Château Bauduc has been mentioned on Decanter.com under the heading ‘Gordon Ramsay lends his name to a Bordeaux wine‘.
Jane Anson’s report highlighted the fact that this exclusive label has been awarded to us for free, and that we’re celebrating ten years as the house wine at his restaurants.
‘Gordon Ramsay’s Selection’ includes two whites, a red and our rosé, all of which are served at his restaurants. All are currently available direct from our website, including a super mixed dozen. Keep reading
We’re bringing in all the merlot this week, so everyone’s helping out on the sorting table. Most of the time we’re removing any unwanted leaves or green bits, as we just want the fresh, ripe grapes going into the fermentation tanks.
It’s the week of harvesting most of our Merlot for the reds. The quality is surprisingly high with minimal rot, and I suspect that 2008 will be a far better vintage than we might have hoped for just a few weeks ago. This is the view of the vineyard at 7.45am, and it’s quite beautiful, with the fairly narrow, 1.5 metre wide rows of merlot we planted in 2002 in the foreground, and the sauvignon blanc down the hill towards the woods. 
Now that we’re entering a recession, we’ve hit on the idea of bringing in local children to carry out the menial tasks of picking the grapes. The schoolteachers in our local town have been only too happy to get their charges out into the fresh air, and best of all the kids are just the right height to be cutting off the bunches. And they’re free. 
We’re still hanging in there, or rather the red grapes are. The forecast, although constantly changing, is in our favour. After some rain yesterday, more rain now and we’d have to harvest like crazy. Worse still, some of the grapes aren’t quite there yet and the days – and hours of sunlight – are getting shorter. 
While we prepare for harvesting the majority of the red, we’re busy in the chai with vinifying the white wine. Now that all the grapes have been pressed and the juice has settled, we’ve kicked off the fermentation. The old semillon from Les Trois Hectares has gone into French oak barrels, whereas most of the sauvignon blanc is fermenting in a chilled stainless steel tank. We’ve also got some sauvignon blanc in barrels too. 
We took a break from the harvest by entertaining a team from Charlton House, the caterers, who were staying with us for the weekend in the chateau and in the farmhouse. Dinner at the chateau on friday night was followed by a tour of Bordeaux vineyards on saturday, with a full-on evening out at La Tupina, Bordeaux’s best known restaurant. The wine list there is on the pricey side, and we wanted to drink wine from vineyards we’d visited, so we asked them politely if we could bring a bottle or two. They agreed and the bottle or two expanded to four magnums, but they didn’t seem to mind.