In the Vineyards

July 09, 2013

Shattering or How Mother Nature Selects her Best

I’d like to introduce you to an occurrence called shattering, an event that happens in the lifecycle of a vine that is often perceived as bad news but can instead be a factor of quality. I made a little video about it a few weeks ago while I was in a young Grenache vineyard (4th […]

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May 30, 2013

Where did our vineyards disappear to?

A few days ago, while walking a row of our parcel of baby Mourvèdre I couldn’t resist taking this picture. It shows how exceedingly well our September cover crop seeding has taken off. The intelligent use of cover crops not only respects our appellation’s engagement to ensure ecological diversity in our vineyards: the mixture of […]

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February 13, 2012

Vineyard Pruning: A delicate and essential task

Pruning is a delicate and crucial task for the lives of our vineyards. It determines in great part the evolution of each vine with respect to its growth, health, form, and the quantity and quality of its grapes at harvest. The objective of pruning is to train vines to produce without excess, in order to concentrate the natural sugars and flavors in the summer, and evenly distribute the grapes on the vines so that they can […]

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August 12, 2011

A Haunting Evening Song

At this period of the summer, each night we come home late at night, we are greeted by families of stone curlews who nest in our olive orchard next to the mourvedre.  With their long thin legs, their disproportionately big head and their huge yellow reptilian eyes, they are like no other bird.  The only […]

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June 24, 2011

“Sexual Confusion” of the Grapevine Moth

How can we protect our vineyards from the dreaded vine moth larvae without using insecticides?  These larvae can cause significant damage to our grapes and create gateways to disease. To contain the populations of this insect, we use a technique that is approved for organic farming. The fight by “mating disruption” is our answer. In order to be fertilized, the female moths release of sex hormones (or pheromones) that enable males to locate them more […]

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June 17, 2011

Long Live the Springtime!

I love this period of the year when my winemaking brain is on overdrive, when I project our future plantings, the equipment purchases to come, when I imagine our future vintages. Dreaming is essential, but we have to be careful, because the harsh reality of the world economy can hurt … Since our conversion to […]

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June 09, 2011

“To till or to seed” that is the question

As an organic vineyard, we do not use any herbicides or synthetically processed concentrated fertilizers. We rely on compost for nutrients.  Under-vine weed control is done mostly with tillage tools (I’ll show you how in an upcoming video). Both tilling and seeding use many of the same cover crop species, managed in different ways.  Although […]

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June 08, 2011

What dreams are made of…

See those little bits of red wood sticking out of the ground? Look at them a little closer. They would appear to be just some useless pieces of twigs. But these bits of wood are planted dreams, a parcel of dreams. What will they give us ? I don’t know yet, but I can explain […]

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  • Chemin des Canaux
  • 30132 Caissargues
  • France
  • Tel: +33 4 66 38 44 30
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