A successful harvest doesn’t make a good wine!! The harvest went well last Saturday and that has started the next part of the process. Thank you again to the team, friends and neighbours who participated. I hope it was great day.
We are only making one “first label” wine – no second “cru”!! So while we harvested the grapes by hand, we selected only the best bunches and dropped the rest. At the winery door, we made one final further selection before stripping the stalks from the grapes in the destemmer. Removing the stalks also helps minimize any green tastes – often found in Cabernet France varietal wines. After the destemmer, we loaded the vat and allowed a natural yeast fermentation to start. We have added a small quantity of prepared yeast mid this week to prevent a drop off in fermentation activity.
Albane Bervas has agreed to be our winemaker. Thank you, I hope this will be a strong partnership for a very long time. Albane and her mother Pascale check the progress of the wine every day, pump over the juice from the bottom side of the vat on top of the cap of skins and finally break up the solids at the bottom of the vat (called pigeage locally) to extract colour and tannins from the skins / solids.
Albane reports (from her tastings and lab analyses) that we will make a fine wine, beautifully balanced, possibly a touch acidic initially but, with a reasonably long maturation, we will extract the optimum colour and “fat” from the grapes to achieve a nice balance. It will most likely be a wine that will keep well. That’s a lot of information after one week in the winery – we are fortunate to have a very talented winemaker hand crafting this critical stage of the process. We will keep you all updated with progress.
In the meantime, here are some of the photos of Albane, Pascale, the wine and the winery.