"Tagged" tank (by our friends who came to visit us) emptied to blend the Mistral 2007 and to be ready to receive the 2008 grapes

Dear wine lovers,

We are now done with spraying copper (Mildiou is at last no longer endangering) and our vines have turned color ("véraison"). It is now time to measure (thanks Steve for the refractometer) their sugar and acidity evolution which often look like the following graph on its very simple version. Guess when it is time to harvest then ?

It is time to now make sure our harvest equipments are in good shape and re-organize the cellars to make room for this very special operations.

Just before the harvest, we will also bottle our "Mistral" 2007 blend mainly elaborated from our oldest Grenache vines and which a 1/3 of it has been aging in old barrels for 10 months. Since this wine is a blending of 3 tanks and 15 barrels and since we are just bottling a 1/3 of it, we had to take from them in each proportion and then refill all the tanks. For this, I had the great help of my Son Maxime.

Mistral 2007 will be the core (2/3) and probably the most qualitative part of our production, having in mind that Dentelle 2007 is also a beautiful wine with a very distintive character brought by the Carignan.

Dentelle in fact has a nice success as expressed by the numerous comments that you can read here. Don't hesitate to leave one if you have tried it. And if you would like to try it, we now have it available in many US cities and most of our retailers can ship.

We are bottling the Mistral now because it is ready to be drunk, it will actually be perfect for the coming Holidays. And we are also bottling it because we need space in the tanks to vinify the new coming grapes.

Al last, another way to prepare for 6 weeks for 7 days a week intense job is to rest. That's why I have taken some vacation and I am now rested and ready for this big event. Please wish us good fortune with the weather. The last two weeks and the 2 weeks harvest probably count for 2/3 of the harvest quality.

Cheers,

Jean-Marc - Domaine Rouge-Bleu

PS : Many thanks to Soren and Ken who have made published on their blogs some great info on us.

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