Cape Town

Hello loves,

Here I am in Cape Town. I have no internet in my backpacker (hostel) so I find myself in a coffee shop down the road with FREE WIFI! I was excited to see this sign the other day and have been coming back to this coffee shop often. Three days in total, so these 12Rand ($2) coffees shouldn't hurt my budget too much... but still, a bit pricey for South Africa. So other than finding a great location to kick it and sooth my addiction to the internet, I have found Cape Town to be a truly fantastic city.

Everyone I have met so far is so friendly, generous and helpful. Through various acquaintances I have made, I have been able to get out of my residential part of town and see the hot-spots, eat some great food, and finally get a taste for the local wine. Last night I had a really nice picnic with two friends - a local and used-to-be-local who I met in Calistoga this winter - before seeing a hilarious version of Taming of the Shrew at the outdoor theatre. The picnic included a bottle of crisp white wine (...), local figs, berries, creamy Camebert cheese and fresh cheesy bread. We ate ravishly while catching up and laughing at the unique species of birds that encircled us.

During the play, which was just short of a Cirque de Soleil-esque show, my attention was quickly drawn to the sky as my eyes caught a firefly flying overhead. Upon realizing what this was, I scrambled to pull my hands out from under the blanket to point it out to Linah... but it flew away. So she thinks I'm crazy... especially since I couldn't find the words to describe what I saw and I started laughing uncontrollably. But all in all we had a great time together and Corina, the local, was such a treat to meet. Thanks to her I am beginning to understand, more or less, the ins and outs of South Africa!

In addition to this outing, I was lucky enough to meet up with another local on Sunday, Jo, who I met in Burgundy in September. Jo works for Francois Freres here in South Africa, and is a key player to the production of great wines in the surrounding areas. She was generous enough to take me out with her boyfriend for the day to see the sights. Firstly - we conquered the heights of the Table Mountain 1600 meters above sea level, by riding up in a Cable Car. From the top of the Mountain we could look down on the entire city and surrounding natural landmarks - Cape of Good Hope, Lyon's Head, Devil's Peak, False Bay, V & A Waterfront, etc... It was breathtaking. All around the Mountain adventurous souls flocked. Paragliders were floating over the ocean, rock climbers were adjusting their ropes and hikers were burning their calories for the week. I questioned my own adventurous soul, but decided I best wait for now. It was lunch time, nonetheless, and it was time to eat some seafood. So that's what we did.

After riding the Cable Car down and getting a 360 view of the town, Jo, Willy and I went to the Waterfront for some sushi, fish and prawns, along with a few glasses of Chenin blanc and Shiraz. Yum. Afterwards we walked around listening to music and grabbing some ice cream cones to cool off.

So I am very excited indeed to be out and about, and now I must sign off on this Tuesday early afternoon to meet up with Liam and Louise, my fellow interns, to catch the India v. S Africa cricket match!

Love you all. Over and out,

d'laur

PJs and No Job

Hey all,

To catch you up from since I last posted in early November...

My harvest job ended in Burgundy, France and I am back in Nevada City, California with my parents and Penny, the pole dancing cat. Not really sure how that name came about for her, but it seems fitting... Anways, the expensive and anticlimatic holidays have come and gone and the new year is upon us. I made no resolutions for this year, but I definitely see some major changes occuring in my life as this year goes on.

Next week I will be flying out to Cape Town, South Africa for a cellar hand position with Vrede en Lust Winery in Franschhoek. This will be my first travel to the country and I am getting very excited/ nervous at the same time. At some moments I question my sanity for taking on a harvest job in a far-off land I know so little about, but luckily those moments are fleeting and I look past them. I am very lucky to have this opportunity and I am looking forward to working with the VnL crew and getting to know the people, and learning about their culture and history. Susan, the winemaker, has been so helpful in planning my stay and has setup a cottage on the farm for myself and the two other interns during our stay.

