Arlaud Vendange Day 2, Sunday 25th Sept 2016

Similar morning start to Saturday, one or two new faces presenting documents, some others from the day before not turned up. New faces included the most extraordinary looking character I think I’ve ever seen vendange time. Turned out to be a girl (I wasn’t sure honestly) with the most inappropriate, (bizarrely) ‘floaty’, ‘outfit’ for a day in the vines and an incredible blonde ‘beehive’ type outfit – a true apparition.

Vines wise this was a totally Aligote flat lands morning experience. We started nearer Morey than Roncevie but beyond that & even nearer to the train lines, passing several lovely looking ‘virgin’ pieces of earth ready for planting with whatever, super looking soil though. The plot we arrived at, vans parked under a very attractive large tree, was not one I could ever recall from my previous years thus I wondered if rented, or maybe machined in past years. Machines are generally an absolute “ No no” for Arlaud as wholly against the much valued certified organic/bio status. The vines were atypically dripping wet from over night but I’d learnt my lesson quickly from Saturday a.m. and wore waterproof over trousers. The sun was rising behind us for an ethereal atmosphere as Herve gave a lecture to the newbies on how to pick Aligote, and the essential need for vandalistic leaf stripping beforehand to reveal the ‘hidden’ fruit for then cutting. Gloves, or a left one in my case, utterly essential. If one ignores a leaf you can guarantee a bunch of grapes behind it. Here I had ‘love himself’, “aren’t I great, fantastic, girls look at me supa cool dude” Thierry as my porteur – conceited idiot. Just stood there, fagging it for the most part, preening himself in his 60’s style, throwback from ‘Grease’, baseball bomber jacket – get a life monsieur. Total opposite of fantastic, rough edged if great bloke, porteur Claude (see later).

Mixed results here, vines clearly frosted badly, and nothing remotely like the weight of fruit Aligote routinely produced in past years. What there was though was nice, much care required to make sure none missed. I rattled up my first row, having always enjoyed picking whites. We moved south a plot or three, passing a bold cock pheasant chancing his ‘luck’, to do our second plot quickly via doubling up to the few rows before moving onto familiar Aligote territory on the Chambolle side of Morey below the RN74. Here, to my utter amazement, we had a coffee break ! Unheard of a la Arlaud but welcome, father in law chef arriving with flasks, biscuits and No 2 Cyprien & Carole daughter, the lively, fun, Jeunesse. Pleasant interlude before we attacked this latest plot of long rows towards the main road. For me this was superb as in my row I had longtime regular porteur, Claude, who was missing Saturday. Claude is a bear of a bloke, but super cheerful, despite surviving a bad illness of some sort which saw him absent a year and losing a load of weight (he had it to then lose !). What rules him apart from ALL the rest of the (mostly lazy in my experience) porteurs is his sympathetic nature to the coupers, manifest whole heartedly in the Aligote, in being prepared to, most efficiently, leaf strip without being asked. This was worth loads to me and, between us, we stormed up the row we were in, ending up way ahead of anyone else – hugely satisfying to me as the anglais outsider. Brilliant.

Resting after lunch, I overheard mention between Herve and Damian, the latter clearly being groomed as 63 yrs old Herve’s in the vines leadership succession (have my personal doubts as, whilst I have no problem with nice guy likeable Damian, having patched up our 2015 differences) I’m not at all sure he has the gravitas or ‘drive’/authority for vineyard team management) of a team split for the afternoon, and Echezeaux. I asked Herve if I could be included for the Echezeaux (Les Treux) team so off we went, just a few of us. Some more activity noted around Vougeot and Vosne which Cyprien had mentioned at lunch (Mugneret-Gibourg and others he mentioned seeing on his parcelled checking travels) but we arrived at our few rows with no activity around us. Some really nice looking grapes here, very nice, but not many of them compared to previous years. Here Damian gave me a lecture (unnecessarily in front of all – singling me out as being English ?) on putting my Bucket under the bunches being snipped to avoid, as if, single grapes hitting the deck. I said nothing, but took tacit support from my porteurs knowing ‘looks’ and brief supporting words après. The owner of these en meteyage vines was present throughout, hovering. We had a brief conversation post picking where he was clearly intrigued/amused at my English vendangeur presence, asking all the usual questions about where in England I am from, how many vendanges I’ve worked, etc etc. We agreed about the positive looking quality but he bemoaned (assume he gets paid by the caisse) the lower than in the past volume (to be the recurring theme of the vendange I wonder ?).

