2009 Vintage

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Odds and Ends

2010-01-02T19:05:00.007+01:00

Just a few brief bits of news I wanted to share:

I’ve just uploaded technical data sheets for my 2007 wines here. I’ve also included links to all lab analyses done on these wines.

Berry Brothers & Rudd open their Burgundy en primeur offer at 9am on Tuesday 5th January. If you want some of my 2008s don’t delay as quantities are particularly small in this vintage.

I’ll be at Berrys’ tasting on the 13th and look forward seeing some of you there.

Bottle Filling Machine

2009-12-16T17:15:00.004+01:00

My parents have just left Burgundy three weeks after arriving to help me bottle the 2008s. Now three weeks may seem like a very long time to fill 6000 bottles, but consider that we spent the first 2 weeks building this machine to fill those bottles in the gentlest possible manner!

We had to build this ourselves because I believe this concept isn’t commercially available – and presumably never will be given its top speed of 180 bottles per hour! Anyway, the objective of bottling is to transfer the wine to bottles with the minimum amount of disturbance or aeration and I think this concept is unsurpassed in that regard.

The bottles are filled by a tube descending to the bottom of the bottle - unlike a normal filling machine that fills from the top with inevitable aeration as the wine splashes to the bottom of the bottle. The second and perhaps more distinctive novelty is that the desired level in the bottle is achieved in the most simple possible manner – by equilibrium with the level in the vat being bottled. This means that the filling platform must be slowly dropped as the tank empties – hence the two threaded rods in the photo above. This avoids the need for pumps or indeed any unnecessary transfers.

A siphon is established at start of bottling and maintained by electrovalves which open and close as bottles are placed and removed. As shown in the video below, lights illuminate to show that the electrovalves are open and wine is flowing, as well as to help visualise the level in the dark glass bottles. To ensure that the wine is only ever in contact with inert materials we chose to use pinch valves, which stop the flow of wine by simply pinching the silicon tubing visible toward the top of the video below.

Whether this will make the 2008s even better that the 2007s I encourage you discover by tasting!!

Vineyard buggy Mk2

2009-09-13T10:43:00.004+02:00

Faithful readers of this blog will doubtless remember this post about the simple rolling seat I used last year for working on the vines. It worked a treat, mainly thanks to the smooth grassy band I was leaving between the rows of vines. Only trouble is, this year I wanted to change my ploughing scheme – eliminating the grass. A quick test showed that pushing a buggy through a ploughed vineyard was a non-starter so a new motorised version was born…

Once again my father is to be thanked for the meticulous construction, which even required learning to weld.

It’s a positive luxury compared to last year’s model with a steel chassis, twin electric motors, comfy seat and rear-wheel steering!

It was a godsend for the pink-harvest, not least because the temperature was in the mid-thirties Celsius, which is just about bearable under the shade of a parasol. However, as might be expected of our first motorized model, there are a few little bugs to iron out, so we are already dreaming up next year’s version (complete with solar panel!)

Vintage update

2009-08-20T13:40:00.002+02:00

Just a few quick words on how 2009 is shaping up.

We’re about a month (or less) away from harvest and so far so good. The first three weeks of August have been exceptionally hot and dry - a welcome change from the past three years. The vines are very healthy and the grapes are looking good with basically no rot at this stage.

Sugars are rising and the acidity dropping, perhaps a little faster than would be completely ideal. 1997 seems like the obvious comparison vintage at this stage, but as ever such speculation is just a bit of fun while we wait for harvest. Plenty time for change yet, not least because the forecast looks stormy.

Vendanges en rose

2009-08-18T08:14:00.008+02:00

Apologies that it’s been an age since my last post; I intend to be significantly more diligent over the coming months!

Anyway, for now I wanted to write about what I’m calling les vendanges en rose, or pink-harvest. Instead of a green harvest (which I’ve written about before here) this year I’ve decided to wait a bit longer before removing bunches from any over-loaded vines.

The advantage of waiting is that the colour change makes it very easy to identify (and remove) any bunches which are lagging behind. I do sometimes wonder whether arbitrarily dropping green bunches earlier in the season really serves much purpose – at least at this stage I feel confident that the average maturity has taken a step forward after what is a very time consuming task.

