Another day of grape picking, and forgetting sunscreen, but at least I brought my hat today. Picked Grenache from 7 until 2:30, now I’m sitting by the pool. Not much new to report for today. I did determine that sneakers are much more comfortable for picking grapes than boots, although new sneakers will not look so new at the end of the day. Nearly all of the grapes are picked now, there is just one small block left I’m told. It must be a much warmer pocket here than at Mas Carlot; my email from Nathalie a few days ago informed me that they’ve just started bringing in the Viognier, and the rest of the grapes are still on the vine. I did successfully carry on what I hope was a fairly coherent conversation with Eve’s father Luc, and mother Lucienne, and her sister Laure last night at dinner without Eve’s translation assistance. I still need them to speak fairly slowly, it sometimes takes me a minute to find the word I’m looking for, and I’m sure I’m mis-conjugating my verbs half the time, but I think I’m communicating reasonably well. I’m guessing Bobby must have had a rough time while he was here, speaking as little French as he does. I’m also finding it hard to keep English, French, and Spanish separate in my head; I keep talking to Frankie in French, and even as I’m typing this I keep misspelling English words. I think that’s about it, here are some photos from the last few days.

Grape-picking day!

After writing in my journal, I read bit, and finally fell back asleep sometime after 3.
At 6:10a.m. I woke and hit the snooze button.
At 6:20a.m. I woke and turned the alarm off.
At 7:15 a.m. I woke, cursed, and dressed as fast as possible. I shoved 2 Clif bars in my pants pockets and ran out the door. I found Eve in the garden and she drove me to the vineyard, I ate one Clif bar on the back of the ATV on the way out. Thanks to Dad and Bobby for telling me to take them with me. Tip of the day is, Clif bars are awesome. Yesterday's omitted tip of the day, Sweet n Salty Nut bars, while delicious, do not survive well in your pocket after a full day's work.
I also learned last night that most of the men working on the picking crew are Moroccan, and are Muslim, and this month is Ramadan. That means these guys are getting up at 4 a.m., eating and drinking all they can, then working all day picking grapes in the sun when it's 32 degrees centigrade (I don't know exactly what that is in farenheit, about 90 I'd guess. I suppose I could look it up, but clearly I'm not going to.) This really did make me feel like a candy-ass when my back started hurting half-way through the day. From my time picking I learned that Syrah grows in longer bunches than Grenache, and that the Syrah clusters have pretty distinct shoulders, while the Grenache has more of a conjoined twin kind of thing. I learned that goblet pruning makes for prettier, more consistent clusters which are more backbreaking to harvest. I learned that not all Muslims know George W Bush well enough to hate him. And finally I learned that, when instructed to watch your fingers when handling grape clippers, you should also watch your hands. I nipped the heel of my left hand, but not that badly. But now that I've sustained injury the adventure has truly begun! I don't know if "It's not really an adventure until you hurt yourself." Is something I've actually heard Jen Adams say, but it was her voice in my head when I thought exactly that after cutting myself.
I count myself blessed that this work is not my full time job, although I do have to do it again tomorrow. Fortunately the Cartiers have a pool, where I spent about 3 hours lounging away the day's lower back pain. Tomorrow I will take aspirin before work. And I'll wear a hat. And sunscreen.
Eve won't be here for dinner tonight, which means I've got to make conversation in French without any translation assistance. Fingers crossed!

It's dark outside.

Merde.
I woke up in the dark, which is a bad sign when you're still dealing with jet-lag, because it typically means you've woken up way too early, and are going to have a hard time getting back to sleep. In this case, it means that I have woken up too early, and I'm going to have a hard time getting back to sleep.
I woke from more fitful dreaming. Perhaps I'm having too much cheese before bed. I can't remember the context of the dream, just the feeling of having been dealt an injustice. Of having been given something I deserved, that I had earned, and at the same time having it taken away.
The clock read 1:23 a.m. when I woke up. I need to get back to sleep, I'm supposed to go pick grapes at 7a.m.. I sat in the dark for a while, listening to the moth that's trapped in my room flying into the wall over and over again. Moths are morons. I found out last night that the French word for Moth translates to 'butterfly of the night,' and I wondered if I'd like them anymore if I thought of them as butterflies. I don't think so.
I tried to count sheep, but the sheep turned into some kind of muddy water or oil coming out of a fountain and forming numbers in the sky and in my mind they were getting my feet all wet and dirty, plus I couldn't settle on which language to count in, so I stopped.
Then I started entertaining myself with fantasies that I'd actually publish this whole adventure, and the book would be wildly successful and I'd do a book tour and insist that my publisher get me on the Jon Stewart show. It was at that point that I decided I was brilliant, and got up to start writing.

