For those of you that will be here over the next couple of weeks, we have finally bottled some of our 2010 vintage ready for you to try. It'll be better around Christmas, when it will have got over the shock of being bottled, but I had some last night and I'm pleased with it. Hope you will be too.

 

 

We don't have enough time to keep our vineyard meticulously tidy, in fact it's all rather a pickle. But it is a magical place to take a walk in the early evening. We frequently take guests up with a bottle of wine, to take a stroll followed by an aperitif.

Just recently we took the lovely Allan and Jill from Western Australia, with a bottle of fizz, to celebrate Allan's birthday. We sat on the Caux seat, hot from the day's sunshine, and toasted a very jolly stay.

 

The weather's taken a grand turn for the better and we've had unbroken sunshine for days and days now. With temperatures in the mid-30s (90s for those on the old scale) guests are enjoying long lazy days by the pool or chasing Cathars in their many castles in the region.

 July marks the start of the fetes/festival season and wine domaines open their doors now that the heaviest of the early Summer work is just about done. The grapes are left to get on with growing fat, fullsome, flavoursome and ripe. So the winemakers party. Our pals Hans and Christa open their doors each Monday night for a couple of months so you can go to taste their lovely wines in the middle of the vineyards.

 

 

We still have some availability at the end of July as a result of a cancellation, so why not escape the bustle and come to sunny Roujan for a few days? There's no-one in the pool right now - it could be all yours!

 

 

I had a great weekend. Having worked in the garden at Le Couvent all week, my treat for the weekend was to work in the vineyard. No honest, that does feel like a treat to me. It's beautiful, I can see for miles and the birds sing their socks off. I've worked out a new watering system that I think might see the vegetable garden through the summer without killing me in the process.

But the strangest thing happened there too. On Saturday I was weeding in the potager when both the dogs started barking madly. I looked up to see three completely white gowned figures coming towards us from the top of the vineyard. They were not 50 metres away, and for a moment I thought I was hallucinating until I recognised them as three nuns from the presbytery in Mougeres, just outside Roujan. The dogs were decidedly wary, but the nuns and I had a brief chat and they skipped on their way down through the vineyard, with one shouting back "Christ is risen, Christ is risen".

At moments like that you can feel as though you're going mad. With no witnesses it feels as though one could have dreamt it. But no, the dogs were still yelling in their shock.

But that's not all. Yesterday I was again in the vineyard, feeding the trees in the orchard. Once again the dogs started barking and looking across the amphitheatre vines at a lone nun who was just standing there, looking across at us, for a good minute. I waved, but she didn't wave back. I, for some reason, thought she might have been saying a prayer over the vines. After a short while she left and I heard other voices going off up the hill, behind the trees so I assume she was with the other nuns. The dogs were spooked, but I like to think the wine from Le Couvent might have been blessed this year.

 

 

 

Woah, we're doing too much. Well, that's what our lovely neighbour Maria thinks. But we have ten weeks' work to cover in three, so we end each day happy, but done for. Today Ali's painted  every door in the bedrooms - that's ten - and been to her tap-dancing class. I, on the other hand, have been dog-food shopping, weeded and cleared up a hidden area of the courtyard and picked up a 2m x 1m double glazed window unit, before mending the 30 year old Renault 4's leaking fuel pump with a tiny piece of tube, some wire and half a chopstick. Obviously.

Then this afternoon I made the window unit and a heap of tiles into a cold frame for our rare variety tomatoes, courgettes and peppers. Until now the seedlings have been in the house, but they've started to grow leggy so I wanted them to have more light. I like to sow seeds late because they always catch up and I have a much better success rate than the hare-out-of-a-trap method I used to use, sowing while my impatience got the better of me in January.

 

 

Fortunately the cold frame cost me nothing, nada, zilch. Everything was recycled. The frame came from our good pals Yvonne & Henny. They, wisely, have taken a bunch of PVC windows out of their home and passed one on to me. I got the tiles which make the walls from another pal, JdeP, via www.cestgratuit.org . I had been intending laying these lovely encaustic tiles up in the vineyard mazet, but haven't had time. So they are being put to pretty use here.

 

 

Earlier this week we had a day bottling our meagre vintage of Syrah. It was a lovely day and our very hand-made wine was bottled, Zorked, labelled, and packed into recycled boxes by Ali and I along with ma belle belle soeur Michelle and our pals Alex, Henny and Yvonne. So now we have just shy of 200 bottles of Cuvée Solèsio. We still have the Cuvée Chocolat to bottle. But another day. This brief video shows you just how artisanal the whole affair is.  Fortunately it is absolutely delicious, so worth the trouble!