Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Soon the harvest

When you sell wine, be it as an owner or a wholesaler, you regularly receive requests for price lists from imaginary companies who would then swindle some suppliers posing as real customers. Some even contact you using the name of serious companies and get product delivered to a bogus address.
Only this week, we received 2 requests of this sort, and I don’t even count the crazy ones from Africa!


The tasting in Leclerc in Saint Magne de Castillon was very well attended with real wine buyers, with of course, as would Frédéric Gautier say, a beautiful selection of the best Côtes de Castillon. Too bad that there is not a Monsieur Coustou in Fronsac…

Monday, visit of Haut Mazeris, lunch with Capucine, Yves and his wife and Aymar.
The afternoon was spent at Clément Pichon where the harvest started.
The harvest is late for the maturity of the grapes seems to be blocked, stress, cold, in certain cases the difficulty to assimilate magnesia which causes the stems to dry out and therefore the grapes to also dry out (also called in French passerillage). Still, you need eyes to see these symptoms. It is not normal that with all the independent consultants we hire or paid by the sales reps of pharmaceutical companies, etc… I have to be the one noticing it at Haut-Mazeris, or even more astonishing, that Mr Fayat notices it, like he doesn’t have anything else to do…
This doesn’t put in question the harvest in these 2 properties as this will represent, in the worst case, 7 to 8% of the entire surface of the vineyards and the selection process will eliminate the bad grapes.

I read on Parker’s site Neal Martin’s tasting of 12 top vintages of Château Trotanoy, one of our favorite wines in Bordeaux (and we are not the only ones, having friends from the Medoc who regularly drink 1989).

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