X-mas - Noël - Jul

A merry christmas to everybody who celebrates it, and happy holidays for everybody else.

Snow is rare this very warm year. Vineyards of 17 degrees Celsius as late as December 17th. Further north, in Denmark, temperatures are more like early spring than heart of winter.

We will celebrate anyway, with angels of light seen in the low skies over the christmas market of Reims, and a few bubbly bottles.

This year we'll go for this type.

 

17th of December thus 17 degrees Celsius

17th of December. Another day in the vineyards, and a warm one of them.

Today the degrees of Celsius in Loisy-en-Brie happened to match the date around lunchtime, and that is certainly not an everyday thing. Yet at least. And actually it is not very comfortable.

Temperatures like this make you wonder how the vines pass the wintertime. A bit of cold - definition: below zero - is good for plants, maybe persons as well. As a winegrower you can also fear an early start of the vines which means that yourself, you must speed up your pruning. Since our days have the same amount of daylight, it is not really possible to speed up very much.

So, let this be a loner please.

No logical follow up the 18th and the days to come, please.

Multipurpose vendangeoir Noël style

Every year we do a x-mas party the Danish way for our children and adult friends in Champagne.

The party takes place in the afternoon, now and then well into the evening as well, with an atelier of decorations, x-mas cookies and beignets and vin chaud, gloegg in Danish, which is of course prepared with our local redwine, and it does a good job in this set-up as well. Your vin chaud can never be better than the wine was from the start, so it actually makes a difference with a wine of several years even a bit on the light side like our Coteaux Champenois.

But party or not, you can still glue som labels in the morning as you wait for the arrival of your guests .

And so we did.

Some of these Selection of 2006 even left the building a few hours later.

To help securing a merry x-mas somewhere.

A hand or two before x-mas

Champagnes being prepared for last deliveries before the coming-up holiday celebrations.

X-mas Reims-style

1st plot tasting and it asks for more

The tasting sessions are on.

The wines from september are still young. This means not very stable, you must treat them a bit like kids. Give them the best you can but do not expect to see them deliver fully yet. A wine that you may find great one day, can be quite different the following week. Just do not judge it to hard, after all these wines are not adult yet, they may be as capricious as teenagers and it is okay.

Patience often pays though. Also today.

The wines are so much better than last week. It was, in fact, a bit disappointing.

Plot wines upa
This week amongst others a line of parcellaires are up. Plot wines, thus important to each of the tasters, as most do at least one or two plot wines.

We care for ours. The third in a line of three, not yet for sale but oh, are we looking forward for that moment?

So far we name it Vieilles vignes because we can... in fact all our vines are old, we have just not bottled one so far. That will change,

In this 100% Chardonnay we find both the acidity necessary for a wine to keep and develop but also fruits and a certain souplesse or softness.

And today it received both charmeur and prometteur from the hardest Vertus-gang who basically like only Chardonnay from Vertus, and the grandfather of all maintained the comments even as it was revealed to be a simple autres crus from yours truly.