When I turned the light on I found out that the moth was actually a grasshopper. There are some big-ass gnarly grasshoppers here. Like, the kind that don't just fly away when you get close to them. They sit in the grapevines, and when you reach in to pick the grapes they look at you like 'we don't take kindly to your type around here...'

First day of work

I set my alarm for 6 am, woke up at 9. Ironically I was having very fitful dreams about being late for work. Eve's family is very nice. We ate dinner at her uncle's house with some friends of theirs who apparently summer in a caravan on the Cartiers' property. I don't remember their names, but they had a little girl named Caroline and a yorkshire terrier that looked like a bigger version of Chiqi and Maddie. It was their last night in town. We had pasta with fresh tomatoes and merguez sausage and rosé. When the cheese course came, Eve's aunt was concerned that the cheeses might be too strong for me. She clearly didn't know who she was dealing with.

The place where I'm staying is a less-used part of the house. The whole chateau is connected, but divided into sections, so I'm between Eve's parents' house and the winery. I'm just thinking how much some in the states would pay to make their houses look like this, and here's this place just sitting here barely used.


















As I'm writing this I'm sitting outside under a canopy of grapevines eating toast and homemade quince (fr. coing) jam and drinking tea out of a bowl. Go ahead, tell me you're not jealous. Last night I tried a fruit wine made from néfle, which is a tree fruit that's apparently native to this part of the world, and also grows in Japan. We looked it up on Wikipedia to see if it grew in the US, but the Wikipedia page was in French, so I didn't understand it that well. Eve's uncle Fred has the Japanese variety. Eve's aunt's name is Blanchine and her cousin's name is Olivier.

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We had salad, tomatoes, peppers, eggs, bread and cheese for lunch.
Today we did pump-overs, topped off some barrels, and married together some wine from last vintage with new juice for the vin de table. I got an email back from Nathalie, she tells me I'm going to have to practice my French before I get there. Good thing Eve is the only one here who speaks English.

I did my p90x chest and back workout, made it almost all the way through before my shoulder started to hurt. Eve's mom made Tian, which is a provençal dish with onions, potato, eggplant, zucchini, tomato, and pretty much everything else from the garden, it was awesome. We also had a toast spread called Melet Provençal, which is a puree of fennel seed, anchovy, and pepper, which was pretty awesome, and I'm definitely going to try and make it when I get home. Eve's dad made pork chops.

During dinner I explained why we call the funny bone the funny bone, and found out that the french nickname for the humerus translates to 'the little jew'. I was not able to obtain any explanation for this.

I didn't think I could possibly hate the 100-point system any more....

First of all, it's not a 100-point system.

Here's the breakdown of what the points mean from Allen Meadows who, of all of the writers using the 100-point system, is one whose opinion I respect far more than many others....

95 - 100: Truly incomparable and emotionally thrilling. By definition, it is reference standard for its appellation. Less than 1% of fine wine (eg $30+ per bottle).

90 - 94: Outstanding. Worth a special effort to purchase and cellar and will provide memorable drinking experiences.

85 - 89: Very good to high quality. Wines that offer high quality, some flair and generally very good typicity. “Good Value” wines will often fall into this category. Worth your attention. 80 - 84: Average to Good quality. Fine wine, but solid rather than exciting.

70-79: Good wines, acceptable. But personally I find life too short to waste on boring wines

60-69: Not faulty, but plain and low quality fruit, e.g. dilute. Or crass winemaking, e.g. dolled up with oak chips. These points yet with no redeeming features.

Now, how exactly do we even consider this a 100-point system when only 40 of the points on the scale are used? And Meadows will actually score good wines under 90 points. A constant reminder to his readers that IT DOESN'T HAVE TO GET OVER 90 POINTS TO BE A GOOD WINE. I'm sorry if I seem a little aggrivated, it's just that I've recently come across 2 websites dedicated exclusively to wines that have scored over 90 points. I'm not going to link to them here, because I couldn't bear the thought that I might actually direct traffic to either of their sites. They're both built entirely around the premise that nothing that gets under 90 points is worth drinking. This is, in my humble opinion, and if you will please forgive my language, a massive pile of rancid horseshit.

