Relax, Reflect, Refresh

This weekend finds me relaxing in lovely Dijon for the first time in awhile. Since Pascal and his son, my host family, are out of town this weekend I have the place all to myself. Wahoo! So I've gone completely wild by doing my laundry (I know!), shopping at the market, cleaning my room, and baking a fondant au chocolat (recipe given to me by my coworker, Mariette :) So, yeah, Pascal just might kick me out when he gets back...but anyways... I have a long list of other shenanigans to do too since this is my last free weekend before HARVEST on Monday!!

And apparently I forgot to bring the croissants to work on Friday, whoops. (Yeah, real smart relying on the girl with broken french to bring the goods at the end of the week!) But in any case I plan to make up for it on Monday, and maybe Friday if I have the energy..

So this past week at the winery involved a lot of water. And I've come to realize that there is NO way to stay dry when you play with water... which is the reason mouillee, wet, is now in Laura's french vocabulary. But now our cellar and all of the harvesting equipment are clean, and are ready for some major Chardonnay and Pinot noir processing!

However the grapes this vintage are not as prepared as we are since it has been a difficuly climatic season. With rain falling throughout August and September, the ripening period of the berries, Burgundy has been seeing a lot of pourriture, bad Botrytis, and odium, mildew. Which in other words means that the fruit is rotting on the vine. Not good. The Chardonnay especially has been hit hard, which means less good fruit is available for picking and that the expected volume of juice will be lower. And for me, as the harvest intern, this means my time on the sorting table will be quite lengthy and tiring (as I will have mal aux dos, pain in the back)

But dispite this difficulty, Domaine de la Vougeraie will trudge on, and I am excited to see how we process all of the different vineyard parcels (which are typically less than 1 hectare, or 2.5 acres). After visiting and sampling in our most southern most vineyards near Beaune, in Savigny Les Beaune and Corton-Charlemagne yesterday, and working in the more northern vineyards in July (Gevrey Chambertin and Vougeot) I now have a better understanding about where the fruit is coming in from, and how the appellation and terroir has an affect.

i.e. the reason I came to Burgundy :)

So now I must get back to my wild shenanigans of planning out my life after harvest. With a harvest position lined up at Vrede en Lust in South Africa in January, I am now working hard to find a suitable winery in New Zealand to take me afterwards in March/April. Hopefully all goes well and I can conquer exactly what I've set out to do!