Les Welcome
Whether by intent or tragic mis-typing, you’ve landed on the home of Les Garagistes winery collective. If you’re new to our dark cabal, a rich and heady stew of bad French grammar and subterranean winemaking awaits. But where to start? Here are a few suggestions:
- First, you might take a quick stroll through last year’s vintage escapades, accumulated over the two critical months of September 2009 and October 2009 (remember that the posts are presented with the earliest at the bottom of the page).
- Then, who are these Garagistes and where do they get off? And didn’t I hear they were dead?
- We sully the fine pages of Fine Cooking Magazine
- Winehenge: the movie. If that’s not enough to get you to click…
- A French oak barrel primer
- Red, Rex Sox (Yankees fans, be forewarned)
- Plastic capsules and why we switched to paper
- Lastly, mourn with the Moody Blues as they appear to lament the end of a Les Garagistes harvest.
Thanks much for stopping by. We’ve got fruit lined up for 2010 — with new varietals ensuring we’ll be making even more up as we go along — so another exciting vintage is just ahead. Hope you can join us for it, and let us know what you think of what we’ve cobbled together.
Topping Up
Mike and I got together for a brief survey of all the barrels and carboys, with the objective of topping up where necessary so as little oxygen as possible compromises our lovely friends.
We found the three 2006 Peugeot barrels each about a bottle down, so we topped them with some of the wine we set aside in 2005 as an experimental blend (same blend as the regular 2005, but with the Merlot and Franc totals flopped).
All the other barrels were down as well (which, by the way, is normal), but by not as much. We topped grape with grape, but at least for the Merlot, the amount was small enough (and the hassle of breaking up a carboy was great enough), we topped with a bit of Franc. In general, our strategy is to keep the grapes pristine, but the small amount we make often forces our hand. The additions were small enough not to present too much of a compromise, however.
One last note: Mike had a great idea of putting a certain amount of each wine into capped beer bottles for the expressed purpose of topping. That would mean it would be easier to top grape with grape without pulling from carboys (which would then need to be broken into smaller containers to minimize oxygen contact).
Anyone have a bottle capper?
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