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Walkabout Paris

Took a long walk, saw the Champs Elysees, the Arc de Triomphe, and went to the top of the Eiffel Tower.



























































I did a lot of walking, plus I took the stairs when I got to the tower, so I was pretty tired and hungry. I had planned to go to the Pied de Cochon, which is a reastaurant that Nathalie's father started, and despite having looked up the address before leaving the hotel I couldn't find it, so I stopped at a pizza place and got a pizza and a huge beer.

Au revoir, Mas Carlot!

Hellooooo, Paris. Haven't had much to report the last few days as far as work is concerned. Mostly just moving wines around, pulling the ones that had finished malo off their lees and putting them into clean cuves. It's been bitter cold in Bellegarde thanks to the Mistral, which can take a day that's just a bit cool and make it utterly freezing. Wore 2 sweaters and a scarf to work most days this week.
Thursday night I drove back to Mouries to say goodbye to the Cartier family, and have dinner with them and their importer.
Friday night I finally got to make dinner for Cyril and Nathalie, unfortunately with all the cleaning and packing I was doing I ended up pressed for time, and the potatoes came out under-cooked. Dammit.
I've been wearing all the same clothes for nearly 2 months now, and most of the stuff I brought with me was stuff I knew I was going to get wine all over anyway, so I gave a bunch of my clothes and my boots away to one of the Moroccans, who seemed pretty excited about it. Despite getting rid of some clothes my bags are still too full though. I think it's all the wine and salt.
Anyway, now I'm in Paris and I'd love to stay here blogging all day, but I've got some touristy crap to do!

Ok, French road signs suck at giving directions

So, Bellegarde is a somewhat confusing little jumble of traffic circles and one-way streets, and I've been trying to figure out a shorter way to get from the center of town back to home, because my current route takes me straight into town, but then I have to take the long way out, past another traffic circle, and it's like an extra 2 miles to get back to the road where Carlot is located. So today, I tried following the sign from the center of town that points to Nimes, which is the basic direction of Carlot, but the route took me north of the road I normally travel on, then on a loopy path ending back at the traffic circle I was trying to circumvent. It was in fact even longer than the route I usually take that ends at the same traffic circle. So the sign in the center of town should in fact be pointing in the direction of the route I've been traveling the whole damn time.
So, that being said, today was pretty mellow at work. Putting things away, moving a few things around. I did draw the short straw for decuvage and spent an hour or so shoveling grape must, and I'm cultivating some pretty sweet blisters on my right hand. I also washed the bungs on all the red barrels. The process itself is not that interesting, however 'bung' is a funny word.

This is a bucket of dirty bungs.






This is a pyramid of clean bungs.





We also did some fining today, which is a process I've touched on before where something is introduced into the wine to attract the heavier particles and make them fall out of solution. Sometimes it's done with egg whites, which offends some vegans. In this case it was done with a pair of chemicals, one introduced and mixed into the wine, and the other mixed in about a half hour later. Not all wines have to be fined, but press wines are cloudier than free-run juice, and since the quality of the press wine this year is high enough to potentially end up in the final blend, it needs to be fined to bring the clarity level up to par with the rest of the wines.

On an unrelated note, I've decided to start studying for the Court of Master Sommliers' Certified level exam, with the goal of taking the test in November. That means a lot of studying between now and then. Today's little bit of info: Chilean wine regions from north to south; (all valleys) Elqui, Limari, Aconcagua, Casablanca, San Antonio, Maipo, Cachapoal, Colachuga, Curico, Maule, Itata, Bio Bio, and Malleco. My mnemonic device: Everybody loves a chicken sandwich. My cousin can consume many. I'll buy mayonnaise.

Drivin' around weekend!

With just about a week left in my fabulous winemaking adventure, I figured I'd better make sure I see as much of the area around

me as I can. So Saturday I drove to Beaucaire, which is about 20km NE of Bellegarde, just down the Rhône from Avignon. It's a pretty little town, with lots of touristy things to do.


Unfortunately I didn't know exactly what those touristy things were before I came. I looked on the tourism board's website, but I generally find it's better just to go to the tourism office and ask. Unfortunately that only works if they're open. I took this picture with my watch next to it. 'Samedi' is Saturday, the day I was there, so this would seem to indicate they are open from 9:30 to 12:30, then from 3 to 8, and as you can see from my watch, it's just after 4, and they're not open. What I missed was the conditional sentence above the time, which I didn't understand at the time, because I didn't know what Pâques was. It's Easter. What it says is, the tourism office is only open Saturdays from Easter till the end of September. Shoulda come last week.

So I ambled about for a bit, and stopped off in a cafe to write in my journal. The only other person in the cafe was this man. I don't know how well you can see in this photo, but he has only two teeth, and one of them is gold. Bling bling, Monsiuer, bling bling.