As is evidenced by Meadows' point breakdown above, it's more of a 6-point system than a 100-point system, since the subtlety of difference between, say, a, 86 and an 88-point rating is basically subjective and meaningless, and here's why: Meadows rates the 2005 Joseph Drouhin Chambolle Musigny 89 points, and the 2005 Joseph Drouhin Gevrey Chambertin 88 points. By his own definition, that means they are both "Very good to high quality." But which one's better? Is he saying the Chambolle is a better Chambolle than the Gevrey is a Gevrey? Or just that the Chambolle is a better Burgundy overall? How accurately can you quantify that kind of a distinction, and how reliable can it possibly be? How many factors of circumstance, environment, and taster fatigue could have come into play the day Meadows tasted these 2 wines? Can you really make a objective distinction between an 86 point and an 88 point wine? And more importantly, do you need to? Can't we just agree that they're both very good wines? So far we're just talking about the differences between two similar scores from one writer, we haven't even touched on what it means when a wine gets scored by multiple publications. Check this shit out... The 2005 K Vintners The Boy got 92 points from Jay Miller of the Wine Advocate, and...wait for it....74 points from Harvey Steinman of the Wine Spectator. Can you say "What the fuck, Batman?" Ok, to be fair maybe Harvey got a bad bottle or something, so how about another example? The 2005 Penfolds Koonunga Hill gets 91 points from Robert Parker, and 85 points from Harvey Steinman. That means, according to their respective pubications' scoring definitions, while for Harvey, the wine just barely qualified as "Very good: a wine with special qualities," for Parker, the wine is "An outstanding wine of exceptional complexity and character." And while Harvey feels the wine should be consumed immediately, Parker contends that the wine can be cellared and consumed until 2018. This discrepancy in opinion reflects another major flaw in the 100-point system: why even bother all using the same rating system if there's no consistency? Presumably all of these writers intend for their scores to be used as a resource for the consumer, to help people make decisions on what wine to buy, but is it really any help whatsoever when one publication gives 91 points, and another 85? Wouldn't it be just as easy for consumers to understand if Parker just called it 'outstanding' and Harvey just called it 'very good'?

And last but not least, there's the 100-point wine. This has got to be one of the most obnoxious parts of the 100-point system. Are you really telling me there's such thing as a perfect wine? And more importantly, are you really saying there's a difference between a 99-point wine and a 100-point wine? Aren't 'not reccomended', 'mediocre', 'good', 'very good', 'outstanding', and 'classic' enough rating options?

Seriously.

Holy overpriced Chardonnay, Batman!

Ok, Rombauer is one of our top-selling chardonnays. I don't care for it, not my style, but the important part is, we sell it for $28. This place in Seattle's got it for $39.99! Seriously!

Kacher wines to look forward to!

Yeah, so I never did get around to writing another blog post, or putting up tasting notes while I was in France, but we've ordered our wines based on what I tasted while I was there, so here are a few of the things that're coming in that I'm particularly excited about...

Domaine Fondreche has 3 Rhone reds named Persia, Fayard, and Nadal, all of which I thought were fantastic. I actually tried a bottle of the 04 Nadal last night and it was drinking great. All 3 of these should be priced in the mid-$20's. We'll also be getting Fondreche's 08 rose, which was suuper good, much like the 07, very light, very elegant, beautiful color, and perfumed like strawberries and roses. Fondreche is also producing a new entry-level red called Altitude 1912, a VDP Valcluse blend of Merlot, Grenache, and Syrah. It's a great value wine, should be right about $10, an everyday wine with good acidity and a nice balance of power and elegance.

From Chateau d'Or et de Gueles and Petite Cassagne, we'll be receiving all of our old favorites. The d'Or et de Gueles Costieres de Nimes Select, and the La Bolida were both outstanding, gripping and powerful wines. The Petite Cassagne Rouge is, once again, an outstanding value, the white is, if possible, even better than the '07, and the rose was one of my favorites from the whole trip.

We'll be getting 2 reds from Mas Carlot; the Grenache-Syrah, and the Mourvedre-Syrah "Enfants Terribles." I tasted multiple vintages of both of these and they are really impressive wines. We'll be getting rose from them as well.

The 08 Mas des Bressades Grenache Syrah was particularly impressive for how complete it was in it's youth. Tasting so many young wines, they can all start to blend together in your mind and taste the same. The Bressades Grenache Syrah, however, was very well-integrated, and delicious, with black tea, potpurri, and black raspberry aromatics.

There are alot more than just these, but these are the ones that I'm super-extra looking forward to. There are also Burgs, Chateaunufs, Cote Roties, and some Alsatians that I really loved, but those won't be coming for a bit longer, the wines above will be arriving in mid-May, and I just can't wait!!!