Bosman Wines Blog

May 15, 2012

Uncategorized | Tags: 2012, Andries Blake, Corlea Fourie, France, William Wilkinson, Wine Technical Tour — Corlea Fourie @ 12:51 am

Boutes Cooperage – Our contact: Marketing Manager Julien Segura
Beychac et Caillau, France.

Today Andries, William and myself visited a family owned cooperage, Boutes, close to Bordeaux. The company (just like ours) has their roots in tradition and heritage and their story starting in 1880.

The company assembles some 30 000 casks per year. On our visit there we were very lucky to be able to see the whole process from where the seasoned oak come from their continental climate storage plot in Allier,to their production site.

The French oak for the casks are bought on auction in October and November and that makes their team in the forest of utmost importance-making sure that the price they offer for a plot is applicable and to make sure that they allocate oak to their needs for casks that will only be assembled in 2 to 3 years time.

I’ve known these barrels for some time now and especially for its structure,length and elegance. It was therefor so interesting to see the process in action and how much care is taken in regards to detail.

Thank you very much to Julien and Tibo for your hospitality.

Kindly appreciated

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Harvest 2012 and why I loved it…

April 3, 2012

Family,Harvest 2012,South Africa,Upper-Heme-en-Aarde Valley,Wellington,Wine Making | Tags: Harvest, South Africa, wine — Corlea Fourie @ 11:32 am

As I am writing this, we are pressing one of our last three tanks of Cabernet Sauvignon in the cellar. It’s almost over: Harvest 2012.

In Wellington we have now started a blessing of the harvest ceremony which coincides with our annual harvest festival. I love the idea, but I thought I wanted to make a list of exactly what I was grateful for.

I thought it would be fitting to tell you about the 10 things that I feel blessed for this year:

1. Harvest started one week later this year than usually – It gave us one extra week of planning, mostly in the vineyard. It changed a lot for me in terms of concepts and logistics.

2. Our Optenhorst Chenin blanc vineyard had its 60th planting birthday. Oh how I love thee…

3. Our cooling system worked like a bomb, no failures, consistent cooling. What a joy.

4. ESKOM (our South African electricity public utility) supplied consistent power this harvest. No outages. High 5!

5. We employed a small team of young adults from our farm as harvest help- just to keep cleaning and help sorting. Some of them showed great aptitude and energy. Getting excited about the next generation of cellar hands for the future. I love that we can get excited about PEOPLE!

6. And on people – I feel immensely blessed that we all got through harvest intact and with no injuries. Some people forget that in making wine we work with high voltage electricity, heights, wet surfaces and a lot of happy tanks emitting CO2.

7. We had a super harvest form our grapes from the Upper Hemel-en-Aarde Valley in Hermanus. Healthy grapes from a winemaking area overlooking the ocean. High risk – but high reward.

8. On a personal level – my support team that made things work out at home. Being a winemaker in harvest time is a nerve wrecking exercise (especially if you are married to one too). Add 18 month old twins and a rosy cheeked 7 year old, and you’ve got your work cut out for you. Thanks team Fourie.

9. Coffee – good coffee. Thanks, Petrus, for the machine. I will endure any hardship with a cup of java in hand.

10. I work in a cellar where winemakers in the last century made wines without high pressure, steam, pumps, high tech presses. Thank goodness for technology and hygiene. As an obsessive compulsive type of cleaner – all we have in technology helps me feel safe and confident about our products. I sometimes go into the old cellar and look at the primitive utensils our forefathers had to work with and I feel happy…very happy.

Another year, another set of lessons learnt, I was happy with you, I fought with you. You won your fair share of battles and I mine. Harvest 2012 you beauty, we still have a long road before I put all your wines to bottle…But you have been blessed.

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Making wine friends in China…

March 22, 2012

Travel,Wine Industry | Tags: China, Facebook, Spekboom, Twitter, wine, YouTube — Corlea Fourie @ 1:21 pm

Hi guys – I just got Antonia Bosman`s email on the computer. I thought it was just too special not to share. If you know Antonia, you would get the excitement around the new surroundings and experiences. She is doing a stellar job taking Bosman wines to new places and making new wine friends. After a 32 hour haul, she has arived in Chengdu – the capital of Sichuan province in Southwest China.

“Just a quick update before I go for a long bath.

I took a taxi from the airport to the Hotel – first struggled to get the hotel`s address in Chinese! Nobody at the hotel speaks English, and I don`t do Mandarin! Luckily they phoned our importer, Sammie, to come to my rescue.

Sammie took me to my room and she took me to draw some cash to pay the Hotel because they don`t have credit card machines!

Everybody has been very friendly – I do however have an urge to plant some “spekboom” here. It’s just people, cars and bicycles! Chengdu is renowned for their spicy food so I`m quite relieved about my biltong and 2 minute noodles that I`ve packed.

The wine exhibition starts tomorrow. Oh, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter is banned here, so I won`t be updating much!

Hoping all is well on the farm”

Antonia

All the best in spreading the Bosman Family Vineyards wine love Antonia – seems that you will be needing it! And for those of you who doesn`t know Spekboom – the indigenous Spekboom (Portulacaria afra) tree has some the highest carbon sequestration capabilities because it has the ability to photosynthesize both during the day and the night.

Our established spekboom plantation and nursery on Lelienfontein, is an innovative way of contributing to the reduction of the world’s carbon footprint.

