I like to pick sauvignon on the up, not at the peak of ripeness or over-ripe. Zesty, herbaceous, nettley, crisp, gooseberry, a touch of passion fruit even. Overripe and it loses its array of aromas and tastes sweet and flabby - the grape that is - and the resulting wine will be alcoholic and dull.

In the last few days we’ve been getting everything ready and the weather is ideal. Running a vineyard and a winery means that you have a huge amount of kit that’s used for just a few days in the year - especially at harvest time. Here are the stainless steel trailors we bought in 2000. They’re happy to be out in the daylight again and having a good rinse, after being tucked away for the last 10 months. 

We have one parcel which will be ready before all the others - this week in fact - a block of sauvignon blanc vines which we planted in 2004.

This year sees our first real crop from this part of the vineyard, and although yields for our whites will be feeble, partly as a result of an April frost, the potential from this parcel looks healthier. Daniel, our vineyard manager, and our old friend, Ronan Sayburn, check out the grapes. Ronan, who has come to stay (and work) with us during the harvest, was Gordon Ramsay’s Executive Head Sommelier, to give him his full, understated title. He managed Ramsay’s wine lists and team of sommeliers for eight years before taking a year out to further his knowledge of wine. This he achieved by scuba diving in Thailand traveling to vineyards around the world with his girlfriend, Corinne, a fellow former Ramsay sommelier. 

Stuart Gillies, the chef from Boxwood Café in London, organised the trip as a birthday present for his boss, Chris Hutcheson. Chris is the father of Gordon’s wife Tana, and he runs the Ramsay empire while his son-in-law does his stuff in front of the cameras or in the kitchen.

It was the first time that either Chris or Stuart (pictured left) had run in the Bordeaux event and we were seriously impressed that this was Chris’s 71st marathon. I had met him briefly before at a lunch party at Gordon and Tana’s home in Wandsworth, and that too was after the London Marathon a few years ago. Stuart stayed with us at Bauduc a few years back so it was a pleasure to cook for him once again: gigot d’ agneau de Pauillac (Pauillac lamb), served pink with our Trois Hectares 2005 red, from magnum. Can’t go wrong with ingredients like that. (In fact, it could have done, but thankfully it didn’t).

We had a great weekend and they even volunteered for a walk around our vines on sunday morning. However, Chris was not impressed with the paltry collection of Ramsay cookery books in our kitchen, so he very kindly Fed-Ex’ed a stack of them to us on his return to London. The only downside is that they roped me into running next year. I’m looking forward to it, although, unlike for many of the runners, fine claret is not a refreshment I would choose as sustenance when running 26 miles for the first time. 

I sat next to the equally interesting and much more attractive Christelle Guibert, Tastings Director for Decanter magazine, and before lunch had an enlightening chat with John Kolasa (left, with Christelle). John runs Château Canon, as well as Rauzan-Ségla in Margaux. We talked, as one does, about the ludicrous prices for top wines from Bordeaux, and John suggested that I write a book entitled ‘It’s only wine’. Good for him.

On my left flank, pony-tailed Helmut Knall, of Wine-Times (based in Vienna), challenged every other bottle that was presented to us over lunch. Initially, I misunderstood him when he whispered ‘Play with me a little’ but I duly played along once I cottoned on to his game. He made his point well, as there was considerable bottle variation - of the same wine - from one bottle to the next. Separate bottles of Angélus 2001 and of Troplong Mondot 2000 showed quite different personalities. Helmut suspected the cork - and he’s an ardent fan of screwcaps - but I have my doubts: I didn’t detect any hint of the dreaded TCA, the evil compound that if present in a cork will taint the wine. Bottle variation is nothing unusual with fine Bordeaux. At any rate, debating the issue of bottle-closures seemed a bit futile here, as I can’t see any wines of this type being bottled with Stelvin in the foreseeable future. 

For the record, we drank Canon 2001, Angélus 2001, Pavie 1999, Magdelaine 1990, Clos Fourtet 1989, Beauséjour 2000, Trottevielle 2000, Troplong Mondot 2000, Belair 1995, Figeac 1995, La Gaffelière 1975, Beau-Séjour Bécot 1998, Pavie Macquin 1998, and Cheval Blanc 1998. (Unfortunately, Alain Vauthier’s Ausone isn’t in the ‘Groupement’, for reasons unknown to me.) Delicious as they were, I think the younger wines would have benefited from more breathing time in their decanters beforehand. I didn’t ask but I reckon the wines were decanted not long before lunch. An hour or two more would certainly have helped. 

Neal and I popped out after the petits fours for a sharpener in a bar over the road, but our beer together was cut short when we realised that he hadn’t factored in the hour change to his return train time to London. He missed it, but thankfully caught the next Eurostar at no extra charge. After all, it’s a lot more expensive than the TGV to Bordeaux.

Grass down the middle of the rows can help, and it provides good competition for the vines, so we’ll have to sort that out in the autumn once all the alleys have been straightened out. 

Daniel, the guvnor, is back from his annuals and is out there trimming the vines. As well as keeping the vines in good shape, it’s a preventative step against mildew when timed correctly. The row on the right has been given a short back and sides, while the row on the left is about to be snipped.

These are vines I planted in 2001, and they’re just beginning to produce good merlot fruit with interesting flavours. We have to use one of our two smaller tractors because the rows are quite narrow at a width of 1.80m. With the gap of 1m between each vine, that’s 5555 vines per hectare. Far better than the 3000 you’d find in many Bordeaux vineyards, producing the same volume of wine with many more bunches per vine, and not far off the density in top Pomerol and St-Emilion estates. It’s much less than the 10,000 vines in a top Pauillac estate like Lafite, but then again we have much steeper slopes to contend with, and very different soils. I’m often asked how many bottles we make from a single vine: judging by the likely yields of just over 40 hectolitres per hectare, we’ll make about a bottle of wine per vine from this parcel. God willing.

