O'Vineyards

O'Belgium - Wallonie, Liège and Beyond.

2009-02-07T08:30:00.000-08:00

I'm always excited to tell you about the magnificently named locales that I get to explore thanks to my wine travels. Today is a great day for these nominal revelations!

Our friend Fabrice Krier at La Tache de Vin is selling O'Vineyards wine at his new digs in Belgium. He's up and running and people anywhere from Belgique to Luxembourg can dig into some O'Vineyards. Oh, and let's not forget everybody living in Wallonie. He's my Wallonie wine croney.

Wine Fest ... err. Sinus Fest?

2009-01-26T02:07:00.001-08:00

bestiole-de-la-guarrigue-ensemble,
originally uploaded by ryanovineyards.

Sunday, we got to attend a local wine and everything festival held in Moussoulens.

Ampelography, the identification of vines based on visible characteristics, lends its name to the event because we love our winemakers here (at least when it's time to party). The amazingly named festival, Les Ampelofolies, focuses on products of the vines ranging from fine wines to plonk to distilled press juice (anti-freeze).

But, at a glance, we see that Les Ampelofolies celebrates a whole lot of things that do not grow on vines. There's a growing focus on truffles and other less pricey regional delectables. It's really a celebration of all things smellable. A festival of the nose. Smell the terroir. Smell it!

And it's fun. Oh is it fun! Eat all day. Like a carnival where everything is delicious and the vendors made everything themselves. There's pros and amateurs. Volunteer firefighters selling home made cookies. Youngsters like my neighbors and I selling fine wine. Bands dressed as enormous insects.

And of course, like all French village fests, it is a celebration of the moustache.

Video for those who hate reading or just can't get enough of the wine fest ambience.

Tempete de 2009 - It's Windy

2009-01-24T08:56:00.000-08:00

It's been a long and windy day. I am not allowed to go outside because my mom is panicking. The department has banned car travel until further notice. We can see three healthy trees fallen from the winery loft. We assume we're going to be clearing out a lot of trees. Hopefully nothing damages the vines or trellis system. A big one fell in the Syrah.

At least I can still drink.

Sometimes I stay inside all day voluntarily. But when it's forced upon me, I go ga ga. To demonstrate, a recent Garfield Minus Garfield comic:

(this is a comic strip that just reprints popular Garfield comics without the titular character, focusing instead on the grim existential masterpiece that is John)

Pruning Vines in the Winter

2009-01-08T04:58:00.000-08:00

It's an exceptionally cold winter in France this year and everybody from Paris to Marseilles is covered in an unexpectedly thick sheet of snow. We are enjoying it in the Languedoc too as the vines can always use a good frost. The plants harden and green vines turn to woody tentacles that latch on to the wire trellis system so hard you think you'll need the jaws of life.

Most of the locals who prune professionally refuse to work with us because our trellis system (four wires) supports the plants too much. They need to be doing a plant every twenty seconds to make a decent wage. That means spur pruning AND ripping off all the growth. As you can see in this video, my dad is just pruning. A future video will feature how I run around behind him tearing down all the vegetation that he has pruned. But in this one we see the solemn slow work of cutting down vines and letting them hang on the wires.

It's pretty tedious but it's sort of beautiful (especially with snow on the ground). Some people will enjoy this movie and it's slow pacing across the frozen tundra and its light sense of nostalgia for sunny Florida where I spent my December in beach-going weather. Others will think I am an artsy fart. Such is life. Enjoy the video.

Punch down the cap - How to pige wine

2008-10-15T04:10:00.000-07:00

Pigeage is more than just a funny word with indecipherable vowel distribution. It's a way of life. For weeks, all of our wines are going through an extended fermentation where the grapes and grape juice are turning into delicious red wine. This is a critical period known as maceration when the wine will draw its best qualities from the skin and the seeds in the tank. The undamaged grapes of harvest time impart their best qualities to the juice which will one day soon be fine wine.

But it's not smooth sailing, my friends. The tanks we hold the grapes in contain 80 to 100 hectoliters (converted to nonmetric: a lot) of grapes. And the pristine purple marbles that fall into the vat are crushed and torn asunder by the chemical forces at work when yeasts ferment the juice. What's more, there's a byproduct to all this fermenting: CO2. The Carbon dioxide rises to the top of the vat like bubbles in soda and they will lift the majority of the skin and seeds to the top, forming a thick hard cap.

