July brought its usual distractions to Rives-Blanques: the Festival in Carcassonne, Wimbledon (won by Frenchwoman Bartoli while all her compatriots were glued to the Tour de France), and the absolutely stunning display of fireworks over the medieval City marking the glorious Quatorze de Juillet. All this, of course, not a patch on our own private […]
By the end of May we felt as if we might lift anchor and gently go off drifting over the Pyrenees into Spain. It’s cool and wet, wet, wet – and so is the vineyard. Wild flowers are lapping it all up and blooming in profusion … but the vines have come to a sulky […]
Friday May 3 Air travel: the fastest means of transport for people in a hurry who have the most time to kill. And here we are killing time at London Heathrow – not one, but two cancelled flights, and today’s arrival in the USA postponed until some time late tomorrow afternoon. Tuesday May 7 My […]
This is the stay-at-home month when concentrated effort is what we’re concentrating on. The vines are pruned, their branches securely tied, and we wait and watch the next step: buds breaking through the old wood of the vines. Once life starts moving, it starts moving fast. The cool weather and rain we have had so […]
Record-breaking amounts of snow have fallen on the Pyrenees. Down here, at 350 m altitude, we normally can expect about 600 mm of rainfall a year … and so far we have already had almost a third of that. Things are going pretty much according to plan, though if a lot of rain has fallen […]