What followed was ridiculously horrible ! Passing two lots of separate gendarmes teams before and after the Vougeot roundabout, stopping drivers for a) speeding and b) drink testing we arrived at a new to me, ‘wrong’ side of the road plot below Chambolle, with Cyprien present ahead of us in his Volvo V50. He confirmed to me this is a constituent of his negoce Bourgogne Oka. But what a farce cum disaster. If one wanted any further evidence of frost effect here it was. Incredible, hardly any grapes at all, really at all, many vines with none. Dishearteningly tedious, soul destroying, under a broiling sun, which left me hardly able to speak so thirsty was I and with no water (go figure) in our accompanying truck as usual. Initially I wondered why pay us to ‘do’ this waste of time plot rather than just machine what little there was but, without asking anyone, it occurred to me later that to machine would be against everything bio/organic which the domaine so values.

We moved on to join the rest of the crew, resting in a break and, thank god, with plenty of carafed water, in Roncevie to jut finish the few rows o/s from Monday. These we knocked off in short order for a c.5p.m. early finish but not before Herve called the team around him below the RN74 to announce Monday would be a no work, rest, day and we’d re-commence Tuesday. Caused some consternation for the locals, the younger one’s particularly. Almost unheard of for me – think we had a rest day (fatigue and forecast bad weather 2014) in 2014, the only other day off I can recall in 7 years.

Went to the cuverie evening, after bucket cleaning & getting changed out of filthy, sticky, attire with a view to despatching early missives to Bill but confess got distracted by catching up on early emails as well as essentially sports results, including my dear to ma coeur Liverpool FC’s 5-1 thrashing of Hull FC, as well as being much amused by waste of space, W Rooney’s long overdue dropping by MUFC’s (aka the Scum) Moaninho – priceless . Lost track of time, partly by laptop’s clock being an unaltered hour behind UK time but finisihed with a pleasant tasting interlude in the cuverie tasting room hosted by vendange stageur, Arthur (?) Salvadori from his family Jura domaine. We had an Iscardi (no vintage labelled) Dolcetto d’Alba (pleasant but not for me) and a much better, hugely interesting and atypically oxidative 2009 Savagnin Cotes du Dura. And so back to the village, evening meal, and very tired early night. Appropriate to mention during the day I learnt the 2016 Roncevie total production was circa only 20% of a ‘normal’ year – terrible but can totally believe on what I’ve seen to date. We’ll see re the premier and GC’s to come.
 

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 The ‘second-set‘ fruit that shouldn’t have been harvested vs far right, an unripe bunch (that also shouldn’t have been harvested!) – This is why we triage!

The wall-to-wall sunshine of the last days had left us this morning, but it was still dry with some flashes of blue sky.

Sunshine was coming to Beaune though, in the form of grapes from Vosne-Romanée – always a great cuvée, and almost always one where we do a high percentage of whole clusters. Like all the previous grapes, generally high ripeness , dark berries with crunchy thick skins. Here was the same amount of dried material to remove, more second-set fruit to discard, but also some oïdium too – not lots, but I never like the look of that stuff!

 Vosne!

In the end it was Vosne for the whole day – nice to have a bit of volume from somewhere – we will have some days without grapes this year as we’ve lost habitual cuvées from Volnay and Marsannay, all frost-related.