After a bit more wandering I stopped at another cafe. I was trying to find some of the many touristy things that I know must exist so close to the center of town, but one of the rough bits about French architecture and city design is that damn near everything looks alike. So, at the second cafe, I noticed again that it doesn't seem like French bar and restaurant employees are strictly required to be nice to all the patrons. I didn't see the whole story, so I'm not taking sides here, but what I saw was as follows: A family with children was sitting out in front of the cafe. A girl who looked to be about 3 got up from the table and went inside unsupervised, where she grabbed a handful of sugar from a table where some men were having coffee. The waiter/bartender stopped her, took the sugar away, chided the child, and yelled at her mother. The mother yelled back, and the child returned to the family. Weird thing is, the family didn't leave at this point. I didn't understand all of what was being said at their table, but I'm pretty sure she said something along the lines of 'I don't care what he says, he's just some prick who works in a bar.' A few minutes later the girl walked in again unsupervised, the bartender yelled at the mother again, this time he definitely asked them to leave, she said 'we're going' and they left. I paid and left as well, because I was sure I wasn't going to get anything more entertaining out of that place.

I walked around a bit more and did manage to find one of the touristy spots. Apparently this village is known for eagles, and they have some sort of Renaissance eagle-show in the old fortress at the top of the hill. Unfortunately I missed the last show of the day. Perhaps I can give it another go this weekend before heading to Paris.

So, yesterday I went to the beach. They had a specially designated areas for dogs to poo, so you know I had to take a picture of the sign.





I wend to a village called Saintes Maries de la Mer.
I swam.
The water was wonderful and warm, although there was a bit of a breeze in the air.
Also a very touristy village, and with the beautiful weather, and it being potentially one of the last really nice days of the year, the place was bustling.

All the restaurants were open to the street, and all of them serving paella and fresh seafood. This area is also in the Camargue, which is well known for salt and horses and bulls and honey and rice, so most of the souvenir shops reflected the theme.


I was wandering around town and saw some sort of tourist attraction, and I didn't know exactly what it was, only that there were people up on the roof. I found the door and it was only two euros to get in, so I checked it out. Turns out the walking on the roof was pretty much the whole thing, but the view was amazing.

Today was pretty mellow at work. We drew the press juice off the mourvedre skins so it can be de-cuved tomorrow. We're still in the process of putting everything away for the winter, today we put a bunch of the hoses and pipes in the storage room. The Moroccans are still working on end of season maintenance on all the harvesting machines. Just about all of the wines are finished and we're working on getting them in the cuves where they'll rest for the next few months.

Language lessons

So, it's not uncommon for somebody to say something to me and for me not to understand one or two words that are being said. There are some regional dialect issues from time to time, for example the word I'd learned at Gourgonnier for 'hose' was 'tuyau,' which the dictionary defines as pipe or tube. Here they also use the word 'manche' which the dictionary defines as 'handle,' which can be confusing when they use the same word to refer to a hose as to refer to the handle of a shovel.
So, today, Nicholas was trying to tell me to do something, the conversation went something like this:
Nicholas: Can you take 1 kilo of tartaric acid and put it in cuve 33 in a (word I don't know)
Me: A (word I don't know)?
Nicholas: (word I don't know) like women wear
Me: What?
Nicholas: Like woman's underwear, you know?
Me: I put on woman's underwear?
Nicholas: No, you put the acid in the (word I don't know) like women wear (mime running hands up and down leg)
Me: I don't understand.
Nicholas: Come here, I'll show you.
Me: I'm scared.
(we walk into the lab, Nicholas pulls a stocking from a box)
Nicholas: This is a stocking.
Me: Oh! A stocking!
Nicholas: You put the powdered acid inside, and put it in the top of the cuve.
Me: Ok, I understand. I thought you were asking me to do something very gay.

I also went to Bressades with Cyril today for tasting and to see the winery. It's a bit smaller than Carlot, they have about half the acreage in vines, but it's very cleverly arranged, with all the metal cuves for primary fermentation on top of the concrete ones, so the grapes are pumped in, then the wine is fed by gravity into the lower cuves when primary fermentation is complete.
It's almost dinnertime now, I was supposed to go to Nimes with Cyril and Nathalie, but their babysitter got sick, so we're eating at their house.

Long day.

Just got done working and it's 7:45. The last hour and a half was mostly waiting though. We tasted through tanks with Alain again this morning, and made some more blending decisions. These decisions basically led us to moving around what seemed like all of the wine in the winery. All the pumps were active, and several moves were in the queue. Jordan, Nicholas, and I have been waiting for the last hour and a half for the last cuve of press wine to finish pumping onto the Mourvedre skins. Since it was the last to finish fermenting, and since the Mourvedre generally has the most punch to it, and since the press juice seems to far like it's good enough to maybe end up in the final blend, we're adding all the press juice to the Mourvedre skins to try and get them a little more complexity.
With all the wine moving around there was a lot of sanitizing to be done too. Normally the pumps and hoses are just rinsed with water, but at this point we're dealing with some wines that are going through, or have finished malo, and some that aren't done with primary fermentation yet. As we've learned previously, the bacteria responsible for malolactic fermentation can go after the sugars in the wine and raise volatile acidity, so it's very important to make sure the wines are completely finished with sugar fermentation before they're exposed to the malo bacteria. I also learned that there's a visual test for malo; wines that haven't gone through malo have a very purple color to their foam, while wines that have gone through malo have a white foam. This distinction of course applies only to red wines, and it also explains why most sparkling red wines, such as Australian sparkling Shiraz, and Italian Lambrusco have such intensely purple foam.
Also, the mosquitoes seem to be back in force today. Dammit.