lot of power.  And everybody has to fight so hard to get wines on the market, it seems absurd that we might have to take one off the market.  But such are the rules!

Anyway, today’s tasting went very well.  The quality was good to very good for the three rosés and nine reds we tasted.  I noted one weak objection on the last wine in the tasting that had a bit of reductive rubber/tar quality to it.  The rest of the panel approved of the wine, and I’m honestly happy because it was a good wine and I think the free market will naturally select the best wines in the Cabardes.  This tasting is more of a formality to prevent gross misconduct.

Perhaps the best part of these tastings is that you get to see what the other producers are up to.  Although they never reveal what you tasted.  Cabardes is small enough that I can just ask around and the people who had to give samples to the inspection organization will know who they are.  And it’s fun to see what the AOC is up to as a whole.  And it’s a timely lesson as I put the finishing touches on my Cabardes book and map of the wineries in the appellation.

The tasting is supposed to be more focused on defects than traditional wine criticism, but I took some notes anyway.  The keywords that kept coming up were dark fruit, plum, and garrigue.  There were also two or three mentions of eucalyptus, spice, and pepper in my notes.  One of the wines came off with an absurd amount of ripe raspberry or red fruit and really reminded me of certain coastal wines (which can happen in the eastern Cabardes).  And there were a couple that felt a bit rustic and a couple that felt a bit light (if I were in a bad mood, I’d say weedy), but this is a style and it has a place in the appellation. At least it’s not me who will put an end to that trend.

Anyway, on the whole, I feel like the wines presented were well-balanced between Atlantic and Mediterranean traits.  They were bold and flavorful but they were also rather refreshing with a brightness that is somewhat unique to the Cabardes.  Amen!

More wine!

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 of place and we can often minimize the efforts of the winemaker.  We say that winemakers should only act in order to produce good fruit that reflects the place where they’re growing the fruit.  Anyway, we can get a little carried away with the rhetoric.  So in the spirit of making fun of myself, I bottled some vineyard dirt and put it up  for sale on the website.

The idea, unfortunately didn’t stop there. Once I had a bottle of dirt, it was pretty much unavoidable: I had to do a dirt tasting.

Tasting notes: dry, abrasive attack; strong minerality; dead leaves; low alcohol; significant sediment; muddy finish

So, without further ado, Ryan O’Connell from O’Vineyards tastes some dirt and makes fun of himself.

If we can learn anything from this ridiculous exercise, it’s that the perfect wine is not 100% vin de terroir or 100% vin d’effort but some clever middle path between these two extremes.

Buy now 🙂

Couleur bouteille

Marron €13,00Vert €13,00

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?

Another post from Joe the winemaker, my dad.

Welcome to week 2. I am back as promised with more basic wine information and photos to help you follow the entire cycle of  a year in the vineyard. As I mentioned in last week’s vineyard update I expected that you would be amazed by the change in the growth of the merlot vines we are following, but even I was estonished by the rapidity of the growth this past week. This is pure speculation on my part, but I believe that the late start of the vines due to an extremely harsh winter followed by record breaking temperatures the final week of April could be the reason.  (can anybody say global warming ?).

Our Norwegian lady friends (hello, ladies) who visited us 2 weeks ago, with Anthony Swift of  Wine Pleasures tours, can bear witness to the rapid change in the growth of the merlot. We are very pleased that we chose to lower the wires in the merlot when we did  because if we were attempting that with the present growth we would be knocking off far too many shoots (buds, future grapes). Fortunately for us the progress of the syrah and the cabernet saugvignon does not match that of the merlot this year. This is not unusual for the cab but very surprising for our syrah which is normaly ahead of the merlot. I attempted to take the photos in the same spot that I did for the first post and will continue to do so we have an accurate account of the progression of the vines. The majority of the photos show the same vines as week 1 and I have included a close up a  future  bunch of grapes. The “baby grapes photo” is something I always found intriguing and I hope you will also. We still have wires to lower in the cabernet but we are extremely happy with where we stand today. Hopefully my son will not read this but I think we will soon be able to cut back to  45 hour work weeks. I am not complaining because I have never felt heathier in my life and the fringe benefits are outstanding!

We are considering doing some weekend BBQ/Blending sessions for wine enthusiasts living in or visiting the  Carcassonne area this summer. give me some feedback if you find this interesting.

Thanks for following and remember to come back next week for more free wine information.

I get a lot of questions about the nuts and bolts of vineyard finance.  Honestly, I’m not really comfortable posting all our costs and returns on the web or even talking about them openly at wine tastings.  But I understand when people get curious.  I mean, somewhere in the back of their minds, they want to know just how much dough it takes to buy and operate a vineyard.

I found a really interesting breakdown over at the Tablas Creek blog where they discuss the math on buying a new property and trying to make it profitable.  SPOILER: the boat sinks.  But it’s interesting to hear a real winemaker talk shop on the nuts and bolts of dollar costs in the US.  I’ll try to add a couple differences with costs in France later on.  But for now, here’s the link to Haas’ article on vineyard finance.

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.

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

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. 😀

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.)