December 2004 and January 2005
Author: Jacky
Well, I bet it comes as no surprise that we are behind with our diary writing. As usual we have been pretty busy and by the time we finish our working day, which is almost always more than seven hours, including the weekends, we are just too tired to do anything else and often the best we can do is collapse! But that is not to say that we are unhappy about it, far from it, as our first ever bottling is scheduled for February 7th, and this is most certainly a red-letter day for us. It is incredible to think that we are now in our third calendar year here. We have gone through huge changes in that time, with a new and fully operational winery, a successful first harvest, wine of a quality we could only have dreamt of and a vineyard in a very healthy state after two years of work.
The Winery
Work is now slowing down in the winery much to Iain’s delight. Whilst the winemaking process itself is completely fascinating, he is not sorry that the time-consuming cleaning is less frequent. Mind you we are probably a little paranoid about cleaning and, as with everything, 100% is not enough. In general, the wines are now pretty much looking after themselves. As the ambient temperatures drop, the wines are entering a period of repose. The white wine in the barrels has to be stirred on its’ lees every other day, but that in the vats no longer requires any particular attention. The malolactic fermentation for the reds is now complete and only the Cabernet Sauvignon and the Rosé required a single racking with aeration. Our oenologist’s visits have slowed down and we no longer have to be in the winery at 7 am. three times a week.
We continue to taste the wines regularly, some days we are full of hope for them, others less so. But from time to time we get a boost. Our Bank Manager paid us a visit and we showed him the winery and had a tasting with him (can you imagine this in England? Knowing your Bank Manager personally is a great advantage). He was honestly impressed with all the wines but when he tasted the Sauvignon Blanc he was overwhelmed. Later in December a fellow vigneron who owns one of the best Cotes de Duras vineyards visited us. He tasted all our wines, loved our reds, found the rosé to be of excellent quality and most amazing of all made Iain blush (I have never actually seen this happen before) by saying he had always tried to make a white wine like ours! Well……we were speechless.
We were more than a little concerned about the rosé though. During one of the regular checks Iain was sure he detected a smell of glue on the nose, but only at the top of the vat not from any wine taken from the tasting tap. A smell of glue is not good as it indicates the presence of acetone, a significant problem if it occurs during fermentation. It seemed a little puzzling at this time of the wines life so we asked the oenologist, his advice was to let it breathe for a bit by removing the cap of the vat and see if the smell dissipated, if not then we’d need to do an emergency racking. It seemed to disappear but then opening the top again, after a few days, it was back again! It took us a while to get to the root of the problem - but - about a week or so after first discovering the problem I suddenly remembered that we had re-glued the rubber surround to one of the vat lids – and that lid was now on the top of the rosé vat! Pretty silly, but happily that meant that the wine was perfectly fine! The oenologist sniggered openly when we owned up…..
January
11th was a red-letter day for us - we filled our barrels with the red
wine.
In total we have fifteen French oak barrels filled with our best Merlot and a further three filled with our Cabernet Sauvignon, which will be used to make our premium red. We also have four American oak barrels to add a touch of oak to our earlier drinking red that should be bottled around July this year. The premium red will probably not be bottled until early 2006 (cash-flow is becoming a bit of a problem!). All these barrels are now sitting happily in the winery on new, unbudgeted, stands.
The other major job in the winery has been the preparation of the
white and rose ready for bottling. In the middle of the month both were
filtered. Euralis, the company that supply us with all our winemaking
products, undertook filtration. A large van arrived at 7.30 in the morning.
Inside was a pretty impressive machine loaded with filtering plates
through which our wine was passed to remove as many small particles
as possible. A further finer filtration at the time of bottling will
remove any remaining minute particles.
In the Vineyard
All is quiet. We do not plan to start pruning until February as the later the pruning the lower the risk of disease to the vines. Iain has started, time permitting, to check the trellising, but other than this we are leaving the vineyard to recover from its hard work.
But now is the time for planning. For the last two years we have used
Terres de Sud for all our viticultural supplies and advice. We have
decided to change this year and have now placed our order and our confidence
with De Marco. Reasons for the change are many but most importantly
because we found last year, particularly as we neared harvest time and
difficult weather conditions in the vineyard, that the De Marco representative,
with whom we had already had dealings, offered us a much better service
in terms of advice and guidance. Our change of supplier did not please
the Terres de Sud representative, who I am sure had taken us for granted
as ‘his customers’. There is now a new representative (nothing
to do with us, I hasten to add, as the previous one has actually been
promoted!). The new guy visited us to find out why we had switched suppliers.
