2015 Harvest ‘béni des dieux’ (‘blessed by the gods’) - Rejoice!

Once again, we find ourselves writing our harvest report... though only once in a while do so many positive factors converge to create ideal ripening conditions! Indeed, it has been both a stellar AND a bumper year for grapes in the Rhône, and France in general, and ours were no exception.

Slow Grapes

Our 2015 harvest was wonderfully ripe and full, and we started picking around a week earlier than usual this year, on the 21st September. As always, our pronounced altitude (on avg 550m/1800ft) creates an extreme temperature differential between day and night, which allows our grapes to ripen more slowly (with better flavour development and higher acidity) and pushes our harvest out to up to a month later than in the valleys below.

Clean Grapes

The grapes were in tip-top condition: they had recovered beautifully from potentially devastating hail at flowerset and ended the season extremely healthy with no signs of disease, issues with coulure, or problems with the black rot which has been such a big concern for some others in the region. Weather mishaps during harvest were also limited, though we did encounter two big downpours in the middle of some very sunny days - thankfully, the mistral promptly came in to dry the vineyard before the rot could set in. Armed with a brand new destemmer (which allowed for cleaner grapes and respected the fruit better by not ‘crunching’ them quite as much), we didn’t even have to do the usual individual berry sorting—a huge savings of time and energy.

Better Yields

On top of all the wonderful qualitative aspects of this year’s harvest, the general quantity of our grapes has also doubled from last year (though 2014 was a considerably smaller vintage than usual….) It took us much longer to hand harvest, with our vendangeurs out in the vineyards for 3.5 weeks of hand-picking, rather than the usual 2 to 3. Our yields, so crucial to the economic viability of a vintage, also doubled from an average of 14-25 HL, to about 32 HL (for the super geeky: our Syrah average was at 28 HL, and, our Grenache, at 40 HL)—still way below the desired 35 HL like Chateauneuf-du-Pape, but a welcome reprieve from the punishingly low production of the last years. Our yields vary massively from parcelle to parcelle,despite their proximity to each other, depending on the age of the vines, their situation, the grape variety, etc, but overall more fruit has ‘made the cut’ through our vigorous sorting processes (once in the vineyard, and twice in the winery) and, subsequently, we have some more to work into our top reds, so it should be a bumper year for production of both Abélard and Héloïse.

Spotlight on our Syrah

Every year, we like to put at least one aspect of what we do under the microscope to understand absolutely as much as possible about it and attempt to take it to new heights. This year the Spotlight is on our Syrah. The goal was to get upfront and personal with this variety (also the most widely planted variety on our vineyard), to bring out its personality and let its idiosyncrasies sing. This is particularly relevant for Héloïse cuvée, our majority Syrah blend. No matter the quality, the challenge of Syrah, for winemakers aspiring to making “vin d’auteur” with a distinctive sense of place, is how to get it to make it distinctive. This is in contrast with Grenache, which willingly lets itself adapt to the vineyard location and practices, and the vision of the winemaker.

Alain Graillot & The Holy Grail of Syrah

We deconstructed every aspect of our Syrah from the soils to blending and beyond. We enjoy many of the cuvees of our winefriend Alain Graillot, and admire him for his mastery of finesse and restraint, so it’s been a privilege to work with him all year on this project, rethinking which parts of the vineyard to repicket, tweaking certain pruning practices, staging blind tastings of iconic wines from his region to zero in a composite of characteristics that we aspire to emulate. Overall, he has been very complimentary of our fruit, though we inherited problems with some old parcelles that were planted in the wrong direction, which is holding the quality back. We like to scour the globe for best practices and inspirational expertise, and this time our guidance has come from closer to home, just few hours North in Crozes-Hermitage. Indeed, if Syrah is the Queen of the Northern Rhône, we feel Alain Graillot is the King of Syrah, for his mastery of finesse and restraint. Together we are experimenting with a Northern Rhône-type fermentation for some of our Syrah in a solitary wooden tank, applying his signature “no destemming” to decide if this method is well-suited to the fruit of our terroir. The trick is to work with ripe stems to add elegant tannic complexity to the structure of the batch, avoiding the greener stems that can bring unwelcome acerbic notes. We are curious to see if this practice could reinforce the more ‘Northern Rhône’ characteristics of our vineyard afforded to us because of our altitude – alongside our signature splash of a perfumed white grape variety in the blend, such as Viognier, in the tradition of Côte-Rôtie, or Roussanne in our 2014 blend. We are excited to see what comes from this.

Putting the 'M' into our 'GSM'

GSM blends (Grenache-Syrah-Mourvèdre) is often referred to as the Holy Trinity of grape blends. We love Mourvèdre and have been feeling like dogs outside the steak house because we were told that it wouldn’t do well at high altitude, since it ripens late and might not reach desirable maturity. But we decided to tempt fate and take our chances—even if we can’t get it to ripen every year we think it’s worth fighting for. So the forgiving conditions of 2015 coincided with our first (small) crop of Mourvèdre. Thanks in great part to the guidance of soil experts Claude and Lydia Bourguignon and the backbreaking dedication of Bénédicte to nurse the young vines through the first treacherous years (we had lost our first planting because it didn’t “take”), we were able to harvest our first young clusters—not enough to fill a tank but we get to co-ferment them in a small Grenache tank for our Abélard cuvée. The counterpart to our Syrah-driven Héloïse blend, Abélard is more typically Grenachey & ‘Southern Rhône’ in style, so the obvious choice to blend with our baby-born Mourvèdre.

Viva Vermentino!

We’ve fought hard to explain why we stepped out of the local appellations for our top cuvées, in order have the freedom to blend what we want as we think best reflects our unique terroir. So now we have been taken it a step further, viewing that freedom as an opportunity and even a responsibility to “go for it” and plant other varieties from further afield than the Rhone, or even France. Our philosophy is to complement, contrast and ultimately enhance the local palate of flavours with some exciting “exotic” notes that make sense, and keep experimenting!! To the end, on the suggestion of Michel Bettane, then validated by our fantastic team, we decide to plant some Vermentino, and for the first time we’re going to Rolle a little bit of into Aliot… (sorry for the pun.)

Cheers to a wonderful year!

Nicole & Team Bleu

P.S. A tremendous thank you to Laurent Pamato for all the fantastic photography :)