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It`s not inside, its on top….But in some cases not.

March 6, 2012

Harvest 2012,Uncategorized,Upper-Heme-en-Aarde Valley | Tags: anthocyanins, ENTAV, Teinturier, vineyards — Corlea Fourie @ 3:00 pm

It seems that the De Bos farm, where we have our clonal garden, (used for our Lelienfontein Vine nursery) will always be a wealth of things we will be itching to show you. A vinous treasure trove so to speak. We took our camera with on our last grape visit, and we were not dissapointed.

Roobernet is a South African crossing of Cabernet Sauvignon and Alicante Bouschet (which also has coloured pulp). The parentage was confirmed by *ENTAV in 2007.

So here is a picture of a small Roobernet berry and the red juice it holds within. There are few people that actually make the connection that red grapes have colourless juice. That’s why my winemaker colleagues and I slave away extracting the colour from the skins in order to stain the juice to make our beloved red tipple.

So on a Bosman wiki-vine note:

“Teinturier, a French language term meaning to dye or stain, is a wine term applied to grapes whose flesh and juice is red in colour due to anthocyanin pigments accumulating within the pulp of the grape berry itself ” In short – red pulp and red juice other than most other like Cabernet, Shiraz et al which has colourless pulp and juice.

*L’Etablissement National Technique pour l’Amélioration de la Viticulture or translated: The National Technical Association for Viticultural Improvement

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Half way for Harvest 2012

March 5, 2012

Harvest 2012,South Africa,Wellington | Tags: 2012, Bosman Family Vineyards, grapes, Harvest, wine — Corlea Fourie @ 8:03 am

We have just passed the half-way mark for harvest 2012. Actually getting worried it will all be over too soon. So here just a quick recap op the last few weeks.

Enjoy!

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Fairtrade for the future

March 2, 2012

Fairtrade,Harvest 2012,South Africa | Tags: Bosman Family Vineyards, Fairtrade, Fortnight, wine — Corlea Fourie @ 9:19 am

In the spirit of Fairtrade Fortnight another clip. This time from Anrico Solomons who is an apprentice in the Bosman Family Vineyards cellar. I asked him what Fairtrade means to him and then his vision for the future.

Thanks Anrico for your courage to do this clip in your second language. You did well!!

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A Winemaker`s perspective on Fairtrade

March 1, 2012

Uncategorized | Corlea Fourie @ 8:13 am

With our customers celebrating Fairtrade fortnight in the UK, I thought it could be insightful to hear from a winemaker`s perspective what Fairtrade means in my working environment on a day to day basis.

I joined Bosman Family Vineyards in 2006 by this time the Bosman family have been farming in an ethical way for generations. The Family decided to make it official and in a landmark transaction a well-earned share in De Bos and other prime vineyard land in Hermanus & Wellington was obtained by the families farming with the Bosman family. Please see our site here for more information about this.

Fairtrade does have a direct influence on what I do daily. Please see the following video for my reasons why!

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Are we there yet?

February 23, 2012

Harvest 2012,South Africa,Wine Making | Tags: Harvest, sampling, vineyards — Corlea Fourie @ 1:20 pm

If you are a parent this question might have you cringing behind the steering wheel. Especially if you live in South Africa and you are on a road trip of note.

I do ask the same question to Mariaan though – every morning. So I have sympathy with her situation with me!
Mariaan does a stellar job in going into the vineyards every day and sampling bunches from specific sites. She then comes to the cellar and makes juice from the samples to be tested.

Following this regime every vineyard has a blueprint of ripening and it also flags us to when we should start tasting the grapes for picking. I would love to say that we only taste the grapes for picking but having analysis to underline your decision helps a lot!

So here I`m filming Mariaan sampling. You can’t hear me asking it on the video, but my next question to her would be…..Are we there yet?

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Noble rot – Harvest vineyard pic of the week…

February 21, 2012

Harvest 2012,Upper-Heme-en-Aarde Valley,Wine Making | Tags: dolce, Noble rot, Primitivo, sweet wine, vineyards, Zinfandel — Corlea Fourie @ 3:01 pm

Noble rot is the benevolent form of a grey fungus, Botrytis cinerea, affecting wine grapes. Infestation by Botrytis requires moist conditions, and if the weather stays wet, the malevolent form, “grey rot” or “suur vrot” can destroy your grapes.
Grapes become infected with Botrytis when they are ripe or almost ripe. If they are then exposed to drier conditions and become partially raisined this form of infection brought about by the partial drying process is known as noble rot. Grapes when picked at a certain point during infestation can produce particularly fine and concentrated wines.

We visited the De Bos farm in the Upper-Hemel-en-Aarde Valley yesterday, to see what we will be taking in this week from there. We saw this awesome picture in the Zinfandel vineyard – too good not to share. The infection looks like little claws getting stuck into the grape.

We do make a wine with Noble Rot character called Dolce Primitivo. It is from Primitivo grapes, but from Wellington. So after the fungus has attached to the skin, because of our dry conditions, the berries become beautifully raisin-like and concentrated. Because of the sugar content of the berries the fermentation stops naturally at some point giving rise to a wine with a lower alcohol and higher residual sugar. Through the concentration process of the noble rot – the acidity is also concentrated. The product then a wine which isn’t just sticky sweet, but also has some lovely acidity to balance it all.