Our travel in April has taken us both to Sancerre, to Chablis, to Bordeaux and to Champagne. The vines had reached different stages of evolution in the various districts. But everywhere we saw a nascent green colour and beginning leaf canopy. From now on things will develop fast! The vines grow so that you can almost see the branches get longer if you stand watching (much more exciting than watching paint dry). It is a beautifully time in the vineyards now in spring. A lovely time to go visit them.
Some growers have already started picking off some buds, de-budding, at an early stage to limit the number of bunches per hectare. Soon the tedious work to remove the wild shoots that grow from the bottom of the trunk will begin, les pampres as it is called in French. Tough but necessary.
We saw many vineyards with an unusually high proportion of newly planted vines. Often it due to diseases like esca, black dead arm and eutypiosis. The wine growers have been forced to tear up the infected vines. These wood diseases are a major threat to vineyards worldwide today. Almost like the wine louse, phylloxera, was little over a hundred years ago.
We have also tasted several wines from the latest vintage, 2014. Both whites that were already nice to drink and some red Bordeaux wines that were not finished yet, but still very nice indeed.
These four districts that we have visited are all prestigious districts in France, but the funny thing is that they still have an incredible breadth of price levels. On our Bordeaux tour, for example, we tasted wines for between 5 and 200 euros (price at the chateaux).
One of the things that are fascinating when you travel around the vineyards is to see all types of properties, from small family farms to stately palaces with gilded halls. But the most important thing is, after all, that the wines are good and excellent quality.
And you can find quality at many different price levels!
Britt & Per
PS: Recommend to your friends to read the Brief!
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