First day at Mas Carlot!

The rainy morning was a perfect for the sad goodbye I bade the Cartier family this morning. Fortunately they're not far away and hopefully I'll have the time to visit them while I'm here at Carlot. We took the long way getting here, stopping in the Camargue region, which is in the delta where the Rhône river splits as it approaches the ocean. It's not more than a half hour drive away, but a pretty different climate, much wetter. Eve's uncle Pierre has a winery there, the wine is vin de pays appelation, so he has a lot of leeway with what varietals he grows, he has some grenache, mourvedre, merlot, a few hybrids, roussanne, etc. He also grows rice. The region is known for honey, rice, horses, bulls, and apparently mosquitoes, as my numerous bites can attest. They're not like Idaho mosquitoes, who are rightly too ashamed of their miserable existence to show their faces in the fully light of day, and only come out in the early morning and evening. These Camargue mosquitoes will eat your face off at high noon if you're not careful. Not far from Pierre's vineyards, there's a wildlife preserve. I can't quite find the right word in English, it's not quite a marsh, but it's not quite a lake. The French word is 'etang', which the dictionary translates as 'pond', but it's much bigger than a pond. Click here to see it on the map.
We drove part of the way around the etang, we saw some of the famous horses and bulls, and flamingos! Yay! I'd never seen flamingos before. After that we went to a grocery store on the outskirts of Arles, and I found out that French people DO have malls! However, their gigantic, Wal-Mart sized grocery stores have a much better cheese selection, and you can buy a whole rabbit, head on and everything!
So, we arrived at Mas Carlot about 2:30 in the afternoon, I got my stuff settled. I'm staying in a little apartment with my own kitchen and everything, so the downside is I won't have dinner with the family every night like at Gourgonnier, but I can cook all my own food, and I can eat in my underwear!
I'm already very excited about all the new things I'm going to learn here. Mas Carlot has about 75 hectares of vines, compared to the 44 at Gourgonnier, so the operation is much larger, and the winery is proportionately bigger. They've got some fancy high-tech gadgets that I'll describe as I begin to see them in use. They've also got concrete fermenters, which is pretty traditional in this area, so that's something new and fun too. They have stainless fermenters too, as well as a lot more barrels than they use at Gourgonnier. Today I did some battonage, which involves a metal rod with sort of a half-propeller on the end, which is inserted into a full barrel, and used to stir up the lees. This is done to add body to white wines. It's pretty much the exact opposite of what's done with the white at Gourgonnier, which is taken off its lees pretty early, to preserve the very clean, crisp character. Battonage makes a white richer and rounder, and is most often done with chardonnay, although I completely forgot to ask what varietal I was batton-ing this afternoon.

Ok, that's it for this exciting installment. Stay tuned for more, now I'm gonna go make myself some chicken for dinner!