After my short two month internship with VnL I will be flying directly to New Zealand in March and working another cellar hand position with Indevin in Marlborough. Here I will be one of eighty or so interns monitoring the crush of grapefruit and grassy Sauv Blanc and living in a make-shift dormitory. Crazy times are expected... and promised!

But for now I am enjoying the luxury of sitting in my PJs at 1pm in the afternoon, sipping coffee and feeling the warmth of Penny's rump on my shoulder.

Cheers to a seasonal internship!

Scones for Peace

For this Veteran's Day/Armistice Day I baked up a batch of apple cinnamon scones for peace.

Who would want to fight when these fluffy, flakey scones are brought out of the oven? No one.

Well, except for my sister Maureen and friend Rocky, that is, if they had to pick sticks for the last one... But that's another story. So for those people, double the recipe!

D’laur’s Apple Cinnamon Scones

Note : Key to good scones, biscuits and pie doughs: Be careful to not over-handle the dough! Unlike doughs made with yeast, these are made with baking powder and require little to NO kneading.

Okay, so now that we have that covered, go out there and get your hands buttery!

Ingredients

2 ½ c cake flour

1 tsp pure vanilla extract ( or 15g sucre vanille)

2 1/8 tsp baking powder (11 g levure chimique)

1/3c sugar

1/3 cup (75 g) cold butter (I used salted, but non-salted works too with an addition of 1/4tsp, 2.5g salt)

1 small golden apple, peeled, cored and sliced into small pieces

1 lemon, squeezed ; 1 Tbsp juice

2 eggs, lightly beaten

2/3 c crème fraiche, heavy cream, or sour cream

1tsp cinnamon and 2 Tbsp sugar for topping

Preheat oven to 375°F (190°C). Place rack in the middle of the oven. Butter and flour round biscuit pan.

Toss apple pieces with lemon to juice and set aside.

Blend flour, sugar, baking powder, (and salt). Cut butter into small pieces and cut into four mixture with 2 knives, a pastry cutter, or my preferable method, with your hands! Stir in apple pieces.

In another bowl, combine cream, beaten eggs and vanilla (if using extract). Set aside approx 2-3 tbsp of mixture for topping, then add the rest to the flour mixture. Stir just until combined. Do not over mix! Pat dough together just until a ball forms. Divide dough into 8 round balls and place in pan, again, be careful to not over-handle each portion. Don’t worry about perfection here, it’s all about the taste and flakiness in the end!

Top each scone with remaining cream and egg mixture and cinnamon/sugar mixture.

Bake 15-20 min. But check after 15min, perhaps they might be done! No? Thought so, why not go dance around your kitchen for the next 5 min? That’s right. Turn up that music, break a move and breath in those sugary fumes…

Don’t get too distracted there! Pop those scones out!

Cool in pan. But why wait? Burn your tongue, it’s worth it! Bon Appetite!

Vive la France!

Sorry for the lack in updates recently. I really have no other excuse than exhaustion from work, well, and maybe a little lazziness in between.

Last week was a very productive and eventful week as all decuvages were completed, and my parents came and went in a flash, and I attended the Confrerie des Chevaliers Chapitre dinner at the Clos de Vougeot.

So to start, I will fill you in on what a decuvage is by showing you some pictures..

First, we drain the tank of the fermented juice (red wine!) and pump it into a stainless steel tank for storage until Jean-Luc has time to move it into barrels with gravity flow. (SORRY, NOT PICTURED) And then the fun starts! A brave soul, such as myself, jumps into the tank of grape skins and seeds, shuvel in hand, and begins the decuvage. Shove-full by shovel-full, the grape remnants are tossed over the side of the tank and into the recieving cage.

As shown above in the picture, Mariette excellently shovels out her first (but not last!) tank.

After the cage is filled, it is carried over by the fork-lift, inserted into the Vertical Press machine and WAMO!