Two or three times a day depending on where we are in the fermentation (determined by measuring the density and temperature of the wine in the cuve). This is hard. It's a struggle to push the grapes back down into the juice. Especially the first time. Especially the first hole. That first puncture is rough, but we've gotta' do it!

I've been looking for excuses to push back the daily pigeage ritual to give my tired arms a rest. My finely tuned ability to procrastinate led me to make a video about pigeing. And now, in an effort to avoid the afternoon pige, I'm writing a blog post about pigeing.

Now you can learn the ins and outs. See the tools I use. Learn the theory and strategies that I usually ignore. You too can use this blog post as a way to not do the work you should probably be doing right now.

Behold punch downs:

Wine punch down - Pigeage

oh, music by Phunt Your Friends available for free download at songfight.org

Taste Merlot before harvest to check maturity

2008-10-11T08:31:00.000-07:00

I have a new video for you all. This is a little video that describes how we go about tasting the grapes to decide whether or not they're almost ready to harvest. You all know how to taste things, so it's a little basic. However, sometimes, it's fun to hear about the specifics like ... what exactly does tasting the seed show about acidity and maturity or ... how do you go about randomly picking grapes for a 200 berry sample that you'll bring to the lab.

Yes, these and far nerdier questions will be answered.

Tasting Merlot before Harvest

Pre-emptive Q & A:

Q: Ryan, isn't it a little late in the year to be checking your grapes' maturity? I thought that the Cabardes would have harvested most of its Merlot by now.
A: You are such a precocious reader! Yes, it's true that this is late. I filmed this in September and then got too busy actually harvesting to edit the video (also, I had to debug it because iMovie HD was giving me some trouble).

Q: How about a harvest update?
A: Harvest is going well. The Merlot and Syrah are in and they're fermenting. We just started punching down caps today on two of the vats and it's as hard as I remember. There's a new harvester that is amazing so our quality will go up even though we are harvesting a little less by hand this year. That's awesome, because it means less stress for me and better wine for all of us. :)

Bocuse d'Or Winner pouring O'Vineyards

2008-09-28T01:31:00.000-07:00

I read an article about the United States selecting their competitor for the upcoming Bocuse d'Or competition (not a small deal). The golden Bocuse is named after renowned French chef Paul Bocuse, and it is in fact the biggest deal. The article linked above mentions rather briefly that individual countries will budget over a million dollars to train their selected chef for the upcoming competition. We're dealing in a realm that is hard to access on a daily basis, but this is the sort of cuisine dreams are made of. I mean, Bocuse has served individual soups more famous than the combined life achievements of my direct family.

But in my little way, I'll be adding to the long culinary tradition! I'll be making regular deliveries of O'Vineyards wines to a restaurant étoilée. Franck Putelat, the 2003 winner of the Bocuse d'Or, has started his own restaurant at the foot of the historic walled city of Carcassonne. Within a single year, his Michelin star followed him to Le Parc, and he deserves it.

Thomas Brieu, the sommelier at Le Parc, will be personally introducing three O'Vineyards wines alongside the delectable menus that Chef Putelat arranges.

This is a good way to kick of what the French refer to as CHR sales (cafes, hotels, restaurants)!

I'm Franco-American again!

2008-09-19T08:33:00.000-07:00

I usually tell people I'm an American making wine in the south of France but the truth is that I'm a dual citizen or at least I was born that way. It gets tricky because I let my French passport expire, and trying to convince the French government that I'm still French was a hoot and a holler (a phrase I'm afraid to teach anybody over here since they'd probably pronounce it:"Ay 'oot an' ay 'oh-lehr").

To get a new passport I had to show them a National ID. To get a National ID I had to show them a passport. You know the drill. Well now I can show them both! In the end I had to prove to them that I had NOT renounced my French citizenship after turning 18. As it turns out, it's rather hard to prove an absence of an act, but surrender isn't in the French dictionary. ...not when it comes to bureaucracy!

Somebody remind me when this is about to expire.

So, above is my mandatory sourire-sans-dents face. The photo booth encouraged me to look happy but reminded me that smiling is not allowed if the photo is to be used for an official government ID. And those joint stipulations were thought-provoking. I reflected quietly upon the true nature of happiness while the photo booth timer ticked away. First photo was a botch.

