Category Archives: Ramblings and Rants

‘Special Recognition accolade at French Wine Awards’ – toot toot

November 08 2013

A handsome package arrived this week, and inside was a razor-sharp trophy. It was a ‘Special Recognition Award’ from the Harpers French Wine Awards and I’m extremely chuffed to be able to stick it on the mantelpiece next to our grumpy bronze boar.

I was gutted, in fact, not to have been able to collect the prize in person at the awards ceremony in London – you don’t get many rounds of applause in a vineyard – but it was the night before Angela’s birthday and I’d promised to bring her tea in the morning.

The funny thing is, the prize isn’t for our wine at all. It’s for writing and tweeting. Richard Siddle, the editor of the UK-based trade magazine and known as ‘chief’ in the wine business, wrote the flattering explanation below on the Harpers website. Forgive me for modestly including the title of the article but it really shows that the little people – in wine, at least – can make the headlines above the ‘Supermarket of the Year’ and the like.

All the winners and finalists are listed below, with links to their Twitter pages (hey, Twitter’s all about sharing).

Gavin Quinney scoops Special Recognition accolade at French Wine Awards.

“Gavin Quinney, the English winemaker who owns and produces wine at Chateau Bauduc in Bordeaux, has won the Special Recognition Award at the first Harpers French Wine Awards.

Quinney received the honour for the work he has done in giving the wine trade as a whole a fascinating insight into the day-to-day highs and lows of being a winemaker and running a Bordeaux winery.

Quinney has become a one-man publicity machine not only for his own business but for helping promote French wine overall, Bordeaux wine in particular, and for airing some of the more lively and controversial issues facing French wine in such engaging and entertaining way.

He has built up such a following online through social media that he has more Twitter followers than prestigious Bordeaux houses and many of the generic French wine bodies. Keep reading

Bordeaux 2013 – Bauduc harvest, sparrow’s fart

October 03 2013

It’s not something you’d want to do every Saturday and Sunday morning before dawn. Thankfully, like Christmas, the harvest comes but once a year.

I’m not sure when we decided to pick at the weekend but I think it was on the Friday morning. A few calls to Guy, who rents and drives the machine, and it was all booked. Mind you, it’s lucky we’re happy to harvest at a ridiculous hour at the weekend, because all his normal weekday slots were getting booked up by neighbouring chateaux.

It’s also lucky that he’s based here on site at Bauduc, with two machines, another driver, fuel, cleaning facilities and a rather unattractive caravan (below, left). We’ve yet to let his tyres down on the way to another customer but you never know.

It was the last weekend of September and the final week, after a mixed fortnight, was dry and sunny. This had certainly helped the white grapes ripen. The acidity had dropped and the sugar levels, the flavours and aromas had developed well. We do look at the numbers from the analysis of the grapes but the taste, with a bit of experience, is the important thing.

Then, with rain and sweltering humidity on the Friday, we had to pick before rot set in. We could see in the bunches that within a few days the rot would spread quickly, like a blackened banana in a bowl of ripe peaches. The weekend could make all the difference. Time to act.

One thing I’ve learnt is that nature doesn’t stick to a five-day week, so we don’t think of weekends any differently during the harvest. We also like to machine pick early in the morning – for freshness – and we’re lucky to have, in Daniel and Nelly, two tireless workers who don’t worry about the time of day or the usual Monday to Friday routine. They have been with us from the start, including the first five harvests which were all by hand. Keep reading

Bordeaux 2013 – pre-harvest report

September 27 2013

This article also appears on JancisRobinson.com and Livex – the fine wine trading exchange.

As the Bordeaux harvest begins, here is a detailed report on the weather so far this year and its impact on the vines.

It’s fair to say that my earlier updates on the 2013 growing season in Bordeaux have been less than enthusiastic. Running late in May, The flowering and Soggy Vinexpo, sodden vines in June, Lafite’s weeping willows in July and then, in August, the Hail in Bordeaux series of posts hardly paint a rosy picture.

Yet even at this stage at the end of September, this roller coaster vintage is still too early to call. The weather in October for the red harvest (Bordeaux is 88% red) will be crucial. Even before then, storms are forecast for this weekend, after a week of sunshine.

To follow my harvest updates on Twitter, type the following in the Twitter search box: from:gavinquinney #bdx13

TEN THINGS WE DO KNOW

1. 2013 is an exceptionally late harvest. (Or should be.)

2. 2013 will be a small crop in Bordeaux overall.

3. A cold first half of the year held up growth in the vineyard.

4. An unusually cold, wet May and downpours in June led to late, uneven flowering.

5. July was hot and dry, August sunny, September up and down. October is key.

6. An August hailstorm hit more than 10,000 hectares – about 10% of the Bordeaux vineyard – but none of the top châteaux.

7. Quality and yields will be extremely variable – the contrast is evident in the vineyards.

8. The dry white harvest has started well, while prospects for sweet whites are ‘promising’.

9. The red harvest is likely to be a race against time (and rot) as the autumn weather draws in.

10. The advantage lies with those who have the resources and equipment to be highly selective. Keep reading

Hail in Bordeaux, part 4 – FAQs of Bauduc

August 09 2013

Shreddies. 2 August 2013 at Bauduc

We were hit by hail on 2 August. 5000 hectares of vines in the area have been stripped of this year’s grapes and another 5000 hectares, like us, have seen damage to vines to a greater or lesser extent. Here are a few questions and answers, mainly as far as Bauduc is concerned.

1. Are you insured against hail?

No. You can buy special hail insurance but the premiums are outrageously expensive. Those sharp-suited insurance folk are no fools.

