Chèvre à deux becs

We’ve just bottled the 2007 Morey-Saint-Denis, and since there was only one barrel of this wine I decided to do it the old-fashioned way, which is to say, straight from the barrel using a chèvre à deux becs (pictured below).

So a couple of months ago I carefully drilled a 22mm hole near the bottom of the front face of the (full) barrel and immediately pushed a clean cork into the freshly drilled hole (actually I used a DIAM composite cork to eliminate the risk of TCA tainting the whole barrel!) It’s surprising how little wine spills out of a hole at the bottom of a full barrel –maybe 20ml in the 3 or 4 seconds it takes to remove the drill and fit the cork.

Anyway, the point of this is so that when bottling day arrives I just fill the cone of the chèvre with wine, place it against the cork and give a gentle push. The cork is pushed into the barrel and floats harmlessly to the top, and the chèvre is in place ready to fill bottles. Done like this there is no disturbance to the fine lees at the very bottom of the barrel and the wine can be bottled crystal clear and with absolutely minimal processing.

The chèvre rather cleverly has a tap to direct the wine to just one of its two spouts at any time. Once the bottle on one spout is full you flip the tap over to the other spout and replace the full bottle with an empty, etc, etc (307 times for this barrel).

It takes a bit of practice to get the fill levels even approximately correct, so I just slightly overfilled each bottle before removing the excess with a depth calibrated syringe (as my mother is doing in the photo below).

As always the bottles are then corked by hand, although with the help of a new and improved machine that I shall write about next week.

New Sprayer

If you happen to have watched “Wine:The Firm” on BBC4 last month, you might have noticed a brief reference to my new vineyard sprayer. I’ve actually been using it for almost a year, but since I haven’t written about it before I thought I’d take this opportunity.

If I had a marketing department I’m sure they’d tell me that writing about spraying vines is bad PR, but it is a sad fact that grapevines are very sensitive to fungal diseases and need protected in any climate, not least Burgundy’s. Anyway, this isn’t the point of this post, but I should recall that I am certified organic and as such never spray with synthesised chemicals – this year I am using powdered milk and flax seed oil!

So now on to the point of my post. The traditional Burgundian sprayer is a 6-row tractor mounted mist generator, which I used until 2007 (as shown below).

It has the advantage of being fast and relatively simple, but the disadvantages of relatively poor spray penetration and of being mounted on a 2.5 tonne tractor. Many of the top domaines in Burgundy are recognising that minimising soil compaction is one of the keys to wine quality and so I wanted to do better.

Hence the switch to this:

It weights 99kg and contains a large turbine that blasts air and spray out of the 8 nozzles located at the front. As result the spray coverage is irreproachable and soil compaction almost negligible. It does have the disadvantage that now I have to walk rather than ride, but I won’t be going back to the old system any time soon (not least because I’ve just sold it!).

Lève-fût

I’ve spent the day racking the 2007 Passetoutgrains, to get it ready for bottling next month. I’ve written about racking before (here) so I won’t repeat myself, but I did want share a few photos of the ingenious lève-fût (barrel lift) that I use to recover the last few litres of clear wine, once the barrel is almost empty.
Hopefully the photos make the principle clear – turning the ratchet handle pulls the hook attached to the rear of the barrel. That pulling force is reacted by the ‘legs’ that push down on the front of the barrel and a horizontal arm that pushes against the wall. The net result is that the rear of barrel very slowly lifts and wine starts to flow from the spigot. The barrel is tipped further until the wine starts to run very slightly cloudy at which point the spigot tap is closed and the few litres of cloudy liquid left in the barrel are sent to the distillery.

15 minutes of fame

I haven’t seen it yet, so 15 minutes might be an exaggeration, but at 9pm on Monday February 16th BBC4 will be showing the first episode of a new three-part documentary series about wine.

