Picture (crop) ex-Faiveley…

Since last Easter Friday we have seen all aspects of ‘life’ in Burgundy:

First, something to celebrate! Today was the 80th birthday of one of Volnay’s great characters – Regis Rossignol (right), who I visited in February; he’s still going strong, indeed, as far as I can tell, he’s actually still making the wine. He loves nothing more than disappearing into the cellar find yet another ‘older’ bottle to discuss!

On the other side of the same coin we lost Bernard Dubreuil of Domaine Dubreuil-Fontaine in Pernand-Vergelesses on Friday. He’d been unwell for a while but was seemingly in remission, that changed all too quickly. My thoughts are with his daughter Christine. Here is a fine image of Bernard from Jon Wyand.

Lastly, for today, pictures of the first vines with swelling buds were put out by Faiveley yesterday, from their vines in Mercurey. Actually I checked the chardonnay up and down the Côte de Beaune today, and many of the sheltered vines are in a similar state the picture (at the top), many bagettes are showing at least 2-3 buds swelling up. The chardonnay is much more ‘precocious’ so the pinot noir usually needs 3 to 4 weeks more, so don’t hold your breath for those!

Okay, perhaps not all the seasons – the amount of sun was a little more limited – but there was a little in Beaune today!

It seems bizarre that we have had 10-12°C for most of the winter, and then in the last days, flurries of snow – only a flurry this morning in Beaune and nothing remains. In the Côte de Nuits it was a little more than a flurry and all was white!

This time last year, it was more like 20°C…

Le Roi Chambertin.

Harvest day 16, but only our 12th day with grapes…

As we say, it’s only over after the Chambertin is in – and today, finally, it was. Despite the wait, no complaints about the cleanliness and presentation of the grapes. More info after a short (maybe long) Paulée… 😉

Hooray! At 16h00 today, the rain stopped – so that was only 23 hours of rain…
That said, the sky remains very dark with just a few patches of blue – in fact it’s averaged several hours of rain per day since Saturday!

At the home domaine there is nothing to report – our last grapes are still on the vine, and it’s not certain if they will be picked on Friday or Saturday.

I’ll be signing-off from this series of reports just as soon as those grapes are sorted, but for info on the ferments, and something of the analytics of the 2015 vintage, I’ll include that in my September report.

For those who were asking, here’s the difference between (very ripe) pinot noir and pinot gris – locally called pinot beurot – from Charmes-Chambertin today.
[2x life-size]

We wake to rain – not particularly heavy, but unyielding. It’s still raining when our first truck of grapes arrives from Gevrey-Chambertin – avec nos Charmes-Chambertin – I bet the cases will be rather muddy (again) too! As it turns out the cases are in good shape – this grower fills them differently to the one in Marsannay.

Our grower’s Charmes is always something of a challenge to triage as it’s normally full of rot. This year, hardly a sight of rot – maybe a dozen bunches from many pallets of fruit – and they have also managed the oïdium better than most too, I found only 2 or 3 bunches in the 2 hour session of triage – chapeau! The grapes are dark and ripe, and it seems to me that they were needing to be picked – any hard handling and the berries begin to part with their stems – but yet again, what stems! Like the yesterday’s Marsannay, approaching brown/red colour for many – really lignified. I’ve never seen that before, but it’s really just these last two appellations that have presented themselves in such a way. These are our only grapes of the day – half the cleaning is done before lunch, the rest after. Fortunately today we triaged just a little longer than we cleaned!

Halfway through our triage there was sunshine but also an ever-growing force of wind. After lunch the floors of Beaune are littered with discarded branches and hundreds of horse chestnuts – the temperature was impressive too, whilst this wind alone could easily dry the vines, the temperature was well over 20°C – warmer outdoors than in. In Switzerland we would call this a Föhn wind, the Swiss also took this word for a hairdryer! Our forecasters suggested thunder and lightning would return by 19h00, so I went jogging at 16h30 – the thunder and first drops of rain started before I was back – and I was only out for 30 minutes. Rain returned with a vengence about 18h30.

Will our last appellation arrive tomorrow? It seems not, the talk is now of Friday or even Saturday – hmm – our Paulée is planned for Friday, and I’m not sure it’s allowed to bring in grapes after the Paulée. Tough decisions await 😉

(Part of!) Lunch:

I said it was windy! :

Bussy-le-Grand : gros dégâts après une forte rafale de vent http://t.co/GmYUXPlY5spic.twitter.com/zAaeZuAXeW

— Le Bien Public 🗞️ (@Lebienpublic) September 17, 2015

Lavaux St.Jacques.

The finishing-line is in sight now, but today we’re just going to focus on more Marsannay Les Longeroies and one of Gevrey’s bigger guns – Lavaux St.Jacques. Still, it won’t be very much fun cutting grapes today, due to multiple showers of rain overnight – but by 09h00 the streets and pavements of Beaune are almost dry.

As our first cases arrive – Lavaux (some say/type Lavaut) St.Jacques, it’s clear that conditions in the vines were less than perfect; the fruit in the cases is fine, but to the sides and the bottoms of those cases adheres plenty of mud – sorry, terroir! There’s a thought – over the last 40-50 years I wonder how much soil/mud from the Côte de Nuits has been washed down the drains of Beaune. Before that most fruit was processed locally as there simply wasn’t the ease of transportation of today. When our Marsannay arrives, if anything, the cases are muddier than we experienced with the Lavaux – and they were a pig to clean afterwards too!

