Part 1, September 19th 2010:
It has already been a week since the picking started; the weather has been magnificent, a continuation of this very dry summer.
Luckily, we got 15mm of rain the week before the harvest.
Right now, the musts in the cellar are fabulous, the only minor negative being that the acidity in certain cuves is a little low for my taste.
The sugar levels are slightly higher than last year; the average for last week’s harvest at 11.5.
The yields are pretty small, around 45 hl/ha; this due to both the lack of rain this summer and a green harvest done in July.
We have already picked half of the grapes of the 7.5 ha, including most of the Pépière cuvées, the Clos des Briords and the Granite de Château Thébaud which leaves for this week, the last Pépière plots above the village, les Gras Moutons and the Clisson.
Forecasts predict rain, especially for Thursday, Sept. 23rd. Between now and then, we should be able to get almost everything in out of harm’s way because due to the acidity levels, I have a really big team of pickers this year (45 people). This is the big difference between 2009 and 2010. In 2009, we were able to stretch out the harvest over three weeks and still the last musts had around 5g/l of acidity. In 2010, the first juice we brought into the cellar had the same 5g/l.
Therefore the need to harvest very quickly. Ideally, we would have already been finished but for some obscure reasons the official start of harvesting began on September 9th. To compare this year with previous years, normally I would have started harvesting on the 16th or 17th (always at least a week after the official start) . The result was that some of the earliest ripening areas were harvested with less than 4g/l of acidity. With this sort of balance, Muscadet loses an important part of its essential identity. It’s almost as if there were a conspiracy on the part of the local growers union and the national agencies in charge of wine to push the evolution of the Muscadet towards a pale copy of the southern model.
Lastly I would add that these two vintages (2009 & 2010) seem to me to be almost exact copies of 1989 and 1990, and this bodes very well for the development of the 2010 vintage.
Part 2, October 13th 2010:
Our second week of picking, from Sept. 20th to 25th, went under a resplendescent sun. We harvested the last plots of la Pépière, Granite de Clisson and Gras Moutons. The berries got concentrated and sugar levels climbed up, all musts that week reached a potential 12.4 to 13.2% alcohol! Because of the concentration factor, acidity levels stayed stable or even increased, between 4.8 and 5.2g/l.
On Friday Sept. 24th, after some tests, we picked our Côt and Merlot, all very ripe, 12.6% for Côt and almost 14% for Merlot. I had decided to wait for the Cabernets, which mature last, but a lot of rain between Oct. 1st and 5th ruined the party. So we picked them on Oct. 6th and 8th, still wet from the rain, with the skins beginning to crack: what my colleagues did not harvest before today all went to rot.
I hope that Anjou and Touraine did not get as much water as we did!
Fermentations are going without trouble, the first vats to be picked are almost done; the first Pépière batches are very pleasant to taste. On the other hand, Briords and Granite of Château Thébaud are tight and very hard to taste now.
