Maison Des Bulliats

Our friends in Morgon ,who have been working their land for the last thirty years ,have never seen the vines so advanced in their growth! I remarked before that on April 21st last year the small green shoots had just formed. Today on April 25th there is a huge mass of leaves, the landscape being transformed to a rich green. It will be interesting to see how this affects this years harvest, The ‘vendanges’, the picking of the grapes, over the last decade has been earlier and earlier, what will this year be like we wonder….

Fernand came today to check the 2006, wine that is still in the ‘cuves’ or vats. Untill the wine is bottled we need to add half a gramme of bisulphate each month to each cuve, this acts as a sort of disinfectant and is absolutely necessary to keep the wine in peak condition . The small oak barrels, now in the cave as decoration ,that have been used in the past but not yet by us also need to be treated to keep them clean in case in the future we decide to make a wine with the flavour of oak that some conoisseurs appreciate. Fernand deftly suspends,on a wire ,a cotton mesh block of 250 grammes of sulphur through the barrel opening having set light to the mesh. before its descent. It is now a legal obligation to mark on the label of all wines ‘contains sulphites’.This is not a nasty additive, without them ,as with other food and beverage products,the wine would suffer.

April sales have been good and the register for the cave, recording every detail, has as usual been a struggle, but I receive 10 out of ten for accuracy this time and the gruff monsieur douannier stamps the page with great authority, and when I feebly complain how difficult it is says ‘Madame you only have one to do I have to check 5000!’

In between lorries coming to pick up the order for Holland and another lot for the U.K today, we dashed across beautiful countryside to the cool and relative calm of the water mill I spoke of in the Auvergne region of France.

The geology is volcanic and before Beaujolais we became quite used to the wines there, which are little known elsewhere, they have a piquante taste and a hint of the minerals of the volcanic terroir. We became very fond of wines such as St Pourcain. We enjoyed a bottle with an excellent meal in Thiers, the knife capital of the world.

Our mill wheel was used to grind the steel for knives after it had served its life grinding corn when the landscape here was all wheat, now it is pine trees. Now, for us, Fred has, with patience and mechanical genius made it make electricity, the river supplying our water. 

Fred gets on his beloved tractor [memories of childhood on the farm in Canada]and rotivates the vegetable patch in our field where I swiftly planted potatoes beans and beetroot, hoping they will not mind my absence and that the dreaded yellow and black striped beetle does not attack the leaves of my potato plants .

We supply some regular customers with more Regnie and enjoy seeing old friends.

Back in Beaujolais the paper work has to be done for the U.K order, another complex piece of French administration. The worst of these tasks is the completion of the Register of the cave every month without fail! Here we must record every single bottle of wine that leaves our cave, personal consumption, gifts, export and French sales and if the figures don’t add up….. well they have to and it is a nightmare. 

Tomorrow I take this months records to the lovely Madame at the customs office in the next village, will I get my long awaited ten out of ten, no errors? We will see.

I have just picked up on an interesting article about Japanese comics in South Korea featuring French wine.  An article in Asahi and commented on Vinography.

Wine is enjoying an unprecedented boom in South Korea, where the distilled spirit shochu has traditionally been the people’s favorite alcoholic drink.

Wine imports were worth $88.6 million (about 10.3 billion yen) last year, up 30 percent from 2005.

The sharp rise is partly attributable to the increase in the average income and a rise in purchasing power generated by the growing strength of the South Korean won against other major currencies.

But the major reason is a Japanese comic book on wine, “Kami no Shizuku (Drops of God),” which is now a best seller in South Korea.  more..

The next step is to contact the publishers and strike a deal to have Regnie 2005 featured!