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.

Grape harvest in the south of France

The grapes are changing color and that reminds us that harvest time is right around the corner.  We get exceptionally busy around harvest, but we leave the door open and let tourists come to the vineyard and see exactly how harvest goes down.  Some people actually roll up their sleeves and work for a bit too!  It’s the perfect way to get immersed in the wine from the region while you visit Carcassonne.

Who is this workshop designed for?

This is great for anybody who is curious about how wine is made.  You don’t need to know a lot about wine.  It’s interesting to every level of wine drinker.  We’ve actually had visitors who don’t even drink wine but still love the tour because they get to see a really fascinating process that defines the life of our entire region for an entire month.  Wine is really the backbone of the Languedoc Roussillon and visiting a vineyard is a quintessential experience!

All that said, if you do already know a fair bit about wine, this is a great way to take it to the next level.  You’ll see soooo much in a short period of time.  It will certainly be time well-spent.

When is harvest 2011?

Harvest should start around the second week of September.

But this is the toughest part of planning the harvest workshops.  Folk lore says that harvest starts 45 days after the grapes change color. And they’re changing color right now.  According to that, you can expect harvest to start around the second week of September.  But that’s not set in stone.  On the bright side, if you come right before harvest, there is still a lot of interesting stuff going on.  We’ll be tasting the grapes to see whether they’re ready to be harvested.  We’ll be setting up the winery for harvest.  And we’ll be doing some last minute work to prepare the parcels that are going to be machine-harvested.  You might also get to peek in at our extremely limited white wine production (just a couple of barrels).

Harvest should end around the second week of October.

But even toward the end, there are lots of interesting things going on.  Vinification for example!  How do we turn that grape juice into wine?  In many ways, the end of harvest is the most interesting time to visit because you’ll see freshly picked grapes (generally the Cabernet Sauvignon comes in last) side by side with the first grapes we picked (and they’re generally finishing their fermentation by the end of harvest).  The downside is that we’ll be exhausted so you’ll meet a much less energetic version of the O’Connell family. 😀  But we love to receive people and share the harvest so don’t be shy!

What do you see and do at harvest?

You’ll see everything.  There are no closed doors.  You’ll see how we pick the grapes and bring them into the winery.  You can see the sorting table in action.  You’ll see how we bring the grapes up to the tanks without any pumps.  You can see us mix yeasts or sulfites that will be added to the fermentation tank.  All this is open book.  Last year, a group from Barcelona took some brilliant harvest photos that really showcase how much access they had to every step of the process.

A lot of tourists choose to participate actively in some of the easier jobs.  Spend fifteen minutes at the sorting table to contribute to the quality of O’Vineyards 2011!  Help pick a row of grapevines.  Or do more technical stuff like learn how to take sugar density measurements on the incoming juice and calculate the potential alcohol level.  Whatever tickles your fancy (within reason… we have to be careful about insurance issues).

How to book a harvest tour

You should email us at ryan@ovineyards.com and let us know what day or days you can come by.  We’ll tell you what’s likely to be the best day to visit.   Also tell us if you want the tour (25 Euros / person) or the more involved harvest workshop (95 Euros / person, lunch included and more time with the winemakers).

I hope to see a lot of you very soon!

After seeing all the interest in how Chateau Margaux brings in the harvest, it occurred to me that I haven’t really talked about our own harvest intake. So without further ado, this is how we harvest at O’Vineyards … plus all done with pictures taken by a friendly tourist during our 2010 harvest!

It starts with grapes ready for harvest:

Then somebody picks those grapes and puts them in a bucket. And eventually that bucket gets dumped into a fruit crate.

Those fruite cases are brought back to the winery where my dad slowly feeds the fruit into a destemmer.

The destemmer consists of a large cylinder with a vice in its center. The cylinder has holes that let grapes through but generally don’t let stems through. The vice has arms that turn and pop the grapes off their stems.

Then the destemmer drops the grapes onto a vibrating sorting table. The grapes bounce down the table where my mom, our brave tourists, and I pick out any snails, stems or leaves that made it into the fruit crates.

At the end of the sorting table, the grapes drop off into a conveyor belt that lifts them to the top of the fermentation tanks.