To illustrate see the animation below of one vine in my Côte-de-Nuits-Villages (Brochon) vineyard.
The often cited problem with dropping bunches so late is that the sugar they contain can turn to alcohol… and then vinegar. As well as making your vineyard smell terrible there is a small risk that the acetic acid bacteria spread to the grapes still on the vine and sour the future harvest. Thankfully I find the dropped bunches remain innocuous (and shrivel rather than ferment) on condition that they are not crushed – so once this job is done the vineyards are out of bounds for a couple of weeks.

I’ve even heard of people collecting these pink bunches – A bit of chaptalisation and a bit of deacidification, et voila,… house rosé!

Chèvre à deux becs

2009-04-29T18:56:00.001+02:00

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

2009-03-26T18:36:00.004+01:00

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

2009-02-16T20:06:00.004+01:00

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

2009-02-12T17:49:00.002+01:00

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

2009-01-11T12:23:00.010+01:00

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

2008-12-06T17:44:00.010+01:00

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

2008-11-13T16:17:00.004+01:00

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

2008-08-26T08:01:00.003+02:00

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

2008-07-25T17:07:00.005+02:00

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

2008-06-25T23:08:00.002+02:00

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.

Vineyard buggy

2008-05-08T17:54:00.002+02:00

I wasn’t going to write about this, because, well, I didn’t want you to think I was going soft, but the little vineyard buggy pictured below has been such an unqualified success that I feel compelled to share!

I’ve written about de-budding (or shoot thinning) the vines before… when the vines start to grow they produce a huge number of unwanted shoots that need to be removed to ensure a open, airy environment for the future grapes to ripen in. Physically I find this the single hardest job of the year since it involves spending about 30 seconds either crouching or bent double in front of each of my 20,000 30cm-high vines. Ideally this needs to be finished before early June, which doesn’t exactly leave much idle time… so when my parents were here in March I asked my father whether he could build a buggy so that I could de-bud while seated! And here is the result…The key is the row-straddling concept that allows each of the 3-wheels to run in the centre of a row, which in my vineyards are conveniently smooth and grassy. Equally fortuitous, almost all my vineyards are on a very slight slope so rolling from vine to vine is basically effortless. The construction in copper was merely a matter of convenience since I had some leftover from a plumbing project, and no one I know has any experience welding steel!

As far as I know the concept is unique in Burgundy, and certainly I feel acutely self-conscious in the enquiring gaze of hardened pros, but my comfort is such that I can live with that!

Finished re-trellising

2008-05-04T18:01:00.003+02:00

Just a quick update on progress here…

The past month has generally been cold and wet, in marked contrast to last year’s record-breaking April. As a result the vines are getting off to a very slow start so I’ve had plenty time to finish off the winter work of pruning, etc.

Indeed I have just finished running new wires in the Côte-de-Nuits-Villages vineyard, which is already looking much tidier than it did last year. As the photo also shows the weeds are loving all this rain so I’ll be out early next week doing my first ploughing of 2008. Ideally when you plough you want a long dry spell to follow so the weeds dry out and don’t have the chance to re-root. April was so wet that this was never the case, but the current forecast promises sun for the next 10 days so conditions should be perfect.Once the ploughing is done I’ll start the major task of de-budding, which will keep me occupied full-time for about a month.

Malolactic fermentation

2008-03-31T18:41:00.009+02:00

Every Spring, as the weather starts to warm up, the young wines which have been ageing peacefully in barrel since October suddenly start to change; their acidity softens and they become temporarily cloudy and a little fizzy. Incredibly the reason for this was totally unknown until explained by professors at UC-Davis in the late 1960’s…

The alcoholic fermentation had been well understood since the 19th century; yeast convert sugar to ethanol and CO2, but the professors at UC-Davis discovered that the mysterious Springtime changes were also due to a fermentation, this time conducted by bacteria, converting malic acid to lactic acid and CO2. Initially this ‘malolactic’ fermentation was considered a spoilage, and indeed if it takes place in bottle the wine is certainly spoiled (fizzy, with unpleasant sulphurous aromas). Conversely, if the fermentation takes place in barrel the CO2 and sulphurous aromas can escape and the wine is positively improved by the softer lactic acid. Now almost all red wines complete malolactic before bottling, and wineries everywhere follow the progress of their malolactic fermentations by paper chromatography...

