November 5th, 2020:

Here are a few pictures from the extremely precocious 2020 harvest. We started on August 25th. The quality is high but quantities are low. Our Chardonnays were touched by oidium and will be sorely lacking this year. Oidium is increasingly becoming a problem for us, becoming more and more normal due to global warming and the heatwaves we now experience in the region. 

The wines are currently very aromatic, a little less acidic than 2019 but it's looking like a good year.  

November 5th, 2020:

The 2020 harvest has been very successful.

We are very happy about the results (we harvested on last April) and of the concentration of the grapes. The wines are very rich in structure and lovely tannins; we also changed the process from older vintages in that this year, after fermenting, we decided the blend early. We used to make the blend just before bottling. So now "Sirios" 2020 and "Aralez" 2020 are already spending some months in barrels ("Aralez" between two 500 and 225 liter barrels, "Sirios" in a big, 2500 cask).

We also harvested our young plants of Chardonnay and Viogner, from which we made an orange wine. 

We'll use 2021 Chardonnay juice and its sugars for a new sparkling wine, but that's a different story. 

2020: A Vintage with Only Two Seasons:

2020 will forever be remembered for its unprecedented sanitary crisis. In our world of wine, it will also be remembered for how precocious it was.

In the vines:

The 2019-2020 winter was the warmest in France since the beginning of the 20th century. As expected, mild winters tend to invite rain and the area witnessed many important downfalls that assured the soils would have solid hydric reserves. 

March began just how February ended, with two weeks of almost non-stop rain and moderate temperatures. The second half of March was cold, but not cold enough to reverse course and stop the vegetal cycle from starting very early. A cold snap in April halted budburst, but the weather quickly warmed up and the vines kept at it. Budding occurred on April 5th, eight days early than the average this decade.

Above average temperatures persisted. By the end of April, the vines were two weeks in advance compared to a usual year. The vines kept growing through May. It's almost like 2020 is trying to become the year of reference for a precocious vintage!

The rains of May finally reactivated mildew and thus began the protective phase of our work. Overall the weather was not too favorable to mildew but there was a possibility for oidium to rear its ugly head in certain sectors so we stayed vigilant. On May 20th, the first flowers were visible. However flowering did not truly start until around May 28th, still two weeks in advance. 

June's weather was more gloomy than May's, with covered skies, rain and lower temperatures than usual. The phenological advance of the vines therefore did not accentuate itself in this period. We also had hail storms at the beginning and end of the month. 

The clusters began to form in early July. We were feeling more at ease at that point: véraison took place the last week of July, the result of a very dry month. 

Maturation:

The maturation took place in an August marked by extreme heat waves. We've once again suffered losses from burnt clusters, as bad as 30% to 50% in the most exposed parcels. Fortunately, a bit of rain in the middle of the cycle made the clusters plump up. While sugar concentration remained normal, it feels like these episodes of heat waves create a kind of degradation of the grapes' malic acid. Tartaric acid, on the other hand, remained present and in fact was above average for the decade. As the heat persisted, we saw very aromatic maturities and phenolic ripeness.  

The harvest:

We began picking on September 7th with the most precocious Sauvignon plots then went into the reds. The temperature that first week was actually under average. The weather gave us the luxury of being able to let many days go by in order to harvest each parcel at its optimal maturity. But by the second week the sugars were rising very quickly. We had to move fast, but also reorganize and only pick in the very early morning or in the evening because it was just too hot. 

First impressions of the vintage:

The wines are well rounded and show remarkable concentration. On the palate the whites show a superb expression, with different balances depending on when they were harvested. The grapes picked the earliest are more sharp and mineral, and as you go further and further in time the wines get fatter and creamier.

The reds show a color of deep ruby and nuances of purple. The nose is complex, mixing fresh red fruit and riper fruit. Our cuvaisons and extractions were well adjusted to the vintage to give the wine good structure and round tannins. We think that the malolactic fermentation will harmonize things even further.

In the end, it is a very promising vintage. 

September 30th, 2020:

Spring/Summer:

The world seems affected and infected by a terrible virus which is multiplying at high speed. At the estate, we are very worried by the announced and proven risks of spring frosts. The anti-frost towers are installed, the burners, the candles. In total, it takes several dozen hours of work to install the anti-frost system on a total of 30 hectares. 10 hectares remain unprotected this year. It is heartbreaking to "sail on sight" with these, but it is already a huge step to protect 30 hectares out of 40.
 For 10 nights, Pierre-Marie kept watch every hour, ready to deploy a real army of around forty brave souls made up of our permanent employees and friends. The positive energy got the better of the frost and here we are in mid-May working in the vines. The flowering is three weeks early and we will have to hustle to do three months' work in just six weeks.

While the vineyard team is busy, at the office it's a different atmosphere. While Sabine, Lydie and I became part-time school teachers (like many others) the fairs, visits and international trips are canceled.

 Customers around the world are in slow motion. We reinvented ourselves from the start of containment in France thanks to the support of our friends and customers with regular deliveries to Nantes. By activating our networks, we were able to cover some of the stock from usual orders we were not receiving.

There is no partial unemployment at the estate, the vineyard and management does not wait. 

