The implementation in the vineyard and cellar to delight your taste buds ...
Planting a new vine at Château de Garbes is a major job, both in the preparation of the soil, in the choice of grape variety and rootstock and in planting the young vine plant. It’s a team effort between the plant installer and the spoon handler who will make the hole. The young vine will come into production after three years.
Pruning at Château de Garbes is carried out from the time the leaves fall until the end of January. The vines are pruned in mixed Guyot. This task is very important for the future harvest, especially for yield management.
Just after pruning, our team falls the wood , that is to say it pulls the branches from the trellis to place them on the ground. These branches will then be crushed or used to make good grills…
Peeling is the maintenance of vine stakes and wires in order to prepare for trellising for the new season.
Just before spring, we do the folding . This involves attaching the stem that will bear the fruit to the wire, surrounding it with biodegradable wire.
Secondly, when the vine begins to grow, we carry out desepamprage , i.e. manual cleaning of the vine (removing unwanted branches), preparing for pruning the following year.
The vine is a liana that must be contained between wires to trellis it. The foliage thus receives better sunlight, promoting the ripening of the grapes. Trellising in Garbes is done manually.
Pruning involves cutting the tops of vines that grow up and down the sides. It must be carried out several times during the campaign in order to give this straight and rectilinear appearance to the row of vines and the grass is mowed on the same pass.
The vine is a perennial plant, subject to numerous cryptogamic diseases, the proliferation of which is accentuated by climatic conditions. The fungi such as excoriosis, downy mildew, powdery mildew and black rot are the most devastating diseases in the vineyard.
Every year, we seek to prevent their proliferation. The development of these diseases would seriously harm the quality and quantity of the future harvest.
Phytosanitary treatments are carried out in a reasoned manner depending on climatic conditions, observation in the field and the advice of the technician. Our daily observations during our manual work throughout the campaign allow us to anticipate damage. Thus, we use natural treatment products as much as possible such as Bordeaux mixture (copper and natural sulfur approved in Organic Agriculture).
In 2017, we set up a three-hectare trial to limit weed control products.
In January 2018, the Nouvelle Aquitaine Region awarded us the Environmentally Responsible Agriculture in Aquitaine (AREA) certification.
When the cluster is formed, we mechanically strip the leaves from all the vines on the property, both red and white grape varieties.
Then in August, the vines intended for the production of Cadillac and Crémants are manually stripped of leaves again, on both sides.
This operation optimizes the concentration of sugar and phenolic compounds in the grapes.
We practice mechanical and manual harvesting on the property. Cadillac sweet white wines are harvested manually by successive sorting in order to pick the botrytized berries (noble rot). The Crémants de Bordeaux are also harvested by hand in racks using the methods used in Champagne.
The speed of action of our mechanical harvesting machine allows us to harvest red wines and dry white wines at optimal maturity.
The wines are vinified in the traditional way in cement and stainless steel vats. Some red wines and sweet wines are aged in oak barrels .
All our wines are bottled on the property and sold directly to consumers by us.
