Hello Again

Sorry for not posting sooner, but there really hasn't been much news until recently.

Hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving.........I suspect some of you are particularly thankful that Mr. Obama was victorious. The French folks here I speak to about it are all really excited about "The Change" that they see coming.

As for me -the French do not do Thanksgiving...duh....BUT as a bit of a last minute thing, Deb's brother Ken and his family (Joanna and Will) decided to use the holiday time to come and visit France, and me!!! They arrived last Wednesday and we had a delightful 4 days together. the weather wasn't the best but we made do, and it was great having guests in the house (hint..hint). We toured the area - both the Rhone and Luberon valleys; ate good food, drank great wine (reds and roses) - they bought typical Provencal things (table linens, pottery). They left for Paris and Normandy on Sunday, and will return to Seattle (Sequim) next week. Great time!!

Wine - everything is fine - its all resting and waiting for bottling of the rose and the regular red the end of January or first of February. I have lined up the bottler, the bottles, the corks, the labels and the capsules, so now we just wait for the wine to settle a bit and we bottle.

House - All done for now. Got curtains up and rugs down where needed, and I have hung a few pieces of art - all local artists' works - so the place actually feels 'homey' now. Having the fireplace really helps make it comfy. Ken and Joanna enjoyed the new guest room - thought the bed was particularly comfortable (hint..hint).

The vines have now dropped all their leaves, (we've had some snow mixed in the rain today, and it has been below freezing a couple of nights) so its time to dig up the old dead vines (about 300 out of the 10,000) and then prune away this year's growth. I'll do the digging-up and will hire-in help with the pruning. My friend and fellow winemaker Jean Marie Royer is coming to give me counsel on how to prune correctly. Hope to have all that done before I leave for Seattle for the holidays

And - Just finished harvesting the olives from the nine trees in the yard. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that i should have started as sonn as they firstr began to turn color - I mis-understood Julien when he told me they needed to be 'noir'. So - we lost a bit from the interim rain and heavy winds we've had over the last 2-3 weeks. But the trees did still yield about 100 pounds - so enough to take to the local 'moulin d'huile' to have turned into oil. And I learned another lesson to add to my "Lessons Learned" file for next year(pick olives earlier -as soon as they start to turn color and fall).

Well - thats it for today - off to the mill.

Be well.