Mumm 2021 Harvest – Part lll – “Only the Best”

Mumm 2021 Harvest – Part lll – “Only the Best”

The region’s harvest officially started September 6th this year.  The Comité Champagne announced that as much as 60% of the yield was lost due to poor weather conditions where the grapes succumbed to botrytis and mildew.

The grapes are picked around 100 days after the vines have flowered and when they are the ripest. As required by The Comité Champagne, picking is exclusively by hand, vineyard parcel by vineyard parcel, bunch by bunch. Maison Mumm employs around 1,000 grape pickers for this three-week period.

Prior to picking, MaisonMumm sends a Collard machine down the rows.  This will do some partial trimming to make it easier for the grape pickers. Once the grapes are picked, they are placed in yellow bins. Laurent Frenet [Chef de Cave of Maison Mumm] strategy is not to keep the grapes too long before pressing – once the bins are full, they are rushed off to the press houses. Mumm has seven traditional presses ‘Coquard presses’, near its vineyards.

The grapes are sorted at the vineyard level and as per Georges Hermann de Mumm’s maxim “Only the best” bunches are picked.

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Mumm 2021 Harvest – Part l – Moulin de Verzenay and Coffee

I am thrilled to be a special guest this year to participate in the G.H. Mumm harvest along with British wine Journalists Jamie Goode and Giles Fallowfield.  Our initial meeting was at Moulin de Verzenay and accompanying us was three of the Martell Mumm Perrier-Jouet Paris team.

Moulin de Verzenay is perched on a hill above the village of Verzenay. It’s classified as a historic monument and is the last surviving example of a 19th Century mill that once stood on the windswept Mont Rizan. G.H. Mumm took over its conservation in 1972.

We were lucky (September 17th) was a beautiful sunny day with some low-lying clouds. While we sipped our coffee, we could see the harvest in full swing from our vantage point.

There was such an impressive panorama of the grand cru vineyards and from a short distance, we can see one of Mumm’s first pressing houses. 

The Sustainable Viticulture Manager of Martell Mumm Perrier-Jouët, Bernard Pineau, also joined us and explained some of the experiments that he and his team are conducting with regenerative agriculture.

Bernard says: “Regenerative farming involves agroecology, agroforestry, permaculture…, and “we have moved away from chemicals. Weed control and systematic treatments are over. It’s now all about observation

Continues …Part ll….Into the Vineyards with Bernard Pineau, the head of sustainable winegrowing at Martell Mumm Perrier-Jouët

 

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La Champagne commence sa vendange !⠀

Monks of France’s First Papal Vineyard Sell Wine to Support the Community

The Benedictine monks and nuns who tend to the first papal vineyard in France have launched an appeal to sell their wine to help the families of local wine growers.

Located on a hill in the Rhône Valley, the Abbeys of Le Barroux work together with the local wine-marking community to cultivate the land first established as a vineyard by Pope Clement V in 1309.

The monks are hoping to sell 15,000 bottles of their Via Caritatis wine during the month of June to help support the community after it was hit hard by a loss of sales due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fr. Michael, an American who has been a part of the French monastery for more than 30 years, told CNA that around 80 families directly depend on the winery for their livelihood.

“They work hard. They are in difficult conditions. Their wine in the past wasn’t recognized for what it was, which was a pretty high-quality wine, so they were just not making enough money to get by,” the Benedictine states.

“These families around us were making good wines, especially because we have the soil that is capable of producing … great wine, if it was cared for properly … The monastery was able to invest and to help these wine-making families get out of a situation which, all alone, I don’t think that they would have ever been able to get out of,” he explained.

With the help of Philippe Cambie, who has been recognized as one of the world’s top oenologists, or experts in the study of wine and winemaking, the monks have been able to create blends that produce award-winning wines from the combination of small plots of land owned by local growers with the abbey vineyard. Cambie has contributed to the wine production in its last stages at both former papal vineyards, which grow the same grape varieties.

The monks’ wine is less expensive than the nearby Châteauneuf-du-Pape vineyards, which, Fr. Michael points out, was founded later by Pope John XXII.

“You can buy wine for a cheaper price, and yet it can be almost the equivalent of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. And at the same time, by buying this wine you are helping winemakers who are in need of money at this time, and COVID-19 has not helped their situation,” the priest said.

The Benedictines’ Via Caritatis winery is selling red, white, and rosé wines which ship to the United States and elsewhere in Europe – website – http://www.via-caritatis.com/

Fr. Michael said that they chose the name Via Caritatis for their winery because “wine is a symbol of charity, and also the charity of Christ who gave himself.”

The monks support themselves through manual labor, according to the rule of Saint Benedict.

“The monks try and strive to produce something capable of making them not dependent on others, and not only that, but to produce enough to be able to give charity to the poor, to give a part of the income to their poor,” he said. “We give part of our income here, every year, we give it to charitable organizations.”

“A bottle of wine is not just something that man uses to nourish his body,” he said. “If Christ chose wine to transform into his blood, it is for a reason, and he chose wine for a reason. So wine is something material, but it’s something that’s called by Christ to be transformed into something spiritual.”

Source:  The Catholic Telegraph

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Petrus 2000 – the first bottle of wine ‘aged in space’ is up for sale

Twelve bottles of Petrus 2000 spent 14 months aboard the International Space Station — and allegedly tastes ‘several years older’ than it is.