It’s almost an anecdote, but the fruit was once-more excellent, I’ve really nothing more to add to the commentary from the previous days…

Tomorrow should have been our last day, but due to the rain – and it rained some today too – the sellers have slightly delayed some of their picking. So tomorrow it’s (only) Charmes-Chambertin…

It’s a bit confusing I suppose, as it is the 11th day since we began harvesting, but it is only the 9th day of harvesting for our team as we did none on Saturday and Sunday.

The weekend had no grapes as the forecasts were for apocalyptic rain-storms and hail – some moderately heavy rain arrived on Saturday afternoon and lasted into the early evening, but a surprisingly lovely Sunday followed with ever-more blue sky, sunshine and 24°C in the afternoon. BANG – is that thunder? We had at least 2 hours of thunder and lightning in Beaune from about 5pm – for a minute or so, even 1cm sized hail after which the road outside my apartment resembled a river. Beaune received about 60mm of rain and apparently the fire-brigade were called out 50 times in 2 hours! Nobody has reported hail damage, or even hail in the Côte de Nuits, so those (including our) grapes that are still on the vine are probably okay.

The grapes might be okay, but those that were harvesting on both Saturday and Sunday had no fun at all – very muddy, wet conditions – some making references to Ypres or the Somme. I expect no better conditions today, even if it’s sunny. Yet the grapes will be perfectly fine – too soon picked after/during the rain to be affected by the extra water, or for the chance for rot to bloom in the warm and damp – but those that wait longer into the week? That will be trickier…

For our home team, we are planning to be finished on Wednesday. Today we have no morning grapes – though I’m unsure the wait will improve picking conditions, only the temperature. So an early lunch before ‘attack!’

A nice lunchtime selection – if hard to read, that black label is Dominique Laurent’s 1998 Gevrey Clos St.Jacques.

Lunch over and we start un-loading our Marsannay Longeroies from the truck and – BOOM! – the return of the thunder. Actually, not just thunder, heavy rain too. It lasts no more than 20 minutes and then slowly the sky becomes bluer and bluer – of-course the rain is back two hours later! The grapes are almost as good as my 2015 benchmark (the first parcel of bourgogne), but with stems that are a little yellower/browner. For the first time this year the call is heard – ‘whole clusters!’ We quickly remove the destemmer and then carry on. 60 case of fruit are quickly despatched. I saw little botrytis, little oïdium though also some unripe in a few cases of fruit. Overall, excellent! We have a second parcel of this same fruit, and I have to say it’s a little less good – more oïdium – yet the standard remains high. So less than a hundred case of fruit today and cleanup starts at 17h30 – despite only starting at 13h45!

Of-course, we have more tomorrow!
 

13h30 – Hmm – do you think there may be rain coming…

Marsannay Longeroies

Oups! Marsannay (under cover – plus heavy rain

Oïdium…

Found on a single vine in Ladoix – there were other bunches, green like chardonnay with a fainter pink skin, but none of those were ripe. This almost all pink was ripe and sweet, with little extra flavour to define it though. It showed a very open bunch structure with large (minimum 2cm) grapes (melons). I asked about half a dozen locals – nobody had any idea what it was.

Ouf! It’s already Friday – where did all the time go?

Really our biggest day, volume-wise, but aided by an early start and fruit that essentially needed minimal trie – sometimes unripe bunches (Ladoix) or sometimes a little dried fruit (Beaune 1er Avaux), or sometimes a little rot (Hautes Côtes de Beaune) yet we had the opportunity for the triage table to run at full speed – the first time this harvest. We were even finished rather early – 19h30! You know(?) there’s almost nothing else to say about today – very fine fruit indeed – still a vintage of very consistent bunches, not small berries but no melons either.

Lots of grapes today, but not so many words. One thing to note, however, despite a little sulfur added into the tank, and temperatures in those tanks of 10-12°C, we already have two reds beginning to ferment!

Nex week we have only 5 more lots of grapes to come for these 2015s, theoretically on Monday through to Wednesday, but with some heavy rain on Saturday, heavier on Sunday, and now the forecast for rain creeping into Monday too – that looks like a moving target for now. One thing is for sure though, no grapes on Saturday and Sunday!
 

Portrait – Bourgogne Hautes Côtes de Beaune

Portrait – Ladoix

Portrait – Beaune 1er Les Avaux

Not much Ladoix? – that was about 1/3rd…

Clean, clean, clean…

Subtitled: Start your day with Santenay!

I had some great photos lined-up today, but due to the health and safety issues involved, I thought it just as well to keep the camera ‘holstered!’

Another healthy, clean tranche of grapes this morning – all from Santenay. There were only two or three isolated clusters with oïdium, a little easy to triage rot plus some weeding out of the unripe. Here was a reasonable amount of pinot gris, and the first I’ve seen that was universally ripe too – maybe the pinot gris is a little longer ripening this year(?) Perhaps a little too much reggae music though – it’s still cold in the morning, and you’re never going to get warm trying to dance to that! 😉

Then came a parcel of Gevrey-Chambertin ‘villages’ that was good too – not the smallest clusters but it fairly whizzed through the triage table, this time with virtually no oïdium. Our last appellation was Maranges 1er Cru – it seems to be on the triage table for ages – but that was probably because there was more than three tonnes of it – here also was plenty of healthy looking pinot gris, but to taste it simply wasn’t ripe. We finished triage just 10 minutes earlier than yesterday, but for various reasons, we finished our clean-up later. Oh-well – 21h45 isn’t too late for a refreshing glass of something, is it(?)!

There’s rain forecast for the weekend, so probably no grapes on Saturday or Sunday, and that also means that tomorrow could be our biggest grape-reception day of the harvest – woo-hoo!!!
 

Great Santenay…

The bee prefers Gevrey…

Elegantly wrapped desert for lunch

A bertter desert for lunch…

Maranges looking good!

Clean, clean and clean again!