We laid it on the line with him, Iain was pretty brutal, and then took
him for a tasting in the winery. On the positive side, I think the whole
thing might make them take us a bit more seriously, he was clearly impressed
and, without even asking the price (dangerous), placed an order for
some wine.
And so to business..
This aspect of our lives has now become more time consuming. This job is not just about being a farmer in the vines, or a wine-maker in the winery, but also about being a salesman and an administrator, these latter aspects now coming into their own. We have now enthusiastically leaped the hurdles of vineyard management, produced the crop, vinified the grapes and are now moving on to the very much more difficult and challenging role of selling the results, i.e. marketing. To this end we are heavily involved in –
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Defining our image, which centres on the design of our label, has been the most
challenging. A good friend of ours is helping us with this. Despite his years of design experience we, as per usual, are being difficult to please and his ideas are not instantly taken up by us! We pinned up loads of different design ideas all around the house, glued trial labels onto many many bottles, canvassed friends and relatives for ideas and preferences and have generally been spoilt for choice. Finally though we settled on a mix of ideas, using a colour swatch painted by our friend and his CHATER logo. If you have looked at the web site recently you will have seen the result –
Of course there has been the back label to design as well. This is where we have put all the legal stuff. There are endless rules and regulations to follow so I decided to try and get approval from French customs for this. I sent them copies of the labels and asked for approval. After a few emails back and forth our labels met with no further comments. So I asked if I could have a written letter stating that they conformed to the law. Oops! This was met with a very stern telling off! It seems that advice can be offered but a seal of approval is most certainly not available! It seems very odd that there are rules and regulations to follow, that we have been told by email that all is OK but there is no official seal of approval. Oh well…we go out there boldly anyway. We have decided to produce back labels in both English and in French. This, of course, posed it’s own challenges. Whilst we are quite capable of writing our own ‘wine-speak’ English information for the labels, the French version was quite a different matter. Again we have been lucky. Our French neighbour being fluent in English was a godsend along with our oenologist, also fluent in both languages. With theirs and Jose’s help we were finally able to define the words for the French back label. This was a pretty good lesson in French for me!And of course we have also had to decide on which printers to use. Nowhere near as difficult as designing the label. We chose a printer in Bergerac, with a rather ‘special’ salesman. The French use the word ‘special’ (say it with a French accent), to mean someone a little different, not necessarily bad but certainly unusual! Despite his quirkiness he has been extremely helpful. I was able to visit the factory and see their production line in action. This visit was especially fortuitous as whilst there I was able to be a little nosy and got to see the various qualities of paper that were available for the labels (not something the salesman was ever very keen to show us). As an aside this is quite an interesting point as he, along with many other salesmen here, always approach sales from the perspective of saving money and therefore offer lower quality. It generally takes a while for people to realise that we are about quality at all levels. Anyway, to return to the point at hand, I was able to choose us a much better quality paper for the labels. They are set to be delivered in early February.
Deciding on which bottles to use – sounds simple? We of course are always taken with the most expensive ones. As with the labels, we have had many different bottle types sitting around the house to help us decide which quality and type to use. Issues surrounding the choice of bottle are not just price related, but the style of bottle also affects the bottling process itself, as well as the type of packaging required and of course the shape of the label. We decided upon one particular range of bottles that offers high quality at a reasonable price and with a common shape that means the labels, packaging and bottling can all be based on the same bottle.
Corks – again a multitude of choices. But narrowing these down was pretty easy. We had little trouble (in hindsight, compared to everything else!) in choosing natural cork and the design for the cork. When you uncork a bottle you’ll see what we decided on.
Capsules – what should they look like? Seemingly not too important perhaps but there is still the design to work on as well as deciding how many capsules should be duty paid for the French market and how many without the duty paid stamp for export. We have chosen a black capsule to match the label with a gold band near the bottom in which the CHATER logo will be written. For the export capsules the top will also have CHATER on it.
Cartons – what should the box look like? Boxes for 12 or 6? As of the end of January we are still pondering this one and have yet to find a supplier that we like!