It might have taken longer to warm today – t-shirt weather really only from the late afternoon, but it was a good day…

Arlaud Vendange Day 1, Saturday 24th Sept 2016

Bonjour Bill et tout le monde. J’arrive sur la Cote Friday evening after leaving my North West England home for Dover circa 2.15 a.m Friday morning. J’a une petite probleme avec ma voiture on the Autoroute about an hour from Dijon when it locked me out of it after I’d stopped for some diesel and was washing the windscreen free of half the insects between Troyes and Chaumont. I won’t bore you with the rest but suffice to say after recovery from the service area on a flatbed truck to some garage in a hamlet somewhere in the countryside my VW now needs a new left rear window – was impressive how the car stood up to the attempts of the garage guys to break in with increasingly larger hammers but eventually a spot welder or similar something lance like hot on the glass enabled entry & keys retrieval (insert various rude words of choice ici). . I could hardly watch. Now over 200 Euros worse off (that’s less wine to be acquired doh !) I’ve still got to sort some replacement glass before returning home – a trip to VW Ladoix beckons !

Anyway, enough of that nonsense. All hugely familiar in Morey Centre after my diversion to the Arlaud cuverie first to see what was happening, who might be there – it was by now after 7.00 p.m. due to my incident which I reckon cost me 2 hours or so. Only Herve and the office lady packing up at the cuverie but clear all was ready to commence with triage table, presses, cases etc etc outside under the roof overhang as usual. Cyprien had originally contacted me in early August to say, quite explicitly, we would not start before the 28th Sept. Yeah right ! At the beginning of last week he told me Saturday the 24th. Gawd, loads to do in my desk bound UK day job to ‘escape’. Eventually turned my work computer off at home Thursday evening very late having done all I needed to, grabbed a couple of hours sleep, fuelled up with black coffee and set off as above. Some 680 UK miles later, one English Channel & one ferry, 3 quick stops en route to ‘refresh’, plus beaucoup of self inflicted car woes (my defence is I’d no idea it had a self locking system – I’ve only had it over 10 years !) here I am in dear ole Morey-St-Denis, and very sleepy it is this Friday evening.

Reassuringly familiar for this my 9th vendange, 7th at Arlaud (think I got my maths wrong last year when might have mentioned 10th). The chasseurs from Besancon area were here i.e Colonel Rene, loveable softy spoken Serge, sage Daniel plus new man, George. Also present were young Basile from Bordeaux who told me he’d completed his MA thesis on “Iconic Wines – what makes a wine iconic”, and a first time here young lady who turned out to be apprentice winemaker, Caroline, from Germany (avec perfect anglais) who has worked in the Rheinhessen, and latterly Sancerre, but has pitched up at Arlaud on a recommendation from the Sancerre winery (name not known, sorry !) to experience organic/biodynamic viticulture.

Amazingly no long time fixture, Dede, nor Mr Handlebar moustache, Jackie, who has occupied the annex off my room the last few years. Hey ho, nothing stays the same, but Herve is his usual larger than life self including my instantly becoming Marko (name is Mark actually but do I care not one bit !).

Convivial Friday evening meal relaxed me from my Autoroute car woes. In addition to the domaine’s ‘usual’ Bourgogne Aligote & Bourgogne PTG we had a couple of half bottles – one 1999 Morey Village, and one Morey 2002. The first was corked although only I tactfully called it out with Basile quickly agreeing. The 02 was flat out delicious – love to have some of that in my cellar (but not in halves !). We also had some sort of claret – very Merlot. Think it was Chateau du/le Pin 2011. No one seemed very interested & c.half of it it was there on the table for Saturday breakfast so I had a small glass with my breakfast bar and before my black coffee. Seemed quite pleasant !