What was even more distressing was the second photo when the photo booth knew I was smiling. I guess the computer in there can tell the difference between my pearly whites and my wan face.

The third picture I tried keeping my eyes wide and my teeth hidden, while expressing some degree of joy. That sickly smirk is now my official identification in France. I got the best of it in the end I suppose... unless this is all a roundabout way of getting me to look exceptionally smug in my official French ID. Clever system, clever.

Guide Hachette selection Cabardes

2008-09-10T04:55:00.000-07:00

We got reviewed in the guide Hachette. I'll add this to the media portion of the website eventually but it's pretty low priority since it's in French and in the middle of harvest. The 2009 Guide Hachette talked up our wine a good deal. We weren't quite the Coup de Coeur for the region, but nobody expects a wine called "Les Americains" to wine the favored spot in such a prestigious French review. It's an honor to be in the pages of this renowned wine publication.

Here's a link to the actual article for anybody who reads French:

Guide Hachette

As always, the rest of the media clippings can be found in the Press section of the website:Press

Wine Spectator Restaurant Guide

2008-08-29T06:13:00.000-07:00

I don't usually repost the nonsense that's zipping along the grapevine but this is good stuff. A guy made a fictional restaurant with a small Internet presence (a website, some reviews on chowhound) and a phone number.

He comes up with a huge wine list that includes some of the lowest-rated Italian wines of the past century according to Wine Spectator. He then submits his restaurant to the WS restaurant guide with a $250 application fee.

He gets an award of exellence. Nice. Very nice.

Now, what we should draw from this is that Wine Spectator is not a journalistic source in this mess. It's just a republisher of information. A real periodical would have had somebody on the ground to make sure the restaurant even existed. But it's a big magazine and they have some sections that are fluffier than others.

That said, I have a large amount of respect for The Wine Spectator because they rated the wines I sent them. They had no obligation or financial incentive. They just have some reviewers who were willing to taste and evaluate some new wines from O'Vineyards. That means that they're cool in my book.

blog post by the award-winner: http://osterialintrepido.wordpress.com/
wine spectator's response: http://forums.winespectator.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/6826053161/m/835102245

French wine in Sweden

2008-07-22T06:22:00.000-07:00

Good news for all our Swedish readers. A Swedish wine club that you can join online will be making several of our award-winning O'Vineyards wines available to households around Stockholm (and maybe beyond). In addition, I'm excited because I get to write and read an unprecedented number of umlauts in my day to day affairs.

torstig.se

rudimentary English translation

Hurrah for International cooperation. Hopefully it'll go far better than the encounter between Swedish Chef and Jacques Roach.

Vine Tucking

2008-06-13T08:44:00.000-07:00

Okay, so the team (currently consisting of my dad, Joey Quigley, and me) is out in the Cabernet Sauvignon lifting wires.

In a nutshell, we want the most leaves possible on each plant since leaves with direct sunlight get energy for the plant, but we want to avoid crowding or dense packs of leaves because leaves stuck in a pack won't collect energy AND they increase the chance of mildew and rot on the grape clusters come harvest time.

The best way for us to guarantee greeaaat foliage coverage with a lot of vertical surface area (horizontal is good too except that it would bump into the plants beside it and get undesired crowding) is a moveable wire trellis system with high posts. We went through the whole vineyard and ripped all the old posts out of the ground to make place for new posts. The new posts have lots of hooks on them so you can adjust how high the wires are set.

When the plant is just sprouting, we drop the wires. The leaves and vines grow in on top of the wires. Then we go around and lift the wires and hook them to the post. This lifts all the foliage up at once and guides the plant upwards while also providing support to grow extra long without snapping (this is especially important on more fragile varietals like the syrah which has vegetation that can easily snap under its own weight when unsupported).

The other cool part of this video is just talking about a peculiarly pesky weed called Les Americains (the Americans!) which we have to rip out of the ground whenever we see. It kind of looks like grapevine and it tends to sprout near the base of the vines and leech off of their root system. Left unchecked it destroys everything and suffocates the grape plants.

They're called Americans because they were introduced when France took in a lot of California plants after a blight devastated most of their own vines. The American clones apparently introduced this previously unseen weed to the countryside. Enjoy the irony of Americans ripping up Americains.

