We’re always careful of what we ask for. But it seemed certain that we had to ask for winter. January was so balmy that colleagues in (lower) parts of Limoux were reporting that their vines were already beginning to stir. Further afield, the first little buds were already beginning to show on the vines. You […]
This sunset was too awesome, too prophetic, too full of promise and portent to be captured by a humble little Samsung, but here it is, closing the first day of the first month of the new year; the view from the tasting room was so stunning that we all piled out and gaped open-mouthed at […]
Nothing like the gentle warning that Christmas is only two weeks away to illustrate how Rives-Blanques managed to slip into December and clamber half way up the month before any of us even realised it. And yet the month seemed well and truly done long before its undoing actually began. So much going on! Unusually […]
November fell in through the roof, as huge swathes of the Languedoc were covered in enough water to launch a ship. The rain over Rives-Blanques was infinitely kinder, what we call a ‘bonne pluie’, just what the doctor ordered for the newly seeded oats and vetch to grow between the vines – not to mention […]
An unbroken streak of mindlessly magnificent weather which accompanied our harvest of 2011 spilled over into October – when the harvest was already over and done with. Now our attention turns away from the mountains sprawled across a blamelessly blue sky, and into the winery, where the wines are happily bubbling in their barrels at […]