I wanted to get the timing spot on this year as 2008 will be a later harvest than the norm, and to achieve optimum ripeness, we will need to give the bunches the longest possible time on the vine before rot could set in later on at the crucial stage of the harvest. I’m not after over-ripeness, as one might find in some styles of St-Emilion, but we are a few days behind our more illustrious neighbours due to our cooler soils and altitude, so I need all the ‘hang time’ I can get.

Even some ‘biodynamic’ vineyards sprayed against rot in 2007. Allegedly.

The pulvérisateur I bought in early 2006 has served us really well, especially when mildew attack is never far away in damp summers like 2007 or in May or June 2008, which were also damp. In action, it looks a bit like Bill Nighy’s squid-like character, Davy Jones, in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, with all those tube-like tentacles slithering about. 

Last week we also had to spray to protect against mildew - the protection lasts about two weeks once applied - as well as the anti-rot treatment, and both have to be carried out separately. Winegrowers get a bit nervous about mildew, although it’s one of the dullest subjects on earth and you can feel yourself losing a grip on reality when talking about it. As an example, here are two text messages from my friend Sean Allison of Chateau du Seuil (pictured) on yet another holiday: ‘The stress is killing me: I’ve just run out of sun-cream’ and ‘I can confirm there is no sign of mildiou in the Greek Islands’. 

With Daniel our vineyard manager on a three week holiday, Hafid has been hard at it before he goes on his (three-week) annuals today. He’ll certainly be pleased to get away from his fussy patron, who makes him work when he should be relaxing. Monique our assistant is also on three weeks’ holiday, and Nellie has just come back from three weeks off.

We had a wet week in Cornwall. I think we’re missing something.

This time it was the turn of several unfortunate growers and Chateaux in Lussac Saint-Emilion, one of the satellite appellations to the north of the famous, medieval wine town.  Hundreds of acres were hit, and some estates have lost all their crop for this year.  

A few vineyards in Montagne St-Emilion were severely damaged by the storm on 28 July, but it was the area around Le Cros near Lussac which took the brunt of it. James Ryland of Vignobles André Lurton told me over supper the other night that the 25 hectare (62 acre) estate of Chateau Barbe Blanche has lost everything this year. Disastrous as this may be for this branch of the Lurton family - and their winemaker’s car also took a pounding - I feel particularly sorry for their fellow growers who might well be struggling as it is; rows and rows of otherwise beautifully maintained vines - mostly merlot - have been laid waste for this vintage. Even if some of the bunches have remained undamaged, there are insufficient leaves to ripen the fruit over the next six weeks in the build up to the harvest. Growers can insure their crop against hail damage but the premiums are very high, so many vignerons can’t afford it. We had cancelled our hail insurance just the year before we were hit five years ago. Our loss was AXA’s gain.

A local vineyard worker at Le Cros, who saw me standing looking gobsmacked at the scene this weekend, said that the hail attack had lasted no more than a few minutes. Hailstones the size of golf balls, apparently. (I think he thought it strange that an Englishman showed so much interest in the subject and was familiar with the rather specialized vocabulary.)

This rural, pretty corner of the Bordeaux region attracts just a fraction of the number of tourists and wine junkies that descend on nearby St-Emilion each summer. No doubt if this had happened on the famous limestone slopes around the more celebrated town, the gawper’s queue would have stretched to more than just me.

What makes it even more surprising is that within a few paces of almost total wipeout, there are rows of vines that remain completely untouched, as the photos show. For some growers in Lussac it was a disaster, while others could have been relaxing on the beach.  They wouldn’t have been if they had known what was happening in the vineyard.   

These were smaller hailstones on the very first day of our harvest in 2002 and we dived for cover back then.  The sound of loud clattering outside is one of the most frightening that a vinegrower can hear.

Based on what I saw, I would have had the shutters firmly closed if I’d been near Lussac on the evening of 28 July. 

“I strongly urge you to take advantage of the revolution in white winemaking in Bordeaux. I know I have said the same about Rhone wines but that doesn’t make it any less true of Bordeaux. If only there were a similar revolution in Burgundy…”

Strong stuff, but as a vinespotter in Bordeaux and not Burgundy, I’m not rushing to complain. Days earlier, Eric Asimov, the New York Times’ wine critic, posted this equally positive piece, entitled ‘A Bordeaux of a different color’, on his excellent blog, The Pour. ‘For good white Bordeaux, 2007 is a superb vintage’.

Earlier in July, we sent out our first carte postale email to a few friends and customers, urging them to consider our Bordeaux Blanc Sec 2007 this summer. Naturally, we got more replies saying ‘we love the postcard’ than actual orders, but bit by bit the message is getting through. There are some really good wines made with sauvignon blanc and/or sémillon from this part of the world, especially from the 2006 and 2007 vintages.  And for around £20 on the wine list, I still think ours is the best value wine at restaurant Gordon Ramsay, London’s only three Michelin star restaurant. 

If you’d like to be on the mailing list for these carte postales, and they’ll all be short, sweet and infrequent, do sign up on our www.bauduc.com site or email me. You can unsubscribe at any time once you get bored of them. The sign-up form is on the bottom of every page of the Bauduc site, which can also be found by clicking the big red blob in the top right hand corner of this blog. Apologies if, as an old friend or customer, you should have received one.

Plug over.