News from 04/01/2023

The work for the 2023 vintage gets underway

2022 has finished already... What a great year it was! Thank you for all the great moments, laughs, and discoveries we shared with you in the vineyards and cellars. The Gourmet Odyssey team wishes you a fantastic 2023, full of happiness, joy, and good health!

In the vineyard, the work to prepare the 2023 vintage is getting underway.  The winemakers start the year with pruning.  Did you know that it was a donkey that taught us the benefit of pruning?  Legend has it that years ago, a winemaker found his donkey eating the branches of his vines.  The winemaker thought that the vines wouldn’t produce any grapes and was very despondent.  But when the harvest period arrived, he was astonished to see that the grapes on the vines that had been eaten were much bigger, juicy, and sweet than on his other vines.  And so pruning was born.

Pruning is a very important step as it allows you to select the branches from which the new fruit-bearing branches will grow to produce the best grapes.  It’s a technical job and needs to be done by trained people before the first buds burst in spring.  It therefore needs to be done in winter when the sap has descended into the roots, and the branches are easier to cut.  If the branches are pruned too late, the sap will have already risen again, and pruning would risk damaging the vines.  Pruning is generally carried out between December and March depending on the winery and region.

Adopt some vines and join us for a Discovery Experience Day to participate in pruning the vines and to learn about the other work carried out in the vineyard at one of our organically certified wineries in France.

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