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Category Archive for: ‘Vine Lines’

    The grapes are almost at ‘veraison’, which puts our harvest start date in the second week of September. Luck has nothing to do with the stars.  Luck is just a question of a few hundred metres.  And luck was against the Languedoc winegrowers of the Minervois, Cabardes, Carcassonne and Malepere regions, growing their […]

 JUNE 2014 A Very Good Year   The breaking news from Rives-Blanques is that the vines have started flowering … just a few of them, and then only just – but still a giant stride towards Vintage 2014. What we need now is good weather over the next few weeks; no more of that thunderously […]

  March 2014 Winter was late, Spring was early – and we are just in time! Twenty hectares of perfectly pruned vines basking in balm and birdsong, as we get down to the nitty-gritty of chopping up and ploughing the cuttings back into the soil. Vintage 2014 is on the way! And proof of it, […]

The year is nearly done – but 2013 is by no means in the bag. Or at least, not at Rives-Blanques, where a couple of recalcitrant barrels of wine from the 2013 vintage are still fermenting. Unheard of. But then, so much about this harvest was unheard of: privately, we call it the Year of […]

  On y va? On n’y va pas. Pourquoi pas? Parce qu’on attend   It seems appropriate to quote words written in French by an Irish playwright as we are setting the scene  for our Harvest 2013. To answer the inevitable question: no, we have not started yet, and no we do not know when […]