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And finally but by no means insignificant deciding how we should bottle the wine, who should bottle it for us, where we are going to store it all once it is bottles (for the white and rose along there are 20,000 bottles!), and when we should be bottling. We finally decided to go with a company in Libourne of very high repute who we visited to assure ourselves of their standards. They will be bottling the wine for us here using their mobile bottling line – of which they have nine! The bottles will then all be stored at their warehouse in Libourne. The capsules and labels will be put on as orders are processed.
Being able to label wines as being from the appellation is not an automatic right. Each year the wines have to be submitted to the Syndicat des Viticulteurs for analysis and tasting to ensure that they are up to the required standard. Only when the ‘agrément’, as it is called, has been given to the wines can they be called AOC wines, in our case AOC Côtes de Duras. Several dates are set for this and we decided to submit our white and rosé for the agrément in December. Armed with all the necessary papers off I went to register for the agrément. Not as simple as I had hoped. It appeared that we had filled in our annual harvest declaration incorrectly and couldn’t apply for the agrément. I feared that this would have major repercussions for us. The problem was that (unbelievably) we hadn’t declared any rosé. It’s a long story but basically I had filled in the return with advice from the local Mairie, which is where the return has to be lodged initially. Mistake. Luckily, with the help of a very helpful lady at the Maison du Vin the form was altered (it now looks quite a mess unfortunately) and I sent the amended copy off to the Centre des Viticulture in Agen. (I am gradually learning who does what now and who is responsible for what thankfully!) Forms duly amended our application for agrément was accepted. And happily both white and rosé received the ‘label’, i.e. the right to be classified as AOC wines.
We now have to complete and file a monthly customs return, which details our stock levels of wine and of duty paid capsules. I spent an hour with the customs man in St Foy who, very understandingly, took me through the whole procedure. The first return was for November so early in December I took the ‘Cahier des Entries et Sorties’ along and together we filled in the first months entry. Of course nothing is ever simple and my figures for the month didn’t quite match the harvest return. The problem was the lees. For the harvest return we had to estimate the quantity of lees, which we did. But after filing the harvest return we ended up with more lees. By law the lees have to be sent to the distillery and of course when they take them away there is an official piece of paper documenting how much they have taken. More than we had declared – oh no, worryingly even the customs people seem unaware of how to sort it out! I still have the piece of paper and we carry forward the amount every month. I am sure eventually the customs man will decide where on the giant form we should balance the figures.
I have also spent a morning visiting the customs in Agen to try and understand what we have to do to sell our wine while adhering to the morass of rules and regulations. I am still not sure exactly what the due processes are but one thing is clear, we need to have filled in lots of forms and be registered in various ways. This has now been complicated by the fact that we have decided to become a limited company from January 1st 2005. I expect and dread more forms!
Early in December we went to the annual Vinitech exhibition in Bordeaux. In an exhibition hall nearly one kilometre long were housed hundreds of exhibitors. This is where we started our search for capsules, bottles, packaging and corks. Jose was with us and he threw himself in to it and was off chatting to the exhibitors and trying to find the best deals for us. For us it was all a bit overwhelming and by lunchtime we had had enough. Lunch beckoned and after that we visited some of the equipment stands, Iain stopping from time to time to admire the latest hi-tech piece of tractor equipment! All in all a pretty interesting day for us for our first visit. But as with everything we do we are always put to the test. The trip home was a nightmare. The ring road around Bordeaux is often blocked and we hit it at the worst time. A one and a quarter hours journey home took us four hours! We’ll think twice about going next year and we thought we had left the congestion on the M25 behind!!!).
And finally, rather boringly, we are still trying to get the snag list
for the winery tidied up, but we are finding it very difficult to get
anyone to come back and actually finish the job completely. Fortunately
the snags are superficial in that none of them have prevented us in
any way from making wine, but nevertheless they are detracting from
the overall appearance of the place – we will battle on.
