Labour Party Postmortem and Leadership Scrap

The Guardian today 'With endorsement from the Corbynite wing of the party, Long-Bailey is now the favourite for the job'

So the still twitching corpse of the Labour Party, having failed to achieve a Darwin Award, is now trying to strangle itself with its own entrails!

Rosé! Grace du Dieu!

All being well, we'll be corking 200 bottles of carignan rosé in the spring. Now we have only the rest of the carignan to get in for red. I won't post a photo of more crates of grapes as one looks very like another so here's one of Sue working the dégrappeur.

The Rosé That Wasn't

Up at the crack with an international team of vendangeurs to pick enough carignan to make some experimental rosé. All went well until the promised wine press failed to arrive. By the time it did the mushed grapes had been sitting too long and had too much tannin and colour. 

https://www.peoples-vote.uk/let_us_be_heard

Now the Magic Happens.

In these blue barrels are five hundred litres of Syrah grapes stewing away. After about three weeks when all the sugar has fermented out we'll press them and put the vile tasting wine into cuves to let it improve and become delicious. The fermentation begins spontaneously from the yeasts on the grape skins and takes a few days to get started. After that it's almost ezplosive and the grapes can be pushed out the top of the barrel  if you don't leave enough room. 

PS People who voted to leave the EU are provably idiots.

Pallet World!

After yesterday's  vendange with the Syrah we have been slaving in the carignan putting up a boar-proof fence. Pallets are the answer to all the world's problems!!

PS https://youtu.be/uovt1sC3rtM

Wine! Wine! WINE! All we do is wine!

The village is awash with wine. The vendange is underway and the grapes are coming in and being processed into cuves. Our vendange for the syrah may happen on Friday.  Meanwhile we bottled the last of last year's and squeezed out another sixty four bottles. We opened one for lunch hence this post!

Coming to the End of Summer.

Evening in Paradise

Rain, mist, leaden skies. We brought the awful Brexit polluted weather back with us . . . . but it will pass.

The village again

After a round trip of a couple of thousand miles it's back home.

Edinburgh

Saw Stewart Lee today at the Fringe. If you're going to see anything else you really don't want to see his show, at least not first.

Also a couple of author interviews, notably:-

Nayrouz Qarmout

Nayrouz Qarmout is a Palestinian writer and activist. Born in Damascus in 1984, as a Palestinian refugee, she returned to the Gaza Strip, as part of the 1994 Israeli-Palestinian Peace Agreement, where she now lives. She graduated from al-Azhar University in Gaza with a degree in Economics. She currently works in the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, raising awareness of gender issues and promoting the political and economic role of women in policy and law, as well as the defence of women from abuse, and highlighting the role of women’s issues in the media. Her political, social and literary articles have appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines, and online. She has also written screenplays for several short films dealing with women’s rights. She is a social activist and a member of several youth initiatives, campaigning for social change in Palestine.

Back Again, Again.

Still here in the village. Still working on the barn but with more and more distractions the work progresses ever more slowly.

Syrah

Together with two friends we took on a small vineyard of Syrah in 2017. Our first year's production was not a great success but the 2018, which we bottled this June, has really impressed everybody. We reckoned that we lost up to 10% of the grapes to badgers so we called it Délices des Blaireaux, and before anyone writes in to comment we do know that if a Frenchman calls you a blaireau he's not being complimentary.

Carignan - spot the difference

We got a total of about 500 bottles between us which sounds great but you know what they say about living over a sweet shop. We plan to put a good part of it beyond reach for a few years. Now we have a second vineyard of Carignan  which is four times the size of the first one.

The best part of the whole thing  is when you pick the grapes and celebrate with a big boozy lunch. This year we'll be able to drink our 2018 with our sausage and aioli.

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What else is there to report? Our gallery at the front of the barn is enjoying its fourth glorious year and Sue has made several sales this year. I don't have anything in there this year as the wine is taking up so much time and we've been travelling more - five weeks in California this spring plus the usual to Spain, Ireland and UK.

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If anybody's interested we're doing Airbnb

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PS I'm being ironic.