The fermented grape skins are pressed down into a thick dry cake as the lovely juice runs free and joins its juice counterparts in the steel tank.

So this physical activity was my work regime for the last two weeks, and now that we have 31 empty wooden tanks lying around, what better idea is there than to clean them all this week!?

So long story short, the red stains on my hands are washing off nicely as I scrub down these wooden surfaces with hot water, and then alcohol.

No complaints here though! Most 1.5 hour lunches include a nice glass of wine from the cellar :)

Now, back to the parental visit of last week.

My parents in front of the Palais des Ducs in Dijon

With strikes and manifests going on all around France over the pushed-back retirement age (60 to 62), my parents had an unfortunate encouter with the dissatisfied workers of this country. While they had a pleasant visit here in Paris and Dijon, they missed their flight home due to the train strikes and had to sleep in the Paris airport :( I am really sorry for their misfortunate event, and hope that this doesn't keep them from venturing to this country again. As my coworkers reminded me during our long and tiring day of work, not ALL French people are striking... exactly, just the people whom everyone else depends upon... train, bus, airlines, gasoline! But I guess wine is the more important item in this country anyways...

And to celebrate this fact! I attended the Confrerie des Chevaliers dinner two Saturday's ago!

Here at the Clos de Vougeot, this brotherhood of wine lovers in Burgundy served up a delicious 8 course meal for the brothers, their wives, and selected guests. During this 4-hour meal, songs, plays, and speeches were carried out, and everyone was waving their hands in the air to the Burgundy "lala lala lalala LA la" song in the end (for the 10th round).

It was definitely a night to remember, and thanks to my handy-camera, and my escortee for the evening, Pascal, I was able to capture some of the moments!

Caroline and I in the courtyard of the Clos de Vougeot during the dinner

Louis-Marc giving a speech on the mainstage where various speechs and acts were given throughout the dinner

Rob Keeney singing along with the other Confrerie men dressed as traditional Burgundian winemakers (Bourgogne vignerons)

Caroline, Rob, and Marcie swaying and singing to one of the many Confrerie songs of the night

Pascal and Arnaut happily waving their napkins in the air

And it wouldn't be right if I didn't show you at least one course of the dinner. This was poached eggs and bacon served in a Burgundy wine sauce over bruscetta. Yum!

Cheers!

10 Day Harvest in Burgundy

Wow, it's hard to believe that harvest has already come and gone!

I apologize for not updating my blog during the past two weeks but I had little time outside of work other than to eat, sleep and shower. On average I worked 12 hour days with 1 hour lunch in between, but occasionally we had our longer and shorter days. Thankfully, Vougeraie provided lunches for us, and I was able to refuel with a 3-4 course meal each day. Yeah, pretty incredible right? And this is why my coworkers joke I may gain weight rather than lose it during my internship here! I really hope I can prove them wrong.... But seeing as I won't have this luxurious meal after harvest, and will continue to have pumpovers, punchdowns and eventually decouvrages (shuveling out the grape remenants after fermentation and tossing them up and over the tanks), I should be alright!

La Mode de la vendage

Harvest fashion: my "waterproof" attire that I wore before climbing inside the press to clean it.

Starting on Monday, September 20th we received our first cases of fruit, and by the 30th all fruit was in. On the following day, the 1st of October, we finished sorting through the last bit of the Musigny Grand Cru grapes as Pierre Vincent, the winemaker, belted french songs from atop the wooden cuve as he worked on punchdowns. Ahhh... another Vive la France moment that I may never forget.

To give you an idea of harvest I will try to sum up the main processes that we carried out at Domaine de la Vougeraie:

All clusters were hand harvested and brought in by tractor to the winery, where each case was emptied out onto the sorting table and carefully scrutinized by the cellar crew and myself. Luckily we had some extra hands during the sorting process to keep the table running 12-14 hours each day.