Questions and comments are appreciated on the blog or at the youtube video itself. Thanks for keeping up with our adventures!

Wine Tasting with Winemaker - Truly Majestic Saturday

2008-05-20T14:44:00.001-07:00

Sometimes, I take a weekend day off and just do a nice all-day wine tasting with one of my retailers. Which retailer depends on where I'm staying and what I want to do that night. This past Saturday was at The Butcher's Block in Sarasota. I got some video footage that should demystify my job and help people realize exactly how glamorous and fantastic being a winemaker can be. ugh. :D

Cinco de Mayo and Paper Work and Paper Play

2008-05-09T07:15:00.000-07:00

Today is a day of deliveries. I expected to get started sooner because somebody at Whole Foods was registered to be in at 8:00 AM. The wave of relief when I called in to find he wasn't there that early is best left hidden. But I'm going to leave the computer soon for a long list of deliveries around Tampa and St. Petersburg.

Tomorrow will be a day of paper. I will have a lot of fun finishing a birthday present for a new friend and I will have a lot of boredom writing up tax reports and compliance papers for the state auditors. It's a glamorous life, the life of a winemaker. :-( Saturdays buried in paper.

All the whining aside, we had an excellent Cinco de Mayo celebration. Some of my spoiled wine that's not in a condition to sell but is in a condition to enjoy got mixed in with some fruit and ginger ale and cinnamon. We had ourselves a time. (Legal disclaimer: we had all this wine cleared through a licensed vendor in the state of Florida blah blah blah blah blah.)

Some vineyard footage

2008-05-05T07:57:00.000-07:00

I finally had a bit of time to compile some of the vineyard footage. Please excuse the low quality. I'm recording all of this with my laptop's built-in webcam and the macbook icam is not meant for these sweeping outdoor shots. Add Internet compression to that and some psychotic time-lapse editing and you have video that I hope is just on this side of watchable. Anyway, people have been requesting some outdoorsy footage and some footage of the town around the vineyard. Hopefully these clips will satisfy.

The music is "quelle classe!" by Les Auditeurs (my friends and I just recorded it this week!).

You can see the town hall of Villemoustaussou, the fruit orchard on the vineyard, Muse the Wine Dog, and some pretty blossoms. Excitement abounds on the outskirts of Carcassonne, France.

Still running

2008-04-29T10:15:00.001-07:00

I've been back in Tampa a couple days now and I'm starting to miss mom's cooking. But it's good to be in the city that raised me, checking out the old stomping grounds and living in the house I was in before we started this crazy vineyard thing. For those who don't know, I'm from Tampa so this is where the wine's marketing and distribution is headquartered for the time being.

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Home, Sweet-Mother-of-@#*!, Home.

[[VIDEO REMOVED]]

The video isn't working entirely right... I'll have to get my mom to reupload it. Regardless, that's a glimpse of the house my parents built before going into wine. They made the houses like they make wines WAY BIGGER THAN MOST PEOPLE WOULD EVER EXPECT.

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Anyway, I'm in Tampa and I'm ready to start selling wine. A lot of new contacts from the Sarasota Wine Festival. I met David and Deb Hunt from Hunt Cellars, several of the family member at Stanley Lambert including (Jim Lambert, self-proclaimed wannabe winemaker), the lovely family behind Silkwood Wines, and the Michael half of Michael-David Winery (who make Earthquake, Incognito, Pride, 7 Deadly Zins and many many more). They were all fantastic people and I will be keeping in touch with each of them.

I also got to snoop a little behind the scenes, sneaking around the service corridors of the Ritz Carlton, salvaging floral arrangements from the hotel's trash, and pouring more than a thousand samples in three days. I even got invited to an after-party thrown by one of the bigger distributors and it was fun drinking behind (what some refer to as) enemy lines. At the end of so much good wine, everybody can be good friends.

Hit the ground running

2008-04-24T02:07:00.000-07:00

I landed (finally) and my luggage didn't. Oh well. I'm in Tampa. I got a few hours of sleep. I'm going to pack the wine and bring it (past deadline) to Sarasota. We'll see if we can salvage the expo experience despite the Airline conspiracy to destroy my itinerary. I've always thought that Charles de Gaul had it out for me (the airport, not the General/President).

Sarasota will be a hoot if I can make it there on time since the wine had to be delivered when I was originally scheduled to land like a day and a half ago.