Today turned out to be a (Bourgogne) Roncevie day all day. Contain your excitement ! Once the usual checking in paperwork (swear there’s more of it every year) had been done, seemed to take an age, with all the new for 2016 crew and some of the usual regulars, off we went. Quite a smarter line up of hired vehicles this year than the crocks of the past. Seemed to be a change of emphasis from vans and a couple of double cab, flat bed, trucks to only two vans (actually mini buses) but three trucks. Plus the usual decrepit, seems to go for ever, domaine workhorse Citroen Jumpy small van. Quite dark to 7.30 a.m. but we are later this year. Didn’t do a head count but we filled the vehicles – maybe not as many folk as last year perhaps.

Fairly early on the opening strategy for this year’s harvest it became clear i.e attack and complete the low lying, frost affected, stuff. We started in Roncevie, where regular Arlaud aficionados will know the domaine has 5 ha., in the furthest section towards the railway, up against a wood. This portion, probably the lowest lying bit,(think totally) was re-planted after the devastating frost/winter of 2009-10. Its always been a pain in the butt to try and pick the first efforts of the youngster vines. This year was weird. Many of the vines had little or no fruit on them but then one would come to a vine which for no apparent reason had a few nice bunches on it – much more than seen in past years. Also fairly quickly I noticed variable/inconsistent ripening with some bunches, or parts of bunches, next to fully ripe one’s, looking ‘rose’. Very quickly got quite muddy as well, as in clinging to one’s boots etc in vast quantity – not good. Very early the vines were pretty wet from morning dew so one also got damp. Morning passed uneventfully and so to lunch, before which Cedric, Jean-Pierre and myself cleaned all the buckets and the secateurs. On the subject of the latter I had two during the morning which were a sticking pain in the butt. Have never had sticking/blocking secateurs in my previous year’s – someone hadn’t oiled them me thinks. Porter friend/regular Laurent offered to get me a replacement for the first pair but the one’s he got from one of the trucks was no better so I persevered until lunch time then selected my weapon’s of choice carefully for the afternoon.

Cyprien’s wife Carol(e?)’s father, an ex professional chef,. was in charge of lunchtime dining arrangements as last year. An engaging, larger than life, extrovert type whom one cannot help at being amused by. Lunch was usual mixture of entrée, mains, plat du fromage (large one) and fruit ou dessert. Wines as above i.e Aligote & PTG on free flow as required.

Back to Roncevie for the afternoon. Really hot weather wise now with clear blue sky and only an occasional whisper of breeze. What struck me now, as we worked the rows/section nearer to the road (RN74), was the almost total absence, as far as the eye could see between Gevrey & Morey, of any other domaine’s vehicles scattering the hillsides i.e we were almost alone. Very unusual but I heard later most of the Morey domaine’s intended to start Monday or later that week. I should have guessed sooner from the all but empty Morey car park !

My afternoon’s toil was brightened by music to work to. Initially, a tall, whisper of beard, guy next to me was playing Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon from his phone. Actually turned out to be a Floyd tribute band re-make but good enough. Took me back to buying ‘Dark Side’ years ago when it first came out, in my long ago 6th Form College days (between 16-18), as my first ‘proper album (actually my second but I don’t like to talk about the aberration first by Wizzard !). Moving rows later I was next to, hippy traveller type, Sebastian, with his long ‘matted’ dreadlock hair, a ‘type’ old ladies might cross the road to avoid. Sebastian is quite an engaging, if voluble, character with very good English, originally from the Vosges region, but who has spent his latter years as a travelling free spirit. A girlfriend (not present) who lives in Dijon brought him here. He explained to me, andhe can chat (!), whether I wanted to hear or not, that he has fallen in love with Colombia (of all places & nothing to do with drugs) and has dreams to get enough dosh together to open a bar or restaurant there – hum ! Anyway, he was playing what turned out to be an eclectic mixture of stuff, pretty loudly, via his phone. The first ‘tune’ was the rocking, if repetitive, Suzie (Suzy ?) Q which I will always associate with my favourite film, Apocalypse Now, said tune from the up river ‘concert for the US Vietnam War troops featuring, for those days, exotic dancers. Post Suzie Q an even better series of electric blues tracks (just my type) blasted forth to rock us down the rows and take my mind off my raging thirst.

