This blog has moved

This blog is now located at http://domainedavidclark.blogspot.com/.
You will be automatically redirected in 30 seconds, or you may click here.

For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to
http://domainedavidclark.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default.

Odds and Ends

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

1. 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.


2. 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.


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

Bottle Filling Machine

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

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

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

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

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!