- The start of the white harvest
- August rain: much needed refreshment
- Follow the harvest on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram
Category Archives: Chateau Bauduc
The start of the white harvest – in pictures
Our harvest kicked off this morning. Usually, there’s a bit of breathing space between the end of the school holidays and the start of the vendanges but the vines are more advanced this year. So it’s all go.
The bunches are healthy and the leaves bright and verdant as we move into the final stretch. The forecast looks promising so the whites will be picked next week, mostly, during the cool of the early morning. We’ll harvest the red grapes for making rosé at around the same time, a week or two before the first Merlots for producing red, and lastly the Cabernets. Keep reading
August rain: much needed refreshment
September 02 2015
Forget the rain dance. Our review at the end of July, following six weeks of drought, was called ’Time to borrow some rain’ and it did the trick: Mother Nature acted on the collective response of ’you’re bloody welcome to it’ with some heavy showers in August. In fact, we had more rain at Bauduc in August than in the three previous months put together. Conveniently, the last instalment of rain was on 31 August, which is just as well.
Here are some pics and, yes, a weather graph or two.
At Bauduc, we had half the normal rainfall in May, June and July combined, then twice the normal rain (or the average over 30 years) in August. No rain since the (UK) Bank Holiday Monday, with none forecast for the first ten days of September.
July Review
July 30 2015
- Time to borrow some rain
- Bordeaux 2015 – dry and hot to date
- Why wine is cheaper on the Continent
- Last of the Summer Rosé
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Time to borrow some rain
July 29 2015
As you know, farmers are never happy, so forgive us for wanting just a smidgen of rain as we’ve had precious little since the second week of June. It’s also been blisteringly hot for long periods and, as few people realise, us Appellation Contrôlée vignerons are not allowed to irrigate our crops. Still, other than the younger vines on drier soils, the rows look remarkably green and lush here, so we remain positive for the Autumn harvest.
We’ve seen half the normal rainfall since the new season’s growth kicked off with budbreak at the start of April. The Autumn and Winter of 2014/2015 brought 25% less rain (356 mm from October 2014 to February 2015, inclusive) than the 30-year average (470 mm), so it’s not as if we began with a water surplus. Since then we’ve had much less rain than normal, each and every month:
March 2015 40 mm v 64 mm (30 year Bordeaux average)
April 2015 – 51 mm v 78 mm (ditto)
May 2015 – 26.5 mm v 79.8 mm
June 2015 – 46 mm v 63 mm
July 2015 – 15.5 mm to date v 50 mm
Total since budbreak, April to July 2015 – 139 mm v 271 mm
Note that these figures are local (20 kms SE of the city) and may not be the same for all Bordeaux regions, although it’s a similar story elsewhere – the last six weeks have been dry and hot everywhere in Bordeaux. Other areas, such as Margaux, Léognan, St-Emilion and Blaye, have also had half the normal rainfall since the beginning of April, or even less. The Northern Médoc has seen more rain than us, and that was in April, May and early June. I’ll publish the stats from other areas shortly. Keep reading
June Review
June 30 2015
- Bordeaux Facing 40°C
- How technology is helping winemakers bypass supermarkets
- Chateau Margaux, new cellars, and a dinner
- The Bauduc rosé cocktail for hot weather
- Last day of Introductory pricing
Bordeaux facing 40˚C
This post is also published on JancisRobinson.com and Liv-ex.
’Come at the end of June’, I said to my mother when we arranged for her to stay, a while back. ’The weather should be nice then.’ It has indeed been hot and sunny but we certainly weren’t predicting that the temperature could reach 40°C this afternoon. We – and the vines – are bracing ourselves for a heatwave over the next week, with the odd storm mixed in for good measure.
You can identify Bordeaux because it’s the one marked 40˚C. In June…
The prospects for the vintage, heatwave notwithstanding, are bright. Bordeaux had close to ideal conditions for the rapid flowering in late May and early June, which was crucial for the size and evenness of the crop; then rain after the 9 June was helpful for the thirsty vines. Keep reading
How technology is helping wine makers bypass supermarkets
June 26 2015
Victoria Moore, The Telegraph’s wine critic, wrote an interesting article on 20 June about European wine producers selling direct to UK consumers; naturally, we were delighted to be included – to be fair, there isn’t a long list to choose from – and to have our white described as ’beautifully crisp’.
