All the grapes have now been picked and we got the hectare of vines in Morgon Corcelette in the vat literally 12 hours before the rain started this morning! Our gamble to wait until the last minute just paid off. La Corcelette is relatively high in altitude and is late ripening, so the extra week was really necessary.

It seems very empty here now without the chatter of the harvesters in the courtyard. The girls who have been cooking for 25 harvesters have cleaned up and gone back to their own kitchens and normal life which means that the winery team have to fend for themselves. Still, today, we lunched at Chez Zombie in the village – great frogs legs!Tomorrow is my last day before I head back to Devon. There’s still plenty to do, notably a vast pile of admin which the French authorities specialise in.The wines really are rather good, but I will tell you more about them when I get back. Bon fin des vendanges!

It’s all been put safely in the vats! We finished picking at Chateau de Grandmont yesterday afternoon under clear blue skies. The grapes that we picked for the three traditional vin de garde vats were near-perfect, without any signs of rot. Although the potential alcohol degree, at around 11.5°, is not as high as 2009, it is very acceptable and the wines will require very little chaptalisation (the addition of sugar) to boost them to 12.5°.The musts are tasting fresh and are very much red-fruit based. Yesterday, we  pressed  two vats for the Beaujolais-Villages Nouveau and they have a rich, intense purple colour and exciting fruit and floral aromas. They also have considerably more depth and succulence than we anticipated.

 At Chateau du Pavé, we are expecting to press the first vat tomorrow morning and have high expectations. Let’s hope they’re well-founded!

It’s back to the ‘old days’ again as I have decided to incorporate a bit of déléstage in to the fermentation this year. Basically, that means you empty your fermenting vat of all its liquid and get a couple of expendable people (in this case my daughter, Clare, and her boy friend, Josh) to get in to the vat with the remaining grapes and to spend half an hour crushing the ‘cap’ in their wellies. It sounds great fun to start with but gets a tad boring and tiring after a while! Still, they did a great job as this extracts colour and helps prolong the fermentation by releasing further sugar from within the grapes.

Tomorrow, we’re picking the remaining parcels at Chateau de Grandmont for our traditional Beaujolais-Villages vats. The weather is set well and the grapes are now mega-ripe. Let’s hope there’s enough acidity still.

Although we’ve had another good day today (Tuesday), tomorrow’s weather looks wobbly until mid-morning. I therefore took the decision to hold the pickers back tomorrow morning until 10.00am. The fall out from this is that the kitchen will have to delay lunch and our end-of-harvest party will be in the evening rather than lunchtime! This all requires considerable diplomacy and tact to persuade everyone concerned that the quality of the wine has to come before our meals – then that’s France for you and why I continue to love the human challenge.

We have had the luck to have an outstanding group of harvesters who have picked over 200 bins of grapes (a bin weighs about 55kg) in two days. We have one more vat to complete tomorrow and one can only hope that everyone who is down at the café in the village tonight gets up in time tomorrow morning! 

The vats are starting to ferment really nicely and at Chateau de Grandmont, our caviste, Yannick, is getting very excited about the potential quality. My first impression is that the 2010′s are going to be really fruit-packed with a classic Beaujolais openess; wines for drinking over the first twelve months of their lives but not for keeping. It is too early to say, but I feel that, maybe, they should be drunk before the majestic 2009′s. A discuter.

What a great first day here in St. Lager. The troops were up and ready to go at 7.15am having had a decent breakfast…although we had to kick some of them out of bed as the first evening often takes its toll amongst the new arrivals at the harvest! They gathered in the courtyard below the chateau, just as the morning sun was rising towards the Alps – probably with just the weeniest bit of fear as to what they were about to get in to. The first bins came in to the cuvage by 8.15, full of small, ripe grapes from a parcel of vines planted in the mid-70`s. Weighing in at 12.2% potential alcohol, but more importantly, they were phenolically ripe; it was a great way to start. The 15 harvesters have picked brilliantly all day but the star of the show has to be our local 66 year-old, Girard, who has well-deserved his maillot jeune for being the first after every row!  We`ve got one vat (cuvée) finished and this will start on its voyage of fermentation tomorrow.

Everyone is a bit tired tonight but, as I write this, the youngsters are still enjoying a few songs and the odd glass in the refectoire. It`s been fun and the weather forecast is good for tomorrow….so things look good. I guess breakfast might be a quieter affair if they don`t go to bed soon.