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.
Cabernets this weekend
I got word from our other grower that this weekend the fruit’s coming off his vineyard, ready or not. It’s been a difficult year for him, as it has for a lot of growers in the region: late fruit set in the spring means late ripening in the fall, and this grower is feeling that especially.
I’m still waiting for numbers from him, but I’ll be heading east on Saturday or Sunday to pick up Cabernet Sauvignon and our treasured Cabernet Franc. Late though it may be, I’m hoping we get the same luck we got with Westrey’s Oracle Pinot this year – not jammy ripe, but physiologically ripe, that special interlocking sensation when everything’s in balance and the fruit lasts and lasts on your tongue. Some of that’s due to extra hang time during cool fall nights, which keeps the acid intact even as ripeness progresses during the day. We’ll know soon enough!
In other news, the syrah is mighty happy to see us. So happy, in fact, that it’s overflowing its fermenter. In the interest of retaining thermal mass (the same principle as huddling together for warmth, I’d guess), I decided to divide one of the extra 30-gallon fermenters of syrah between another 30-gallon and the stainless steel tank. Was it close to the top? Oh, sure, a little, but what could go wrong? Now I know.
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