Harvest time

Now is not he time to wait for perfection. With this current hot and wet weather, we are doing our best to collect high quality grapes in spite of some botrytis starting here and there. If this rot is noble and welcome in Sauternes, in Saint Emilion we are rushing to win the race against it.
Of course all the work done in the vineyard during the summer (green harvest, deleafing....) means that our grapes are not too close to one another and that  the sun and wind when present, can be the best cure to allow our grapes to be rather great.

Those last few days have worked the tannins just fine. Our harvest team works18 rows at once, all in all we currently employ 60 workers in our vineyard everyday.

As far as performance improvement goes (thank you new Saint Emilion classification !) we have bought a second  grapes sorting machine, which was most needed even if the budget reaches 100 000 euro...

And the harvest goes on...

The harvest of our white sauvignons will end tomorrow, and we may start the harvest of one single plot of young merlot (4 years old) which has suffered from the draught.
The other merlots will wait as long as the current weather remains stable.

Jane Anson has realized one of the first tastings organized with a bunch of the newly classified Saint Emilions. Valandraud 2009 won the race and was awarded with great comments and ratings (94-95-Highly recommended to Outsanding). Some of our neighbours and members of our informal club of Saint Etienne de Lisse based properties did well too : Peby Faugères  (92), Faugères (91), Pressac (90), and Sansonnet (90).
Jane is a regular writer for Decanter, Jancis Robinson and this article was more specifically created for the South China Morning Post