Sunday:
The title is a little unfair – despite the pessimistic predictions of the forecasters – we have on-and-off rain all day, but never heavy.

About 2:00pm I find myself in Chassagne loading the picked grapes from 1er Cru ‘Vergers’ onto a truck. Optically they are nothing special, about one in five bunches have some rot – perhaps one in twenty are quite bad; The taste on the other hand is excellent as is the balance of sweetness and acidity. A good (quite easy) trie and all will be well here.

5:00pm and we have 150 cases of bourgogne rouge grapes (from Meursault) arrive at the winery; these in places have rot almost to the same magnitude as we had to triage in 2004, though on average I would say better than 04.

Tonight we deserve a dinner so head to Beaune with ‘Vinotas’, whose day 4 report can be found here. Some bottles are consumed with very above average food at Le Gourmandin in Place Carnot.

Saturday morning and it’s raining in Beaune – we delay our trip.

Actually we just stay in bed a little longer 🙂

We arrive in Beaune late afternoon and there is no rain – in fact it’s rather warm. In the evening we open lots of bottles and are all humbled (including the winemakers among us) by the understated complexity and alround excellence of domaine de la Romanée Conti’s 2002 Vosne-Romanée 1er Cru – and (as you can see above) we compared it to lots of other bottles! I should add the Julia’s cooking also helped a lot – Julia is from Brasil and is here doing a stage.

Safe to say we slept very well; Sunday the first grapes of our trip arrived.

Vinotas Part 3

Unfortunately the weather prognosis is not good for the weekend. Those that were planning to harvest during the weekend are currently rethinking their plans due to a forecast of rain for Saturday and Sunday – the heaviest rain for Sunday – but then rain has been forecast several times and none has materialised!

If, for a change, the forecasters are correct, it might bode for a better Côte de Beaune harvest than Côte de Nuits – the saga will unfold…

The sun is shining !
After a month of July dry and very hot, August was quite cold and humid. September looks very interesting and will be probably the key of this vintage; the grapes seem protected by good skins , result of the July weather.

We already received the first grapes that we buy every year and really the “table de tri” was not so useful. Concerning our own vineyards it was nice to see absolutely no rot: the grapes are healthy and we start harvest on Monday 25th.

As last years the natural level of sugar looks very good. Acidity is well-balanced and tannins are present ! The “medias” already give notice of an “outstanding vintage in white”: we can confirm with the first musts arrived in our cellar.

Kind regards,
Bernard VALLET
Pierre BOUREE Fils

As promised, here is the link to the daily update on the Domaine de la Vougeraie site. Firefox users seem to have a problem with the site, only a purple screen awaits, but Bill Gates will provide the solution if you crank-up your old internet explorer!

Super reports are coming in also from Michel Abood – aka ‘Vinotas’ – he might well be on his honeymoon, but apparently is being given a long lead! Here is his Day 1 report, and here is Day 2.

Early Saturday morning it is time to hit the road – I should be in Beaune by 9:30am. Without any real organisation I’ve suggested to a few people that we could taste a few interesting bottles in the evening – could be with just bread and cheese as we might finish grape-sorting rather late, but only one rule for the tasting – if the winemakers themselves are present, we (they) shall have to taste blind!

Cheers

The word is that there’s a lot of botrytis around – the weather has been good, but the humidity has been on the high side. Many domaines have already started in the Côte de Beaune and the rest will go full force in the Côte de Nuits at the weekend – the forecast remains good – and I expect to be joining them – there’s nothing quite like chewing on a few grapes from Chambertin while you work!

It sounds like the triage table might be important – but let’s wait and see the grapes.
Info newly in:

• Nathalie Tollot at Domaine Tollot-Beaut tells that they started their harvesting yesterday and are hoping to finish by the weekend – they are pleased with the result sofar
• Carel Voorhuis at d’Ardhuy tells me that he “started yesterday with Ladoix at a bit above 13% vol, quite ripe, with just a very little botrytis. Looking good.”
• Tomorrow Domaine de la Vougeraie will start a harvest log at their website – it already started today in French – tomorrow the translations into English begin. I’ll link to it when it’s running
• Additional info here (in French) from Patrick Essa

Cheers