Vintage 2025: July Weather

We have had a very wet spring, you know the old saying, "April showers bring May flowers", well this year, April showers brought May showers, June showers and now July showers! A farmer's best friend is the weather app and here is what it showed for the previous week from July 7-14 and for this week, July 14-21. Rain! Rain! Rain!

Rain brings a number of things in the vineyard such as out-of-control growth, weeds, and most of all mildew. We have help from our friends and our granddaughter who have been coming to the vineyard at 6 a.m. to help with the July duties which include shoot tucking, lateral removal and hedging. Some parts of our vineyard looks like this, where a lot of work has already been done:

But some parts of the vineyard looks like this where a lot of work still needs to be done.

This is the state of the vineyard in July!

2019 Santenay Antoine Olivier Les Coteaux sous la Roche

July is hot, humid and rainy! No one in this family feels like cooking in this kind of weather, but we can still drink. A few evenings ago, we had this Antoine Olivier, 2019 Santenay Les Coteaux sous la Roche. It is a Chardonnay. We paired it with toast points with olive tenpanade and eggplant spread from Mount Vikos. We also had Saint Andre cheese. The spreads and cheese went very well with the Chardonnay which was medium body, with a slightly reductive nose which blew off upon swirling. The wine tasted like lemon drop candy with a lively acidic finish.
The Product Information Sheet for this wine that I found online mentioned the following:
The grapes come from a single vineyard ‘Coteaux Sous la Roche’, which translates as ‘under the rocks’. For the winemaking process, the grapes were gently pressed and then racked to barrel where fermentation took place using natural yeasts. The wine was kept on its fine lees and underwent bâtonnage to impart texture and complexity to the wine. Malolactic conversion took place in barrel. The wine was 100% barrel aged for 12 months, in traditional Burgundian barrels of 228 litre barrels, of which 25% were new oak. The wine was then transferred to tank where it spent a further six months, prior to being lightly fined, filtered and estate bottled.

Vintage 2025: It's July!

Time marches on. It's July! We have fruiset in the vineyard. Somehow between the extreme heat and the rains the vines managed to set their fruit. We were working between the Cabernet Franc and the Barbera and this is what fruitset there looks like:

After a hot and humid day in the vineyard, it is raining again tonight!

Vintage 2025: Flowering

It is June. We are in the throes of shoot positiong and shoot removal, and despite all the rain that we have been having, and now a heat wave, all of our varieties are at some stage of flowering.

However, not all of the varieties are at the same stage of flowering. The Chardonnay and the Barbera are at the early stages of fruitset. The next variety to be further in bloom is the Cabernet Franc followed by the Chenin Blanc, Auxerrois and finally the Cabernet Sauvignon.
It's time to update the Annual Cycle of Growth chart.

Years of keeping the annual cycle of growth gives us some idea of when flowering and fruitset will be. The heat wave is probably accelerating flowering and fruitset, which is a good thing.
Right after fruitset, the tiny grapes are not securely attached by their pedicel so any manipulation of the shoots is not a good thing so we adjust where we work based on what stage of flowering or fruitset our varieties are at.
The heat wave is forcing us to be at the vineyard at 6 am and today we stopped working at 8 am since the feel-like temperature was 90 degrees!