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.
Amore per le macchine
“Imbottigliamento,” she whispered in my ear, her husky voice the sensual texture of soft tannins. “Pigia…” — she paused, taunting me — “diraspatrici.” My palms began to sweat. I’m a married man, but who among you would not also have been swayed? I took out my credit card…
Si, si, la mia amore. Now that last year’s harvest is safely hibernating in the cellar, it’s time to turn our attention to the finer, more stainless steel things in life: a better bottler (imbottigliamento; and specifically una riempitrice (filler) in the Italian native to the best manufacturers of them), if not a stemmer-crusher (or pigia-diraspatrice). Doesn’t everything sound better in Italian?
It certainly did to me. Before the dollar plummeted any further against the Euro, a lusty voice inside told me to buy and I did, picking up a new 5-bottle filler in advance of our epic bottling later this spring. Courtesy of Enotecnica Pillan, an Italian company headquartered in the heart of the Veneto, northwest of Venice, behold what beauty can be captured in 304-type stainless steel:
From the English version of their website:
With the handicraft tradition “of the done good things” work from over 50 years in the manufacture of several models of crushers, destemmers, presses for the grape, filters for the wine and machines for the working of the fruit.
The Babelfish, has it not the bringing of us to greater closeness?
Actually, that bit in the quotes is “delle cose fatte bene” in the original (ancora, più bello in Italiano, si?), which is probably better translated as “of well-made things,” or more loosely, a tradition “of making things well.” This filler of the bottles is no exception. For a previous bottling or two, we’ve had the good fortune to borrow one from a friend who works for Edgefield. It easily surpasses the test of a great tool: once you get the hang of it, it stops being an inanimate, herky piece of hardware and becomes into a fluid extension of whatever you’re doing. Beautiful.
Now, uh, how do I get this lipstick off my collar?
1 comment1 Comment so far
“It easily surpasses the test of a great tool: once you get the hang of it, it stops being an inanimate, herky piece of hardware and becomes into a fluid extension of whatever you’re doing.”
Yeah, that’s my definition of, uh, ‘a great tool.’
Couldn’t help myself…