At 7:30 the Bourgogne Chardonnay from Savigny. What a sunrise and brilliant light as the “rasins dores” came in: golden grapes.

Immediately we went and picked up threee of our barrels of Corton Charlemagne in must. This is always a hoot because it is a who’s who of small negociants who buy from this supplier. One could also call us a rather motley crew but I try to be the first in line. This is definitely a straight shooter operation because everyone gets the same stuff and it never fails to deliver. This is one of the true win-win deals in Burgundy. As a mater of fact, the supplier gives us a bottle of wine every year to thank  us for being a good customer and doing the right thing with his juice. Many of the small batch negociant wines that you see highly rated come form this source and thus, for once, there is a real positive realtionship where the supplier wants to give his customers good juice and in turn he wants to see you preform. I believe this is rare in any business much less the wine business.

Begins to get overcast as we drive north to drop off our 40 boxes for our Clos Vougeot grapes. It feels as though fall has arrived and rain has been announced for tonight and Wednesday day so our great luck seems to be running out. That said, everyone is a weatherman.  I have learned to be zen… not totally, but not obsessive either.

The Clos Vougeot grapes look great and we drop off our boxes and will return in a few hours to pick them up. The owner’s wife and her 7 female friends are cutting the grapes; this is a good sign. We return after lunch to find our boxes filled with beautiful grapes but not very full. In their attention to make perfect boxes, they did not fill them to the top.  So, after weighing we were 9.6% short in weight; this is not chump change so I had our broker call the owner and tell him the weight was off (the broker weighed the grapes with us). Thus, I schelpped back up to Gevery-Chambertin to pick up four full boxes to make up the difference. What does this mean in dollars you might ask?  Are you ready???? 2,700 euros! Well worth the hour round-trip drive.

I will tell you a funny story about the cost of grapes etc.  A few years ago, I did a tasting with Jim Clendenen of Au Bon Climat and the late Gary Andrus (always a wonderful person to me) and the discussion went to the cost of grapes. Jim bemoaned that his top grapes cost up to $4,000 a ton. After a pregnant pause I said,  ”Jim, how about 9,000 euros ($12,600) for a barrel of Clos Vougeot?”( which equates to ~$38,000 a metric ton). Read it and weep mes amis but this is the reality of Burgundy and why we all watch the proverbial nickles and dimes.

Machines encore:

Well by now I am sure you will believe it but our egrapoir (destemmer) went dead as I brought in the last four cases of Clos Vougeot.  After a couple of hours of trying to jerry rig it ourselves, we called in the technician who, in turn, had to jerry rig the variable speed switch so that it ran, but at the highest speed. At this speed, it makes grape puree so we were a bit reluctant ot throw in the last of the Clos Vougeot grapes (see above.) The upshot – after 1/2 an hour of 5 of us hand picking the grapes off the stems, McGyver Matt McClune had the ingenious idea to had turn the drum of the destemmer and it worked gently and perfectly.  Matt was exhausted, but the grapes were intact and we did not make Welch’s jelly.

Dinner was a “stallione” by John; his risoto with roasted chicken, duck and toulouse sausages, sauted in his homemade chicken stock. Father John’s cooking does one well after a long day schlepping boxes of grapes.