A drop of each wine is placed at the bottom of a sheet of chromatography paper before the paper is stood up with its bottom edge in a thin pool of butanol, acetic acid and pH indicator solution. As the butanol wicks up the paper it carries with it the organic acids contained in the wine; the lighter acids being carried faster (and hence further up the paper) than the heavier acids. Once the butanol has reached the top the chromatogram is ‘developed’ by drying the paper. The drying process evaporates the acetic acid leaving the background blue and the acid spots yellow.
The developed chromatogram above shows the results for wines from 14 different barrels of my 2007 harvest. Reading from the left, first 5 barrels have finished malolactic, the 6th has just started, the next 3 are approaching completion, and the last 5 have also just started.

Filming

2008-03-15T11:59:00.000+01:00

I enjoyed an interesting break from pruning yesterday when Jasper Morris MW turned up complete with camera crew in tow. Jasper and I tasted through the 2007s which are still slowly bubbling their way through malolactic fermentation, but are none-the-less showing plenty of promise.

Next week I’ll explain what a malolactic fermentation is for those who wish to know!

Stephen Liégeard

2008-02-10T16:32:00.000+01:00

Just a quick update on the re-trellising work. As you can see the vines are pruned and the wires and posts all removed. Now just the new taller posts and wires to install.
The large building in the background is the Château Stephen Liégeard de Brochon. Built by the eponymous 19th century poet it is basically a modern copy of the rather more famous Chateau d’Azay-le-Rideau and is now home to the local Lycée (high school).

Stephen Liégeard doesn’t seem to have made much of an impact as a poet, but he does have one small claim to fame… He introduced the expression Côte d’Azur for the French Riviera!

Sécateur électrique

2008-01-24T17:09:00.000+01:00

The weather has turned surprisingly mild (for a Burgundian mid-January) so I am taking the opportunity to do a bit of pruning. I can hardly believe this is already the 5th year I have pruned certain of my vineyards!

The first 3 winters I struggled through with the old fashioned tools of the trade…
... and I have huge respect for anyone who continues to prune with these hand tools, because I found it very tough on the tendons (both wrist and elbows). So I suppose it is no surprise that most vignerons (myself included) now prefer these very impressive battery powered sécateur
They are not cheap, but then they are a pretty serious piece of engineering. The blade position is perfectly proportional to the trigger, so even very precise control of the blade quickly becomes second nature. Perhaps more impressive is the cutting power: the standard salesman’s demo is to slice a broom handle into discs in a matter of seconds! Energy is provided by a 0.9kg lithium-ion battery worn on the back which lasts for at least 3 days between chargings.

And, best of all, no more tendonitis!

Re-trellising

2007-12-11T12:51:00.000+01:00

I haven’t written about this before, but last winter I acquired a new vineyard: 0.47 hectares (1.17 acres) of appellation Côte-de-Nuits-Villages, situated in the village of Brochon. It’s a lovely vineyard, with old vines and perfectly situated at mid-slope (actually on the route des grands crus). The only drawback is that the trellising (posts, wires etc) is pretty shoddy; in particular the post are very short which makes it impossible to train the vines’ summer growth up to the height which I want.So this winter’s project is to change all the posts and wires. First job is to collect all the old wires (19kms worth!)…Next I’ll prune the vines, then remove the old posts, plant the new taller posts and finally run new wires. Plenty of work… which hopefully will be repaid by the quality of the 2008 harvest!

Racking the 2006s

2007-11-27T18:03:00.001+01:00

The 2006 harvest has been in barrels for 14 months now, the wines are tasting good, full of fresh fruit flavours, and so I’m planning to put them in bottle relatively early, probably before Christmas.

Traditionally Burgundy was bottled barrel-by-barrel, but since no two barrels ever taste quite the same most producers now prefer to blend, and thus bottle a single homogeneous lot. Hence I’ve spent today racking the wines from barrel to the stainless-steel tanks from which I will bottle in a few weeks time.

The racking needs to be done extremely gently; the wine is crystal clear (since it hasn’t moved for 14 months) but the bottom of the barrel is covered in a thick sludge of dead yeast cells (called lees) and the lees can all too easily be stirred up, making the wine cloudy (mostly harmless but quite unattractive!)
Rather than use a pump I use the device pictured above to ‘push’ the wine gently out of the barrel. Compressed air is pumped into the top of the barrel (via the lower hose) creating a positive pressure which pushes wine from the bottom of the barrel up and out through upper hose. I find this a much more gentle and controllable method than even the slowest pump.

Berry Bros

2007-11-08T10:22:00.000+01:00

Just a quick post to let you know that UK readers can now buy my 2005 vintage online from Berry Brothers & Rudd...
Click here to visit their site.