The sorting process was quite demanding this year as there was a lot of mold on the grapes, beaucoup de pourri et oidium (grey Botrytis and Powdery Mildew), and most had to be removed by hand or with hand clippers. While the Pinot noir proved to be less affected by either fungus, the Chardonnay got hit hard this year so much attention was focused on the sorting table as the grapes came into the winery.

Mariette sorting fruit as Blandine dumps the fruit into the cuve, Jean-Luc guides her and Pierre stands by for moral support

After the sorting was through, all Pinot noir was directly destemmed and put into large wooden tanks, cuves, and kept at 12-13 degrees Celcius for a week. Since Burgundy is very appellation driven, each parcel of vineyards received its own cuve to carry out fermentation. Each cuve received a pumpover each day (by either myself of Mariette), and once the fermentation started up, punchdowns were carried out (by Thibault, Pierre, and myself on one occasion with the help of Ian, a retired Englishman who came to help out for the harvest).

The wooden cuve (with metal refridgeration cooling tube) before fruit

The cuve after the fruit was dumped in

For the Chardonnay, the grapes were pressed whole cluster in a bladder press and the juice was put into stainless steal tanks to be settled. The settling and racking of the whites were carried out for longer this year to encourage more of the oidium and Botrytis to settle out with the lees, bourbes.

The first Chardonnay pressing

All fermentations were natural and no yeast was added to any of the reds, and only one white wine appellation was innoculated (as the Botrytis was noticably higher on the fruit, and a natural fermentation was risky).

Now we have been seeing very fast and happy fermentations with both the reds and the whites, and Pierre seems to be quite pleased with the outcome. To recieve more aromatic character from the yeasts however, he has been prolonging the fermentations a few days by chapitilizing the Pinot noir cuves (adding sugar) just before the alcoholic fermentation completes. As strange and wrong as this sounds, it makes a lot of sense as the sugar content is lower this year and as the fermentations have been finishing in 5-7 days (which is 2X faster than the average fermentation.) The other question you might be asking yourself is "is that legal!?" And yeah, in Burgundy it is very much legal to add sugar to your must in order to achieve the right alcohol level (12.5-13% alc) but you must keep record of how much you use as the process is very much controlled!

Each day I continue to ask why, what, and when and have been jotting down notes left and right. By the end of this week I hope to do some grape stomping with my feet, and will no doubt share the photos with you all!

Wishing you all a very relaxing Sunday! Cheers!

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!

First Impressions of Burgundy

I was asked recently what my first impressions of Burgundy have been, so I've mulled it over and this is what I've decided:

Burgundy is more than just a region of haughty wine and traditionalist winemakers. It is a culture proud of its fine food, wine and terroir; a culture that strives for the best quality in each of these categories and succeeds. From the prospective of a wine student from California, whose knowledge base of wine includes more science than experience, I entered Burgundy with a bias toward winemaking practices in California. However, not even two months into my internship and I believe I may be swayed toward the traditional, yet innovative practices utilized in Burgundy. Winemaking begins in the soil, moves through the plant to the fruit, and needs little to no intervention afterwards. This concept seems obvious here, but I believe that there is a disconnect sometimes between the land and the wine in other regions. In Burgundy, there is no disconnect. Here, there is a respect for the terroir and the vines which dig their roots into its soil. Quality wine is attained through great attention to the land, vine, and fruit. In the same way, quality food is attained through great attention to the local, fresh ingredients. In Burgundy, this is all understood and implemented. A good wine is just as easy to make as a good meal, you just have to know what elements to focus on. So perhaps a good life follows the same pattern, and Burgundy has attained the ultimate balance we all strive to attain.

In any case, writing this excerpt on the region was quite difficult for me. It made me really think about what I thought I knew about Burgundy, and what I think I've learned now. It made me ponder about what I have gained so far, and in what direction I'd like my career to head from here. My dreams went wild, and I couldn't find the words to express my desires. But then I realized that I might be confusing my dreams with my views of Burgundy...but maybe they were one in the same?