The grapes in Roncevie Haut were pretty impressive, what there were of them. Volume very varied vine to vine but first sight of big bunches. Rising ‘dust’ as said bunches landed en bucket though suggested some rot albeit within the bunch other than being visible on the surface and so it proved post triage conversation – shades of 2013.

And so, to return to the village, final bucket cleaning, departure of the locals, quick glass or two of vin blanc refresher before photo downloads, evening meal and early night.

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 A little villages Gevrey-Chambertin to start the day…

The good weather continues – and if we believe the forecast(!) maybe for the whole week too…

For those a little slower off the mark, today is the real start for many in in the Côte de Nuits. As noted, yesterday, Dujac are starting today, and also in Morey, Sebastien Odoul of Odoul-Coquard is making his first cuts – they are not the only ones! Of-course Burgundy is not just the Côte d’Or! Many in Chablis are starting to harvest today too – I note Domaine Christian Moreau, Domaine Daniel Seguinot, amongst others, are now in their 1er Cru vines…

But for us, today, it was a slow start. Our fruit from Gevrey was out of the chill-wagon nice and early, but more was on the way – so we didn’t actually start triaging the fruit until 10am.

That being the case, I took a tour of the, mainly empty, stainless-steel tanks in the cuverie. Here we can easily see the advantage of temperature controlled tanks; directly I could see on the display-panel, that our first tank of Morgon (that which was destemmed) was starting to ferment – the other tanks were all ~16.5°C – but this one was now 17.5°C – stand well back! 🙂

Between parcels of Gevrey – we also have Gevrey in the afternoon – came some Meursault Vireuils. Actually a little bit too much for the size of our pneumatic press, but a solution was found; Our winemaker has his own domaine, and today harvests his Corton-Charlemagne, and there’s less of that. So his Charlemagne comes here to be pressed, and our Meursault goes to his place to use his bigger press – flexibility!

Our day rounded off with the last of the Gevrey, and it’s been something of a constant theme; very good ripeness, the only unripe stuff being the second-set grapes that shouldn’t have been harvested in the first place, and the ever-present raisined grapes to be triaged. Once more, very good stuff – again with seemingly quite ripe stems too.

 In the hot, early harvest of 2015, the pinot gris was rarely ripe at (pinot) harvest time. But in this vintage it has kept pace with the chardonnay and pinot noir – above from Beaune Les Avaux today…

Today starts a Côte de Beaune day, and finishes as a Côte de Nuits day.

We start with Santenay 1er Le Comme. We do this parcel every year, and usually it needs quite a bit of triage, but this year, in 5 pallets of grapes I saw only 1 cluster with a little rot – remarkable! What we did have, was ripe grapes with quite ripe stems too – what did require triage, however, was the ‘grilled’ i.e. completely dry, raisined grapes – this is sometimes harder work than snipping out the rot, but I have to say – very good stuff vs the average from these vines.

Next a sight to make us very sorry – the total harvest from Beaune Les Avaux and Beaune Les Cras required just 30 minutes work! The grape quality was super, but the harvest yield was probably below 5 hl/ha…

A short pause, waiting for the truck, and then came our Gevrey-Chambertin villages – quite a lot of it! Two lieu-dits worth, with another coming on Sunday – this to wait in the cooled truck for Monday. Really all the grapes this year have been ripe – very little under-ripe to throw away – and with crunchy thick skins too. The only complaint you could have is the amount of ‘grilled’ berries to remove. About one-third of this Gevrey went through triage and then was left as whole clusters.

