And yes, I actually did some work today 🙂

No harvesting on Sunday due to rain – if anything, the rain was heavier at 5am today than anything over the weekend, finally petering out in the late afternoon. The decision not to harvest on Sunday was a good one for me though – I felt bad enough this morning that I turned down both the casse-croute and wine with lunch (shock) but later in the afternoon I was really starting to feel more myself, so I’m pretty sure that wine will be on the cards tomorrow!

We began our day with our first chardonnay of this campaign – the 1er cru of Savigny Hautes Jarrons. I didn’t do the sums so I’ll have to let you know tomorrow what the actual yields were – but there wasn’t a lot. Triage was required – more for rot than oïdium – though still a little of the latter. Over the years, (old man mode – this is my 18th consecutive harvest) I’ve seen grapes that were much harder to triage than these, so we can expect the wines to be reasonably classic, perhaps showing a bit more vintage character than the recent, more uniformly ripe vintages – time will tell.

Two modest red appellations filled the post-lunch period; villages Savigny – the last of the parcel that was started on Saturday – plus Bourgogne. Like the white, both needed some serious attention to triage – many, if not most, clusters hiding some rot. The Bourgogne needed more work but that’s not surprising, because it’s only the second vintage from these young vines and so the grape clusters were a little closer to the more humid ground (ground-cover and weeds) than older vines.

So far, it’s clear to me that, for the first time since 2016 and 2014 in some places, and 2013 more generally, we have a vintage where triage will be rather crucial to the final quality of the wines.

And tomorrow, we should have the return of the sunshine too!

Savigny 1er Hautes Jarrons

Harvested Saturday – maybe a wine for tomorrow!!!

Well, ‘my’ is a bit of an overstatement – I’ll get to that later.

The day started with blue sky and sunshine though, versus the last vintage, you have to start an hour later in the vines as it’s nearly one month later harvesting in 2021.

Today my home domaine brought in only reds: Corton, Savigny Aux Jarrons and some more villages Savigny (right). The grapes generally looked not bad – what there were of them – about 22 hl/ha for the 1er cru and closer to 15 hl/ha in the Corton – ouch! You can see from the image (right) that the triage is less than cursory this year after 2-3 vintages where we were only removing dried grapes.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t triaging myself – I arrived in Beaune yesterday evening in good shape and even went for a jog before bed. In the night I couldn’t sleep – hardly at all – and by morning, how can I put it, I had some stomach problems! I’ve been knocked out the whole day – just two quick visits to the domaine to see how things were running.

And tomorrow? I may have some more recovery time – lots of rain is forecast overnight and for the morning too – so if we are harvesting, it’s only likely to be in the afternoon. Let’s see.