The grapes start their maceration and fermentation in the tank. There are a lot of whole berries and a lot of berries are slightly crushed by the fall into the tank and the weight of the grapes above them.

Big thanks for these awesome photos. They were all taken by Jeremy and his friends who showed up unannounced on our first day of harvest so it is super authentic. No Hollywood mock ups or mise en scene. We were very happy to kick of harvest with them and I hope you enjoy a blow-by-blow photo journey through an O’Vineyards harvest in the south of France.

I just got to visit Chateau Margaux on their first full day of the 2010 harvest.  This is sort of a dream and it’s hard to believe that it really happened.  It was an authentic and intimate glimpse into the belly of one of the world’s most prestigious estates, one of the four (five if you count Rothschild twice) premier grand cru estates in Bordeaux.

As you know O’Vineyards grows Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot in the Cabardes region of France.  So we’re always talking about the potential of these Bordeaux varietals in the Atlantic Corridor of the Languedoc.  So it’s an exceptional opportunity to see how Chateau Margaux (arguably the most famous producer of Cabernet Sauvignon in the world) harvests and vinifies.

That first photo up top is a partial shot of one of their TWO cellars.  They age the wine there for a full year (so that’s the 2009 being aged in the photo) and then they move it to the second year cellar.  Now why am I talking about large wine cellars?  Those aren’t unique by any means as large wine cellars exist around the world, but I think it’s a good place to start talking about Chateau Margaux.  While it’s very well-recognized that this estate produces some of the world’s most desired wines (the 2009’s are hitting 1000 Euro / bottle), what a lot of people don’t realize is how many bottles they make of it.  To produce that quality level on such a large scale is truly a wonder of the world.

Down south, we have some cult wines and some famous wines, but production tends to be very small.  I’ll flatter myself through a brief comparison.  I like to think my wine is very good, but I have to acknowledge that I could never scale it up to produce thousands of cases per year.

So how on earth do they scale up the production of this quality level?  Well, they have two identical harvest lines bringing in pallets of small fruit cases full of hand-harvested grapes.  The small crates full of grape bunches run up a short conveyor belt.  A person  empties the crates onto a sorting line where bunches that show any sign of rot are removed (although I spent a long time up there without seeing any which indicates a good harvest and/or a talented team of harvesters who only pick the good stuff).

The conveyor belt drops the grape bunches into a machine I don’t know the name of photographed here (but the front of it says “VINOCLEAN”).  It is some sort of very fancy destemmer that takes the grapes off of their stems very nicely and bounces them down to another conveyor belt. One more machine that crushes the grapes very slightly before they are dropped into a stainless steel container.

This container is brought to the winery by futuristic pallet jacks with built in scales so they know how much tonnage goes into each tank.  The stainless steel container is hoisted above by a winch and the grapes are carefully dropped into the tanks from above.

As the pallet jacks wisked past us, Marie from Chateau Margaux reached in and grabbed some 2010 Cabernet Sauvignon for us to taste.  I get to taste before Parker now! ;D

And then there’s the whole process of fermentation where they are truly dedicated to maintaining the high reputation of their estate.  Needless to say, I took a lot of notes and borrowed a couple of the less expensive ideas for O’Vineyards.

And then we had a really educational tasting of the 2009 and a few other wines followed by the most amazing meal in a very elegant dining room of the Chateau proper.

I will talk more about this visit when I’m not so busy with my own harvest, but I thought it would be fun to share this technical side of the Chateau Margaux harvest intake while my brain is still in harvest mode.  It is rare to get such an unfettered glimpse into the process of a legendary wine estate.  Thanks again to Paul Pontallier for his excellent welcome at Chateau Margaux. And also a huge thanks to Barry and Stuart for making this visit possible.  What a fantastic experience!

While this blog can sometimes go on tangents based on my strange, exploratory moods, it is still a winemaker blog.  And it is late September which means HARVEST in the south of France.  So here it is, my first obligatory vineyard harvest of 2010.

We’re starting with the Merlot, as usual.  It’s all by hand this year because we’re worried about the disparity between maturity levels of the grapes this year.

I’ll be posting about the particularities of this year’s vintage.  But for now, just pictures of Merlot being harvested … with a vengeance!!