Le Couvent Diary

Wow, it's been a momentous week. My lovely brother Justin (known in the family as Freddie) had his 50th birthday.

His kind wife, Michelle, organised a secret party for 60-odd people (important hyphen). It was nearly a well-kept secret until Joel the local carpenter asked him what time it started just two days before the event.

I gave him one of those super-duper self-published books you can do so easily on a Mac & Ali gave him a day learning how to taste and blend wine. We all went off to Domaine Bourdic and had a fantastic time creating our own blend. By the end of the morning we all had blue tongues from tasting so much 'raw' wine.

But the real panic came during the afternoon when we had to blend, record quantities, taste, adjust, blend again and eventually come up with our very own assemblage which was bottled and given a label with our name on.

It was a truly fantastic and memorable day. Hans & Christa are gifted teachers and each one of us said we'd learnt more about wine in one day than could be imagined. We'll keep you posted about the next chance to do the same assemblage day.

Yesterday we had a real Jean de Florette kind of a morning. For some time we've been lugging 120 litres of water up to our vegetable garden in the vineyards as there's been no water there. But it all changed yesterday thanks to Ebay (where I found the perfect pump), Ib and Andreas. More about it on Ali's blog about our vineyard .

Meanwhile the guests have just been hanging about in hammocks.