Daniel our vineyard manager – a photo journal 1999-2026, part two

Our vineyard manager Daniel retired at the end of June, having started at Bauduc way back in 1985. We have put together a photo journal of his time with us, and we sent the first part out last week – click here if you missed it.

Here’s the second part. Above is a photo of Daniel and Nelly with us five years ago during the 2021 harvest. We’ve all worked together since our first harvest in 1999 – we took Nelly on as a trainee then.

If you have any comments or questions, please email Georgie, Angela and Gavin by clicking this link, or reply to this email and Georgie or Angela will get back to you.

We’ve just said goodbye to our great friends, the Gilbeys, so here’s a photo-journal of the last 10 days, spruced up towards the end with a few pictures from the archives.

Before that we have a quick look at the bunches in the vines as véraison is well under way in the vineyard as the grapes change colour. There’s a way to go, and we don’t want to tempt fate, but with any luck 2025 will be another to follow in the sequence of very good Bordeaux vintages every year ending in zero or five since 1990: 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020…

We were married on Bastille Day in July 1990, in fact, and back then we couldn’t have imagined we’d experience the vast majority of those harvests, with 2000 being our first full season in charge here.

We’ll keep you posted on the next one.

What a scorcher. Though to be fair it’s probably as hot here as it is for any of our readers at the moment: 40˚C is the forecast for 1 July. Crikey.

So that heralds the return of the famous Bauduc Rosé summer cocktail as a headline act, shown below. Our Crémant 2021 however is hard to beat as an alcoholic refreshment, and the visitors and buyers at the château this month have almost always included some Crémant as part of their order. The Rosé wasn’t far behind.

The vines are in good shape so we’re hopeful that they’ll withstand the summer heat for a while, touch wood. It’s been a hectic month and we’re only scratching at the surface of what’s been happening with this photo journal.

Some sad news though as we pay tribute to Pavie, the last of our ‘three musketeers’ and a true, small dog of the vineyard and of the Bauduc family.

A quarter of a century. Blimey.

It’s the end of the summer holidays, our twentysomething children have left this week and we made the decision yesterday, Friday, to start the harvest this coming Monday.

And if there’s one thing you shouldn’t do when you have an end-of-month newsletter to write it’s to start looking through boxes and boxes of old photos. (Note to self: digitise all the old photos, and write that bloody memoir.)

Anyway, it’s all go. We’ve been lucky enough to have had several weeks of glorious weather until the rain came on Thursday. It’s not an early vintage, by the way, it’s just that we need to pick the white grapes for our sparkling Crémant while they still have lots of crisp acidity and aren’t too high in sugar.