The first episode, entitled “Wine: The Firm”, focuses on Berry Bros. & Rudd, London’s oldest and arguably most famous wine merchant. Since Berrys also happen to be the exclusive UK importer of Domaine David Clark wines I understand I will be making my TV debut. (Actually the back of my head has been on ITV many times during stressful moments on the WilliamsF1’ pit wall, but I don’t think that counts.)

“Wine: The Firm” has been getting excellent reviews in the press, and if I owned a television I would definitely be watching!

Ploughing by horse

Two years ago Jancis Robinson wrote a very flattering article about my small domaine that ended with the sentence

“He has not yet acquired this season’s must-have accessory among the Côte d’Or’s swelling band of organic and biodynamic wine farmers – a horse – but this is surely not too far away”

I laughed heartily at the absurdity. I have never denied that horse ploughing is the ultimate luxury one can provide for a much-loved vineyard, but I figured I’d never reach the point of being willing to do so much work for that last iota of perfection. Well, fast-forward two years…

…and I have committed to ploughing my parcel of Vosne-Romanée by horse in 2009.

In many ways it is the logical next step in respecting the health of my soils: in 2008 ploughing was the only vineyard task I did by tractor, everything else (including hedging and spraying) was done by hand. By avoiding compaction the soil develops a structure and life that is truly beautiful to observe.

Before Christmas I did a light sous-solage with my friend Oronce de Beler and his magnificent Percheron named Prosper. For those who read French I include a link to the website of photographer Jean-Léo Dugast who recorded the occasion for his blog. For those who don’t read French there are lots of photos!

In 2009 I’ll be ploughing with another friend, working towards the goal of learning this traditional skill myself and applying it to the whole domaine.

Experimenting with harvest dates

Most winemakers will tell you that the precise date you choose to harvest your grapes has a fundamental effect on the quality of your wine. I don’t really doubt that, but I’m not sure now to reconcile this with the fact that there are quality-minded domaines (say Clos de Tart, Charolpin or Ponsot) which sometimes pick as much as 3 weeks later than other, equally quality-minded, domaines (say DRC, Lambrays or M&P Rion). When I was musing over this prior to harvest I came to only one clear conclusion – I should do an experiment.

And so I set aside one row of my Bourgogne vineyard for an experiment. On seven dates between 21st September 2008 and 17th October 2008 I picked all the grapes from every seventh vine in the experimental row. The objective was to obtain samples that were as representative as possible of the entire row at seven different dates ranging from a very early harvest to a very late harvest.

I was interested in analytical parameters of each sample (notably sugar and yield) but particularly in how harvest date would affect flavours in the finished wine. Hence I fermented the seven samples separately, attempting to maintain identical conditions for each. Since these were micro-vinifications (about 10kg each), and I didn’t want any unnecessary variability, I chaptalised everything to 13% and added cultured yeast for the fermentation and cultured bacteria for the MLF. Oxygen is the enemy of tiny batches so I was keen to bottle these as quickly as possible, which I did yesterday. I now have enough half bottles to do comparative tastings about 10 times in the future, perhaps once per year.

Although I did taste through everything as I was bottling I don’t want to draw any results from that yet, but there is already one conclusion that is hard to avoid:


The later pickings gave significantly lower yields of finished wine.

This result is perhaps not entirely unexpected given that the period was generally dry (with the exception of 4mm of rain on the 3rd October and 15mm of the 16th October), but I do find the magnitude of the drop interesting (almost 30% over the month).

Vintage 2008

There’s a saying one hears occasionally in Burgundy:

les millésimes se suivent mais ne se ressemblent pas

which is basically to say that consecutive vintages are never alike.

The pair 2004 / 2003 make a strong case for this:
2004 – cold and wet with very generous yields
2003 – hot and dry with very low yields

The pair 2008 / 2007 are less convincing
2008 – cold, wet summer saved by a fine September
2007 – cold, wet summer saved by a fine September!