’… Social media – together with simple email – is enabling small producers to form a more intimate relationship with those who enjoy drinking their wine.‘
Intimate? Steady on.
Anything but this
In fact, the piece was given the title How technology is helping wine sellers bypass the supermarkets, presumably by a sub-editor, with the introduction “Wine producers are using social media to sell bottles directly to their clients, with no middle-men required.”
Of course, ‘wine sellers’ are not usually the same people as ‘wine producers’, as Victoria explains:
‘Bypassing retailers and agents to sell direct is hardly a new phenomenon – I think every British wine drinker is born with an ancestral memory of stopping at a French roadside for a dégustation.
‘But modern communications technology is transforming the experience. Each of us is now like a miniature station, capable of broadcasting the minutiae of our lives across the world on multiple channels from Snapchat to Periscope to Instagram. This is enabling a joyful inversion of Amazon’s “long tail”; instead of one faceless retail giant amassing volume by selling tiny quantities of a large number of lines, social media – together with simple email – is enabling small producers to form a more intimate relationship with those who enjoy drinking their wine. Keep reading
The infamous Bauduc Summer Cocktail
June 09 2015
Old friends know about our infamous cocktail – it’s ideal for small drinks parties as you can prepare the mix ahead.
For 25 long drinks, mix 2 bottles Château Bauduc Rosé 2014, 50cl cranberry juice, a dash of lime cordial, good squeeze of fresh lime juice, and a slug of Vodka. Measures to taste, of course. When guests arrive, add ice into tall glasses and pour in the mix to half way; then fill with Canada Dry ginger ale* (2 litres needed in all).
Test ahead. Add mint leaves for a garnish and squeeze in a lime wedge for a zippy first taste.
Back to where we started
May 28 2015
Gordon Ramsay opened Maze Grill at 11 Park Walk in Chelsea last month, and we’re delighted that Chateau Bauduc Sauvignon and our Sauternes is served by the glass. Nothing extraordinary about that, you might think, but the address has special significance for us: it’s where Ange and I had our first date. (And later, more famously, the place where Gordon would make his name.)
Back in the autumn of 1989, 11 Park Walk was the name of a lively Italian restaurant which had a convivial atmosphere and a tasty spaghetti and lobster dish on the menu. It was the scene for our first dinner date (we’d met at a dinner party two weeks before) and, after we’d enjoyed the pasta and a bottle of Tignanello, Ange asked what I was doing at the weekend. I was planning on watching Chelsea play Millwall, and when she asked if she could come too, it was immediately obvious that this was a relationship that had potential. We went to the game, just around the corner from Park Walk, and Chelsea won 4-0. The result was that Ange and I got engaged a few months later and we were married in July on Bastille Day, just after the 1990 World Cup.
11 Park Walk closed in the early nineties (anyone remember mortgage rates at 14+%?) and a wonderful restaurant called Aubergine took its place in 1993. A twentysomething Gordon Ramsay had been hired as head chef and the food was so good, and the wine so reasonably priced, that Ange and I wanted to host her (important) birthday party there. When I put the suggestion to the man himself in the restaurant one morning, he wondered how many people we were thinking of entertaining. I said ’about, um, thirty?’. ’Thirty!’ he barked; ’I’m not a fucking caterer!’ Anyway, we cut the number down to two tables of ten, I think, and it was a brilliant evening.
Ramsay deservedly went on to win a Michelin star at Aubergine in 1995 and two stars in 1997, before he had a run-in with the owners. It wasn’t long before he set up on his own at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in Royal Hospital Road, the year before we moved to Bordeaux in 1999. Bauduc became the house wine at Royal Hospital Road – that’s another story – shortly before he won his coveted third Michelin star in late 2001.
So, moving on a few years, when Ramsay returned to his old stamping ground at 11 Park Walk with Maze Grill, we were delighted that they chose to put Bauduc on the wine list. And with the restaurant being just around the corner from Stamford Bridge, more than reasonable that we should go and sample it. And the cooking. Keep reading