Day 30

I’m still unable to fully grasp what the point of the dernier stage is, other than it’s for filtration and to mix up the contents of the tanks. All I know is it’s a long process and we’re still doing it. Usually my task is to keep a close eye on what’s going on [...]

Over the last few days I’ve been involved in a couple of processes that I hadn’t done before. The first was when we had to “brasser” the tanks which contain wine that’s fermenting. There are two valves on every tank which are for attaching hoses to in order to do basically everything that needs to [...]

I made a bit of an error today. I was high up in the rafters after being asked to check whether the contents of one of the tanks looked right, and to have a good look, I sat down to get my face as close to the entrance as possible. This was a stupid thing [...]

Day 10
Barrels, barrels, barrels! Topping up barrels is all I’ve done for the past few days. It’s an important part of the process, apparantly, because the barrels ‘breath’, which means that over time some of the wine sneaks out. There are approximately 2000 barrels here at Ducourt, in various workhouses, which is why it takes [...]

Day 6
Over the last few days I’ve been introduced to a new process that has to be carried out during the vintage. Screwed onto the top of most of the vast tanks is a chapeau, which is basically a clear plastic cylinder. My job was to top up all of the full tanks containing red [...]

Today was my first real taste of wine making, and not only because I tasted some of the wine that I helped to make. Jeremy, the cellar manager, offered me a taste of the wine straight out of the tank. It was very sweet to my extremely uncultured palate, but Jeremy said it was good. [...]

I got up bright and early with the sunrise at 7.30 to find that Vignobles Ducourt was already buzzing with activity. My first task was a boring one: to wash out a couple of the giant tanks in preparation for the wine that will soon be filling them all. I haven’t counted but there are [...]

Our son, Richard, is in his 3rd year at Leeds University studying French and History. For the next nine months he will be honing his language skills at Vignobles Ducourt in Bordeaux, the lucky blighter! We ship three of Ducourt’s excellent wines all available to buy at www.therealwineco.co.uk.
With Jeremy Ducourt’s blessing he will be blogging [...]