Who stole the sun?
The sun has been the backdrop to everything in the Côtes for almost two weeks, but a little cloud-cover yesterday potentially heralded a change, and today it is emphasised – complete cloud-cover until about 10am when some blue sky re-appeared, it even looked like we had some slight precipitation overnight; perhaps it was a heavy dew. The forecast is a mix of sun, cloud and rain for the rest of the week – and getting colder again!
Today Gevrey (villages) Les Crais and perhaps later, Beaune 1er Les Avaux. I chided our proprietor that Les Crais wasn’t really Gevrey villages standard – it’s a giant 20+hectare vineyard way out east over the N74 – he was adamant that it was and that he would let me taste the 2007 to see, but of-course we didn’t have time for that
- 11:30am: Slow going. The Gevrey grapes are quite super almost nil rot and good ripeness – shame our de-stemmer has suddenly developed an electrical problem – all stop! Anyway, as for the grapes, nothing in 2005 was easier to triage – though maybe those 05 grapes had a little thicker skins and were also maybe more concentrated(?) – let’s see what the analytics say.
- 8:30pm: So, sad to say I arrived back home after close to 4 full days of triage. The weather is starting to change – it remained dry in the Côtes but I had a little rain while driving home – it was drizzly stuff, that unless you’re bothered by the clay building up on your boots, will be inconsequential to the grapes. Those that expect to finish their harvest by Thursday probably managed to achieve the maximum ripeness and the minimum of rain effects, but maybe the weather still has a surprise or two! This afternoon, for info, Freddy Mugnier picked the Clos de la Marechale.
More tomorrow including a double-update from ‘Mark de Morey’, aka Mark Gough.