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?
- 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
- 2009 Blending Trials: we go for the decimals!
- 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.
Harvest starts Wednesday
It’s official: the Merlot’s clocking in between 25 and 27 brix (a measurement of sugar), so it’s time for us to tear off our nerdy glasses and spring into action.
If those are really numbers pulled from a refractometer (a hand-held gizmo that measures sugar by how much it bends light – space age!), they can tend to be a little high. I don’t have enough experience to say that’s a fact, but if that’s at all true, it’s because the average you get from an entire harvest (across rows and rows of plants) can’t be totally replicated with a few hand-picked samples. And at least when I’ve done it, it’s pretty hard not to veer moth-like toward those nice, riper looking clusters, try as you might to be objective.
Anyway, we’ll know soon enough. My ideal is a total brix somewhere in the 25 range, maybe 25.5, but we can totally work with 27 if we need to.
On to the valley of the Yakima!
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