Of course the devil is in the details, but I can’t shake the feeling that the last two vintages have much in common. That said, perhaps I should highlight some of the important differences:

Most notable perhaps is that due to an exceptionally hot April 2007 flowering occurred 3 weeks earlier in 2007 than in 2008. So although it is convenient to say 2007 was saved by a fine September in reality many grapes were picked before benefiting fully (the weather took a turn for the better around the 24th August, and I would estimate the ‘median’ picking date around the 1st September). In 2008 the rain ceased on the 13th September and I reckon the ‘median’ picking was around the 29th. (For the record we started on the 8th Sept 2007 and 1st Oct 2008).

Also important: the weeks before harvest 2007 were sunny and hot while the weeks before harvest 2008 were sunny and cold. As a result there was less botrytis and higher acidity in 2008.

As for the wines I can only speak with confidence (and even then…) about what I taste (and spit!) almost daily in my own cave. The 2007s are lovely – very pure and tender with decent (not exceptional) concentration. The 2008s of course haven’t started their malolactic fermentations yet and so are harder to judge, but they have an excellent concentration of again beautifully pure, bright fruit flavours occasionally with a very slight (and, to me, rather attractive) vegetal hint.

Since you can’t taste the wines yet I’ll leave you with a photo of the two Bourgognes (2008 on the right)…
.

Vintage update II

A month ago I wrote that August and September were the all-important months in making the quality of a vintage. Well, August is almost done and to be honest, it has been grim – about 2ºC cooler, and already 40% wetter, than average. Thank goodness the forecast is perfect for at least the next week.And the longer-term forecasts seem to suggest that our weather is going to be dominated by high pressure until at least the 8th September, so there is hope yet!

The vines themselves are coping pretty well with the weather. Depending on the vineyard the bunches are between about 70% and 95% black, which I reckon is almost 4 weeks behind last year. There is also notable variation from vine to vine, within the same vineyard, which is hardly the hallmark of a great vintage.

However, there is far less botrytis (grey rot) than the equivalent stage last year, or even in 2006. Also the grapes are no longer susceptible to the two other major fungal threats (oidium and downy mildew) so all spraying is long finished. That’s not to say oidium and mildew weren’t an issue this year! In particular the late-season invasion of oidium was impressive for its virulence – in my experience second only to 2004 (the Burgundian gold-standard for oidium).

I’m expecting to harvest somewhere between the 27th September and 5th October, and am delighted to have large, flexible team ready to pick when the grapes demand!

Vintage update

Just a quick update on how the 2008 vintage is shaping up:

Basically the weather has been consistently inconsistent since bud-break; very roughly we've had a few of weeks of cool rainy weather followed by a few of weeks of hot and dry weather repeatedly since April.

The overall effect is that the vines are more or less on a normal schedule and harvest will be around the long-term average of late September.

Flowering coincided with a cool and rainy period so the fruit set has been relatively poor and total quantity is likely to be quite low. I have never before seen so much millerandage (small, unfertilised grapes – see below, and note the 2 normal-sized berries in the bunch). Millerandage is bad news for quantity, but excellent for quality since the smaller the grape the sweeter the juice and also the greater the skin/juice ratio.On the less positive side the regular rain has meant there is a bit of mildew on the young leaves. Unless it gets significantly worse it won’t have a negative effect of the grapes, but it does mean I’m spraying Bouille Bordelaise (Copper Sulphate and Lime) every 10 days to keep everything healthy.

So overall 2008 is looking very promising as we enter the two most critical months.

New vineyard

Good news: I’ve just acquired another vineyard – 4 ouvrées of old vines in appellation Vosne-Romanée. An ouvrée is the old Burgundian measure of vineyard area, and is apparently defined as the amount of land that one man can hoe in a day (or for those who have already gone metric 428 m² – which seems like a hard day’s work to me?!) Anyway, it should produce 2 or 3 barrels of Vosne-Romanée, which will make a nice addition to the cellar.