This “space wine” left earth November 2019 and was launched into space. The twelve bottles valued at about $6,000 each spent 438 days aboard the International Space Station (ISS), where a team of disciplined astronauts refrained from drinking them. The wine circled Earth many times, subject to the uncertain effects of microgravity and cosmic radiation, before finally returning to land aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule on Jan. 14, 2021.

In a statement published May 4, Christie’s auction house announced it will sell a single bottle of the space aged Pétrus 2000 through its Private Sales website (a brokerage service that connects private buyers and sellers outside of the auction house – https://www.christies.com/privatesales/index). The bottle is expected to fetch about $1 million.  It comes packaged in a custom trunk that includes a bottle of terrestrial Pétrus 2000.

Proceeds from this sale will help fund future space-wine research by Space Cargo Unlimited, the private company that sent the bottles to the ISS in 2019. The company has five more wine-related experiments in the works, including a study of the effects of microgravity on grapevine shoots and a plan to study the fermentation process in space, according to Live Science sister site Space.com.

Does space wine taste different?

“I found there was a difference in both color and aromatics and also in taste,” panelist and wine writer Jane Anson told CNN.com.

She added that the space wine tasted “a bit more evolved” than the wine that had remained on Earth, as if it had aged an extra two to three years while in space.

Source:  Space.com

 

 

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Liv-ex 1000 shows that interest in wines from Burgundy, Champagne, the Rhône, Italy, and US has grown rapidly and unexpectedly

New categories of wine are entering the secondary wine market for the first time, with trading up by 70% from 2019.

Bordeaux, which once dominated the secondary market, now has a share of trade less than half of what it was a decade ago. But it hasn’t fallen out of favour – rather, its share has shrunk as the overall market has surged and interest in wines from Burgundy, Champagne, the Rhône, Italy and the US has grown rapidly.

“Last year was a positive year for the wine market, with all major Liv-ex indices showing gains,” said Liv-ex Director and Co-Founder, Justin Gibbs.

Liv-ex (the London International Vintners Exchange) is the London-based global marketplace for the wine trade, where fine wine merchants from around the world buy and sell wine. What happens on the exchange is a reliable indicator of the health of the secondary wine market.

And what it shows is that the secondary wine market is not just booming, it’s broadening.

Fast Market Growth

The number of distinct wine brands traded on Liv-ex last year was up 70%, from 996 in 2019 to 1,420. The total number of wines – including different vintages of the same wine brands – was 8,735, up 72% from the 2019’s 6,367.

The surge has continued into 2021, with March 2021 closing on the biggest month of trade in Liv-ex’s 21-year history – 1,250 distinct wine brands were traded, of which 130 were newcomers to the secondary market. More than £80 million ($109 million) of live bids and offers, are currently available on the market.

The Liv-ex 1000 index was established in 2014 to capture this broadening. As with all Liv-ex indices, it reflects the activity of e Liv-ex membership – a pool of over 500 of the world’s leading wine merchants, who between them represent the biggest and deepest pool of liquidity anywhere in the world.

Most importantly, as a trading and data resource, it is completely independent. And it shows stark changes in the fine wine market, as new wines enter the secondary market.

One Index Alone Is Up 87%

The most striking example of the changing dynamics of the market is the Burgundy 150. It has risen 87% over the last five years, the beneficiary of collectors putting their capital into a new category.

The Champagne 50 has risen 58% over the last five years, driven by the brand power and prestige of the grandes marques Champagnes, widely available stock, global distribution and accessible price points.

The Italy 100 has risen 45% over the past five years, as merchants and collectors discover the relative value to be found in the great wines of Piedmont and Tuscany.

The Rest of the World 60 – which includes the top wines of California, as well as Australian, Spanish and Portuguese wines – has risen 31% over five years. US wines, in particular, are attracting attention; in 2019, US wines represented just 2% of trade by value on the market. That shot up to 7% of total trade last year.

What’s Driving the Trading?

As elsewhere in the economy, technological innovations have swept through the wine industry, transforming the behaviour of both wine businesses and buyers. This past year has seen the launch of new wine tech start-ups, digital wine apps, soaring online sales and virtual tastings, ensuring that people are no longer anxious about buying or trading online.

“These innovations in technology have had a significant impact on buying patterns,” said Gibbs. “As more of the wine trade go digital – with many enabling their customers to access the market using our Automation services – we are seeing increasing diversity in what is traded as collectors are put in the driving seat.”

As a result, the wines brought through Liv-ex in 2020 not only came from the more traditional fine wine regions like Bordeaux and Burgundy, but also from China, Hungary, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Chile, Argentina and more. Prices per bottle also ranged from £4 to £21,000. As the wine world becomes increasingly digital, this broadening trend is likely continue.

The Market Set to Expand Further

Since 2019, US collectors and merchants have been constrained by the US government’s tariffs on the wines of France, including Bordeaux and Burgundy.

“The tariffs have had a singular effect on the fine wine market over the last 18 months, not least for Italy and Champagne whose wines were excluded from the extra 25% levy,” said Gibbs.

But the recent lifting of the tariffs has had a marked effect on activity – leading to a strong kick in demand for wines of all regions.

There are also other reasons to believe the fine wine market will both grow and diversify further.

“The combination of low interest rates and massive fiscal spending suggests that asset inflation will not be confined to equity, commodity and property markets,” said Gibbs. “The fundamentals of fine wine will also be an attractive option to those with cash to spare.”

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