SPRING/SUMMER NEWSLETTER 2008

As I write the sun beats down on my vines, for which I am grateful as until recently we’ve had truly awful weather. We started pruning, wood pulling, mulching and the like early this year. Bud break arrived on time, and after the usual worries about frost attacking the leaf clusters, the vines started their growing cycle, somewhat slowly due to too much rain and a scarcity of sun. Flowering is in full blossom – delicate, creamy petals emitting a discreet perfume – so we are particularly happy with the weather. This is a critical time in the annual cycle where warm, dry conditions are essential to ensure the fruit set which will follow.

We are busy lifting up the wires at ground level to the vine canopies, sweeping with them the long, heavy branches holding the grape bunches and their flowers. This ensures the branches don’t break off in storms or get crushed as we drive along the rows with the tractor to spray or cut the grass. It brings them into line and makes for neat, well ordered rows. Once all the wires and branches are up we will trim back leaf growth and start cutting back the shoots growing at the base of the vines.

We have bottled our 2007 rosé and classic dry white, both of which taste utterly delicious. We made a decision at the harvest to triple the amount of rosé we make, so it’s with relief that I can write that it is aromatic and rich, with raspberry and strawberry flavours on the nose and in the mouth. The Princesse de Clèves dry white is clean and fresh and pure with pleasing citrus fruits and excellent complexity. Both are selling extremely well and can be found on this website and at Majestic and/or John Avery’s of Bristol.

The bottling of them and the 2006 reds was not without its problems. We’ve become used to last minute panics with labels not ready or bottles not delivered. But the last bottling brought with it a new problem – the super sophisticated (and expensive) capsules we changed to didn’t want to sit on the bottle tops. After a one hour panic amongst the bottlers and the very real possibility of having to annul the bottling entirely, we found a solution; someone to stand in front of the appropriate machine on the bottling line and tap each capsule down onto the bottle manually so that the machine could do its job. Given we were bottling 50,000 or so, one can only imagine how boring as well as time consuming it must have been for the woman chosen to do it. Some friends over from England with their children were watching the bottling with fascination (and it is pretty fascinating to watch if you’ve never seen it before). ‘If you don’t work hard at school’, one of them said to his five year old, pointing at the woman tapping down the capsules, ‘that’s what you’ll be doing for a living when you grow up.’

We have tenants in our two houses, La Tabardy and Madame Cholet’s, details of which can be found on this website. The houses are looking particularly beautiful at the moment. The lavender and hydrangeas in the gardens have now matured and are more sumptuous with each season, the view from the swimming pools is breathtaking and the peace and tranquility of the surrounding vines makes for a great holiday. I hope we can interest you in renting one of them, or even both. (We have had quite a few tenants who have taken them over en masse for important birthdays or wedding anniversaries. We can point you in the direction of great caterers who come and take the strain out of such events.)

Here’s wishing you an excellent summer and I look forward to seeing some of you here.