Laurent Mottey comments the coming millesime

What can we say about the year 2020 at this point. The beginning of the year was a bit complicated... a bit complicated because of... COVID-19. However... But today when we take a look here, it looks like this year’s production is among the most... the most beautiful, the healthiest, and the earliest ever. So... The year began very dry, that was wonderful, as it allowed us to do a lot of work... fairly quickly... so the vines benefited from this early... it was a dry year which gave us healthy vines, a little rain from time to time, just enough for the grapes to develop, and so the vines didn’t suffer. But this will be one of our very dry years… So this meant we could treat less and still have a superb quality. Flowering is finished, it went really well. The vines have never been better, we've detected no signs of disease anywhere, on any of the parcels, They’re all magnificent. At times, we had a lot to do in a short time. at other times it grew a bit more slowly... so this allowed us more time to work… Based on what we see today... we are going to have one of the earliest harvests ever, this will be my 20th harvest... and so it appears this year's harvest is going to be held... the end of August. This will be the first harvest I’ve seen that will begin at the end of August, since I first began working here in 2001. So it's an exceptional year... magnificent quality... the vines look great, they're loaded, well formed bunches, we can only hope for enough rain, to plump them up and give us sufficient juice.. But the quality we have here is exceptional. If the weather doesn’t play any tricks with a storm or similar, we should have superb fruit. With a hot year like this one the alcohol content should be good. Everything is going so well! Everything looks as though this will be an exceptional year. We just need to have the weather cooperate from here until the harvest. But when we see all our parcels with their canopy like this, we can’t ask for better. And the soil here, We had the time to work the soil, which was very pleasant. Usually the soil has a lot more grass build up, but we took the time to work it, but without it needing to be as frequent, so the ground is cleaner than usual… in terms of weeds. So we’ll cross our fingers, but for now this year, at least from what we see now, this will be an exceptional year for us. As for the grape harvest, we’ve already begun recruiting, earlier than usual... because the harvest will be early and we need to be ready. But the problem... on top of an earlier harvest the COVID-19 situation... this year has made things... made things, fortunately for us, didn't effect much of our work. This because we could take all the necessary precautions... social distancing, hand sanitizer, gloves and masks, we had everything we needed. by working outside we were safer than people in stores or anywhere else. So we hope you will be numerous for our 2020 harvest... set for the end of August. we will welcome all serious workers with pleasure!