Daily Life
It is quite amazing to think that Beck and I have been here nearly two years and Iain a year. Time has most definitely flown. Whilst we have no regrets about the changes we have made to our lives we do nevertheless miss our family and friends back in England and as time goes on they seem further and further away. Whilst we have made some good friends here, those back in England still remain closer to our hearts. And on a more basic level we are now finding that we miss more and more the greater variety and choice in English shops, and we don’t even like shopping! Tea is a particular issue. Sad to say that we are PG Tips loose tea drinkers (no tea bags for us!) – no such thing here – and even though visitors always always bring us tea we have now reached rock bottom and are forced to cut open the PG tips tea bags that we have to try and make a better cuppa! And then there’s Cheddar. Why is it that English supermarkets are full of French cheeses when here the choice is firmly French and very often local? We did once find a market stall that sold English cheddar at a mere £12 per kilo. We did buy some but decided that we weren’t that desperate after all at that price! I remember my trip back in November and that I thought the local Boots store was like an Aladdin’s cave. When we lived in England Boots rarely got a look in. It’s all relative. Whilst there are many very local and traditional things here, we cannot but hanker after many things English; pubs, cheddar, PG tips, wines from around the world, somewhere to go in the evenings!!! BUT the biggest problem is England is not the place to be making wine…….
For the first time since I can’t remember when we had a free Sunday at the beginning of December. Most depressingly neither of us knew what to do and we spent the entire day rattling round the house not knowing how to relax. We have been so involved that we have lost the ability to relax, although to be fair neither of us are the sort to sit back and relax anyway! Having said that though we did take ourselves off for a weekend in Carcassone. What an amazing place. The old city is just stunning and truly resembles something from a film set.
Christmas – well – an experience in France to say the least. Whilst they seem besotted with lighting the outside of their houses, which they do from the beginning of December much to the delight of the French Electricity company, the only changes in the shops are the huge additions of boxes of chocolates and children’s toys. Christmas cards are very difficult to come by, New Year cards are much more common and New Year itself is a much more important occasion, wrapping paper, tinsel and all the trimmings are non-existent. Of course this does bring some relief compared to England. For example on the Wednesday before Christmas we went to the supermarket. In England this would be an expedition to fear, here we walked straight up to an empty checkout! In fact Christmas is something of a non-event compared to England, which is wonderful, but I fear that as the years go buy commercialism will win!
New Year was fun. Iain’s brother and family were with us as was Granddad and along with our best friends here we enjoyed a great evening of fun and games. In fact the week between Christmas and New Year was definitely all about fun and relaxation.
We have found granddad a car to use when he is here. A very old car! The price of second hand cars here is extortionate and it is no wonder that people buy a new car here and then keep it until it falls apart. An old Sierra of around 20 years which in England would be given away cost €1,000, with (miraculously, and not a little suspiciously) an MOT until 2007 (the MOT equivalent here lasts for two years!). Since buying the car it has had problems with headlight bulbs, the indicator, and jerks and jumps far too much – several visits later to the garage don’t really seem to have sorted it out! Oh well.
Beck continues to enjoy and succeed at school. Her end of term report was excellent and we could not ask more of her. She loves her school here but always misses her friends back in England. Horse riding is still her passion and she goes regularly every week. Weekends she finds a little tedious as despite numerous efforts we find it difficult to coax her French friends out of their traditional family weekends.
Strange but true – we have actually been doing some decorating. This is the time to undertake any personal ventures, as very shortly we will be hell-bent on marketing and work in the vineyard. So more than a year after our friends gave us the paint for our bedroom as a house-warming present we have finally opened the cans and now our bedroom looks fantastic.
Unfortunately we seem to have been victims recently of a series of ‘little green meanies’ that have invaded our every day lives. All very boring with nothing ultra-serious happening but on a regular basis ‘things’ keep going wrong. It got to the point at the end of January where we felt nervous about just about everything we touched, probably the most serious has been a series of catastrophes with our various PCs. We have three now, the third being acquired because one of the others broke. This has subsequently been fixed with glue and sticky tape (Iain: bloody cheek, I would have said it had been expertly repaired and all the lost data miraculously recovered with a high degree of technical competence) but all three seem prone to various levels of failure, much to Iain’s complete irritation (Iain: this bit IS true ). Throughout the much of the time we have been here we have felt as if everything but everything is being sent to try us. It is as if we have to undergo every ordeal there is before can we can feel any sense of satisfaction and success. As fast as we cross one hurdle at least one more and often several pop up! But we won’t be beaten that easily.
Anyway, we are about to bottle our first vintage, which we are feeling pretty happy about. Forget those other wines you’ve been drinking – it’s almost time to uncork a…