Saturday was also a day that some attacked their Corton Grand Crus – according the Carel Voorhuis “The quality looks really good, and to be honest, in the context of the vintage as a whole, I have to be happy with the roughly 25 hl/ha that we managed to harvest.” David Croix (who Carel will soon replace at Camille Giroud) was a little more downbeat about his harvest at Domaine des Croix “The quality looks great, but there simply isn’t enough. I’m still waiting for my Corton-Charlemagne, but the rest is all done, and the domaine as a whole made only 5 HL/ha – the Corton-Charlemagne won’t materially change that.” I will add my own exclamation mark to that!
 

Not bad for this vineyard!

Still clean

but not for long

watching

destemmed stems!

Dried ‘waste’ from under the vibrating table. Lots of grilled grapes but also some okay millerandes too…

Whole clusters of Gevrey…

Washed for the next day…

 No, not a tiny globe – actually a sun-burned grape – to be discarded!

The Marquis (Guillaume) d’Angerville chose today to attack his Volany Champans, but we had unfinished business with our Morgon!

Today, the second-half of our Morgon was going to stay in whole-clusters – of-course we still made the same triage as the day before. These whole-clusters were collected in a different fermentation tank to those grapes we destemmed yesterday. I asked are the two going to be blended together – ‘maybe yes‘ was the answer – I would assume from a pure commercial standpoint, the actual answer will be yes! I also asked, so if we are doing whole cluster with this gamay, will it be a shorter cuvaison as is common in Beaujolais? The answer was – ‘yes – or maybe longer‘ with a smile.

I think that this is called wine-making by the seat of your pants 🙂

Interestingly, like yesterday – virtually no fauna was on the triage table – I smelled two stinkbugs – but again didn’t see them – and I saw one spider. So that spider was the only creature I actually saw from about 15 pallets of grapes. I guess I wouldn’t have been completely surprised if the fruit had come from a vineyard with zero growth between the vines – like too many in Beaujolais – but in this case there is some ground cover. I remain surprised!

• Below you can see our whole clusters being moved from the triage area and dropped into the fermentation tank:
  

And the day’s sorting:

Just one grape, cut by the hail…

 Not really representative, but good to see how great some gamay fruit can be…

The home team’s first grapes of this 2016 vintage arrived in the dark close to 9pm yesterday evening – all the way from Morgon – so a good 1 and a half hour’s drive away. They overnighted in the refrigerated truck in our courtyard.

It was fresh this morning – blue sky, but clearly a little less than 10°C – and now we could see our grapes. At least in the cases the fruit looked good to very good, and almost indistinguishable from pinot – it would be interesting to see how it looked once it started to cross the triage table – see video below:

• Gamay processing – the Beaune way 🙂
  

The fruit needed a little triage work – really just the usual stuff of removing dried berries, some under-ripe bunches and a little rot, but the cases contained no fauna (I smelled but didn’t see 3 or 4 stink-bugs) just rather attractive bunches of grapes. I have to say, the taste of raisined gamay grapes – the stuff we throw away – is really fine, and much tastier than the same from pinot! The first seven pallets of fruit, triaged today, were all destemmed. We have more Morgon being picked today that will again arrive in the evening – this we will probably leave as whole-clusters – but let’s see how it looks tomorrow. I took note today that there was really plenty of sugar in these grapes, as we stuck to the triage table like glue – maybe not so much as 2015 or 2005, but still plenty more than most vintages – let’s see if that’s also reflected in the pinots to come.

From other domaines I heard that both Benjamin Leroux and François Mikulski harvested their Meursault 1er Genevrières today – and both very happy with yields of about 35 hl/ha. The hillside here offering a good return in 2016 – unlike the villages and bourgognes in the flat of Meursault, most of which was sacrificed to the frost at the end of April…

The home team also went out to inspect the vines in Marsannay and Santenay this afternoon – ‘walls of fruit‘ was their summary. These two villages avoided the frost in April, which started to exert itself from Chassagne and northwards. There should be some good stuff on the way from this corner of the Côte d’Or, and with a proper rendement (yield) too.