The authorities believe that only 15%-20% of the vineyards that were hit were insured against hail. Henri Feret of Ch Feret-Lambert, for example, makes excellent Bordeaux Supérieur and he’s not insured, which makes us feel slightly less dozy.

It would be surprising if the leading Chateaux of Bordeaux are not insured, but some appellations like Pauillac and St-Julien have not been hit for a long time, so premiums should be affordable compared to the price they get for the wine.

2. Didn’t you have hail before?

Yes. In May 2009 – twice, in fact, a fortnight apart – and in June 2003. So we’ve been hit in three out of fifteen harvests – or, more recently, two out of five. Our recent form isn’t good. Keep reading

Hail in Bordeaux, part 3 – the lottery of storms

August 08 2013

One of the extraordinary aspects of hail is how one vineyard can be badly hit, while another just a few hundred metres away looks as if nothing untoward has happened. It isn’t entirely random, however. The storm will follow a certain route and anything in its path is at risk, while vines either side can remain unscathed.

The contrasting fortunes of the vineyards around us at Chateau Bauduc, on the outskirts of Créon, is quite amazing. (I should qualify that: amazing for those who are vaguely interested, which excludes half of this household.)

Chateau Bauduc is in the centre of the image above, where a little red A marks the spot. Our vines surround the Chateau and winery – a single vineyard with woodland on three sides and the town on the northern boundary. To give you an idea of the scale, the estate covers 75 hectares, a third of which is planted with vines.

We lost around 50% of this year’s harvest in the storm on 2 August 2013 due to hail damage to leaves and grapes. It could get worse here if rot sets in now or later, or if the remaining grapes don’t ripen. We can only wait and see.

Here’s the thing, as the map shows. Vineyards just 2kms to the west of us were untouched because the storm passed by to the south. Keep reading

Hail in Bordeaux, part 2 – the path of destruction

August 07 2013

Thousands of hectares of vines between the Garonne and Dordogne rivers in the Entre Deux Mers were decimated by the hailstorm that ripped through this corner of Bordeaux last Friday evening, 2 August.

I’ve seen hail damage to Bordeaux vineyards in 1999, 2003, 2008, 2009 and 2011 at varying stages of the season, from one end of Bordeaux to the other. In our 15 harvests, as I pointed out in yesterday’s report, we’ve had hail at Château Bauduc in 2003, 2009 and now in 2013. But I have never seen anything as bad as the vine damage sustained by some of our neighbours last Friday. Others, meanwhile, were untouched.

The week before, late on Friday 26 July, a hailstorm ruined part of the crop in the Entre Deux Mers around Génissac, near Libourne on the banks of the Dordogne. (Strong winds the same night also caused considerable damage to the famous willow trees at Château Lafite 50kms away near Pauillac but as there was no hail, there was no loss in the vines.)

Last Friday evening, at around 8.45pm on 2 August, this second, much more violent hailstorm destroyed this year’s harvest in many more vineyards in the Entre Deux Mers and over the Dordogne in part of the Côtes de Castillon. Official estimates vary, with figures being bandied about of between 5,000 and 10,000 hectares having been affected to a greater or lesser extent. That’s about 4% to 8% of the whole of the Bordeaux vineyard. (I’m a little sceptical of the 20,000 hectares/50,000 acres now being quoted as a result of state aid being mentioned by the press.) Keep reading

Hail in Bordeaux, part 1 – Bauduc

August 06 2013

The children were playing in the garden. The long wooden tables were laid for supper under the vine-covered trellis; grown-ups chatted, rosé in hand.

Last Friday was supposed to be just another lovely summer’s evening with old friends who were staying at our farmhouse. It’s what you imagine life to be like when you own a vineyard.

I’d been walking the dogs around the vines, half-inspecting the thousand, neatly presented rows at the end of the season’s labour. We’d completed the manual work just that morning, and now we needed a fine August and September to ripen the grapes.

The skies out west though – towards the Atlantic in the distance – didn’t look right. It was warm and sunny but there was a chill in the air, similar to the lull before the storm in September 2011, when hail narrowly missed us, and in May 2009, when it didn’t.

Keep reading

Lafite’s weeping willows

July 29 2013

We had a storm in Bordeaux late last Friday and in the early hours of Saturday. Summer thunderstorms here are not uncommon after protracted heat waves, but there was some significant, localised damage. Heavy rain caused flash floods in the city, strong winds brought down a few trees around the region, and vine growers prayed that any hail would pass them by.

The most photogenic damage was to the willow trees of Chateau Lafite Rothschild that sit between the lakes and gardens of this illustrious property and the D2 main road. Many were brought down in fierce winds between 11pm on Friday and 2am on Saturday.

Several estates in Pauillac, such as Pontet Canet, Lynch Bages and Fonbadet, suffered superficial damage – to trees, mostly – but it was in the valley below the buildings at Lafite that tourists stopped to take pictures. At least twenty trees were lost or broken and by Sunday evening there was still a great deal of clearing up to be done. Keep reading

Bordeaux 2013 – The Flowering

June 19 2013

It’s a scary time for vine growers. We need half-decent weather at the right moment or the size and quality of crop could be at risk. 2013 is the latest flowering we’ve witnessed and, what with sunshine one day and unseasonably heavy downpours the next, it’s the stuff of nightmares.

Visitors to Vinexpo, the huge trade fair that’s taking place in Bordeaux this week, can see the flowering for the first time ever during the show – if they have the chance or the inclination to get out into the vines. Normally, between 16 and 20 June, you’d have missed the floraison and the annual Fête de la Fleur, held this year at Chateau Lagrange in St-Julien on the 20th, is supposed to celebrate the end of the flowering, not the middle of it.