Flowering’s finished! Plummeting temperatures at the beginning of the month were too late to nip our grapes in the bud, and torrential downpours only helped to fill up our reserves of groundwater. The flowering of the vines is really, really important, and it went off without a hitch. Textbook perfect. Now we can set our […]
Temperatures fell in the first week of May, and thank goodness for that. The vines have been soaking up all that sunshine and unreasonable, unseasonable warm weather, shooting up like adolescents who grow half a meter the minute you turn your back on them. As the month opened, the beginnings of bunches of grapes could […]
Every month we say this is the best month to be at Rives-Blanques. Well, April really is. The place is redolent with wild flowers, birdsong, and vines full of burgeoning buds and bonhommie. It’s a ‘wish you were here’ postcard from paradise, signed by mountains singing on our horizon and the smile of a brilliant […]
The beginning begins. All the vines are pruned, there’s plenty of ground water deep down, the days are growing longer and warmer – and we all start looking towards the harvest, vines included. Vintage 2011 is already in the making, and there is no going back. So March puts us outdoors and indoors …. and […]
Just when we were beginning to wonder if the vines might get the wrong idea and think Spring had already started, a cold snap snipped right through our warm days, cutting them into ribbons of ice. Winter is still winter after all. We are reassured. The first days of the month were too cold to […]