Time stopped in the vineyards this week…The unusual extremely cold weather forced our wine-growers to modify their activity. Temperatures reached down to -10°C with a North wind.

While in normal conditions, they have to prune, trellis, bend and sécailler, our teams are taking care of other maintenance tasks on the property. Everything is asleep and quiet…The birds and plants alike! The only sound is the wind blowing through the vineyards as it lashes against the few brave souls that adventure into them.

Usually in this season, we have to prune the vines. This essential, meticulous work will determine the vines’ production next fall and their growth in coming years. The pruning technique must be perfectly mastered as explained by Denis Beauger in the interview by Michel Cardoze on TV7. It requires ancestral know-how that has been passed down from father to son for generations. At Brane, we use so-called Médocaine ‘Guyot' pruning which consists in leaving only two canes along each vine.

But in such cold weather, pruning becomes difficult. The canes (long wood from the previous year kept by the pruner) are brittle and difficult to handle.

It is also necessary to trellis, another task that requires care, dexterity and close attention. This is because these natural ties that we attach between the vine and the stake or wire will keep the knotty vine-stocks perfectly straight in relation to the posts. These “osiers” (salix viminalis), small touches of orange on a dark soil background, come from the willow grown along the Garonne river. They are environmentally friendly and highly weather-resistant. But with such low temperatures, they have become too stiff to be shaped.

Bending is also necessary, to guide and attach the canes remaining after pruning that form an arch toward the soil. Later on, this work will guarantee the sprouting of buds across the vineyard.

Lastly, it is important to sécailler, i.e. replace any posts in poor condition and maintain the trellis (wires). But the soil, hardened by the frost, has made this operation impossible.

In the cellar, where it’s much warmer, blending has finished. After having tasted more than 80 different batches, the final ‘recipes’ for Brane and Baron 2011 were concocted by Henri Lurton and his team of oenologists at the end of January. The Brane 2011 is now lying in the first-year cellar and starting to age. It will be topped up on a regular basis, racked every 3 months, and of course, tasted twice a week to precisely assess its development.

Next week, our third wine, Château Notton 2011, will also be blended, and its older sibling, the 2010, will be fined. It is expected to be bottled this spring. It will be the first 2010 to leave our cellars.

"L’hiver s’est abattu sur toute floraison ;
Des arbres dépouillés dressent à l’horizon
Leurs squelettes blanchis ainsi que des fantômes…"

Guy de Maupassant…

It was a cold, windy weekend in the entire region. Yesterday morning, we discovered a blanket of snow on Brane’s vineyards.
Fortunately, this morning, the sun finally came out, the sky was blue and the snow was starting to melt.…

Here are some exceptional images for our region which usually has milder weather…

Par Mary, vendredi 14 octobre 2011

While the harvest is coming to a close with the picking of the Carmenère at the beginning of this month of October, the 2011 vintage appears to have been extremely atypical, both in terms of its climatic conditions and in the events that have occurred in the vineyard throughout the 2011 vine cycle.  Vine-growing continues to be largely dependent on the vagaries of the weather, which dictates the type of work needed to be done in the vineyard and the quality of the wines we produce.