Security

2008-04-23T01:25:00.000-07:00

I just got the royal treatment for security checks, but at least they didn't put me in that dark little cavity searching booth. I should be able to go back to Tampa on time and maybe even get the wine in. Things are looking up. I even found a receipt with some leftover computer time on it so I get to give a lil update.

Travel Travails

2008-04-22T23:53:00.000-07:00

The AirFrance lady refused to check my bags all the way through insisting that I would have better luck just getting them at CDG and running to check them in again with US Air even though the airlines have agreements to check bags through. I ran. I missed the mark for baggage check by 2 minutes. They would have checked me in but the luggage was already closed. So thanks, AirFrance person.

I am now going to take today's identical flight. We'll see how it works this time.

The collage travelogue I'm working on is very satisfactory. I'm using any kind of free literature I find laying around while I move about the planet. It's very fun to put things in a light that is so tainted by the sort of corporate and commercial images we're bombarded with on a regular basis. It's also neat to see how my attention will fall on a word or image. Ah, introspection. The best airport pastime.

Daily Flip w/ Jim Kukral

2008-04-21T21:22:00.000-07:00

I tried to do an elevator pitch for Jim Kukral at the Daily Flip. He's doing an educational contest / promotion where people can get feedback on 15 second pitches about their product or company. I don't verbally identify myself or my brand so he kind of rips me a new one, but that's what learning is about sometimes! A big thanks to Kukral for running a series like this.

Here's the pitch:

Cheesy in the Lap of Luxury

2008-04-21T03:47:00.000-07:00

I made a sister video to accompany the barrel music video. It wraps up the barrel trifecta with a couple of shout outs and an answer to one of the questions I got from the Vayniac forums.

Blog shoutouts

2008-04-20T08:10:00.000-07:00

I got written up by a Master of Wine living in the Languedoc. Juliet Bruce Jones dropped the O'bomb when talking about noteworthy vineyards in the Cabardes region of France. Thank you, Ms. Jones.

Read more here: http://www.aude-vie.com/page19/page19.html

Also, we've been getting some good feedback from the Vayniacs at the winelibrarytv.com forum. If you've never checked out Gary Vaynerchuk, do so. I won't guarantee that you'll love him, but you'll have an opinion. And one of the many nice things about his wine reviews and his rabid fans is that you can access them for free unlike elitist publications that don't even have issues in bookstores/newsstands/libraries.

Winemaking killed the radio star

2008-04-20T02:27:00.000-07:00

We just moved a ton of wine barrels onto the oxoline shelving. Full barrels are really, really heavy so we actually put empty barrels on the shelves and then pumped the wine from a full barrel in the middle of the room into an empty barrel on the shelf. This is a tedious and lengthy process, but it's kind of cool to see it in action.

With that in mind, I tried to stay interesting in this video. Now, what's going on is pretty simple.

Put an empty barrel on the shelf.
Fill it with a barrel from the ground.
Clean the barrel from the ground.
Put the newly empty barrel on the shelf.
Repeat for like three days of your life.

Because it's so simple, I decided to make it an artsy fart music video. I put it to the tune of "A Tear" by Phunt Your Friends which is a collaborative effort between Drew McCarty and I. This also has lyrical contributions from Kate Keelen. The song was originally submitted to SongFight in April 2006.

Pruning methods

2008-04-18T05:26:00.001-07:00

I posted a youtube video about the different pruning methods. There's spur pruning and cane pruning. These are known here as Cordon Royat and Guyot, respectively. At O'Vineyards, we're in the process of converting from Guyot to Cordon Royat and this video explains why we think this will be good for the wine.

PS - I'm confirming this blog's entry into Technorati. Technorati Profile It's a site that catalogs blogs and helps spread the word.

Soutirage Update

2008-04-15T11:35:00.000-07:00

We spent most of the day doing soutirages on some of the Syrah for the 2007 Reserve. It had a lot of lies (that's pronounced leez and has nothing to do with obfuscating the truth) and it was exceptionally important to make sure that this grape deposit should be separated from the wine at this time.

We also took advantage of this move to put some of the barrels in the center of the room on that new oxoline shelving I was bragging about a couple days ago. It took a long time, but it should be easier on the remaining barrels we have to go through.

More to come!