The new plantations and replantings, which began in 2019, has seen the the Butte de la Roche plot getting a makeover. The planters joined us at the end of May and we anchored the babies (from our own massale selections) in this great terroir of peridotite- serpentinite. A plantation project is a bet on the future and future generations. This is the DNA of our profession as vignerons. Working hand in hand with past and future generations, reinventing yourself with each season.





Phew, here we are in mid-July, the vines are superb and the sky too. We are talking about harvesting in mid-August (with all that that entails with most people on vacation!) But the season is very beautiful and the vines are slowing their pace. Whatever happens, the cellar is ready; all we have to do is sound the trumpets and welcome the seasonal workers on the first day of picking. So we snuck out for a quick vacation to get some fresh air with the family and come back in great shape in mid-August.

End of summer/fall 2020

:

On August 24, the permanent team of the estate returned from summer vacation all tanned and rested, ready for the "grand harvest ball" on Wednesday, August 26th. Clos des Allées, Les Pierres Blanches, Butte de la Roche, La Grange, La Plécisière, Vera Cruz ...
The plots and terroirs follow one another day after day in a sustained rhythm accompanied by a joyful and attentive atmosphere.
During these 13 consecutive days of harvest, no less than a hundred seasonal employees will have marched through the estate. From the very young students on the first days to retirees and regular harvesters, the lively team delighted us with the work accomplished.
In terms of the balance of the juices, it is a real relief not seen for many vintages.

Balanced natural degrees and acidities, real yields; it makes our whole team smile again.

 As you all know if you follow our work, 2019 was a tiny crop; the wines of that vintage will be sold out in a couple of months and even weeks for certain  cuvées. We will do our best to satisfy each of you, as we did following the successive frosts of 2016, 2017 and 2019.

We just finished up the harvest, the most precocious in eight generations! We picked from September 7th to the 22nd, totally unheard of… Yields are solid (39hl/h) the potentials are fairly high but there is more acidity than in 2018. 

In Vouvray, many vignerons had very low yields due to the ongoing drought. We are at the northernmost part of the appellation where it is cooler. Our sector therefore has less alcoholic potential and higher yields. The struggle to find balanced maturities has for generations been an inconvenience, but now it’s starting to become a major advantage…

We are doing well and the harvest was positive. 2020 will remain in everyone's memory for the sad lockdown! Here, the beginning of spring was very dry, this allowed the vines to flower well and have a balanced development, which protected them from the rains in the following months. Fortunately, there was no hail and the heavy rains of early October occurred after the harvest of the most delicate grapes such as Uva Rara and Vespolina.

We have just finished the harvest, the grapes are healthy, sweet and in the right quantity (even in the recent vineyard at the Sanctuary), we are happy! Unfortunately, this year too, however, we have not reached the necessary quantity of grapes to produce the Erbaluce (Gino) : - (( Instead we managed to vinify a Croatina on its own!

We are attaching two photos: clusters at the shrine and break with distancing ... ahahahah

A warm greeting and a big hug,

September 22nd, 2020:

We are almost done with harvest (we still have a bit of Cabernet to pick). It's been another year of discovery; one nice thing about nature is that you are always learning. 

Over the last decade, it has been very hard to understand how climate change will affect us in the long term; 2020 was the most precocious vintage our appellation has ever seen. Usually a hot, early year is characterized by high concentration and rising sugar levels. But in the end, maturities were the same as a "normal" harvest started in September. We think the 40mm of rain we got right before harvest unblocked the maturities. 

So we started picking on August 24th, under a sun that stayed with us through the entire harvest (much to the delight of the pickers). A small rain on the afternoon of the 26th was the only time they had to put on their parkas. 

We harvested the grapes for the "Briords" cuvée first with potentials around 11.3% and acidities of 5.2. The following days were dedicated to grapes for "La Pépie", with degrees around 11%. We were very surprised that the potentials weren't quickly spiking as the days went by. As mentioned above, our experience (and that of our elders) in a vintage like this is a very abrupt rise in concentration. This makes sense since the days are longer and the temperatures stay up longer. Maybe the very dry month of July had something to do with this...

We started our second week (still in August, Monday the 31st) in the parcels of Château-Thébaud with potentials of 11.8%, then the next day we were in  Gorges. On September 3rd we picked "Gras Mouton" at dawn. It's the first presses that have potentials over 12%; the alcohol was finally climbing up, but very slowly. Ironically, we had invested in a second press this year in the idea of picking faster in case the potentials started ballooning out of control.

On Monday, September 7th, we picked the vines above the estate to make "Clisson"; as is always the case the grapes here were the most  concentrated:210 grams of sugar per liter for potentials of 12.8% and slightly lower acidities of 4.3. We were done with the whites on September 9th, a fact we are still very impressed with!

We harvested the Côt on September 9th and the 21st and have picked a part of the Cabernet. For the reds we did suffer some burnt clusters in certain sectors; it was surreal because some areas barely had grapes while other vines were bursting with fruit just three meters further. 

When you think that you harvested some of your reds on a date when, 20 or 30 years ago, a vigneron would be cleaning the cellar getting ready for his first day of harvest his whites, it really makes you think about how much has changed so quickly...