Chateau Palmer - Philippe Delfaut 

Bordeaux 2005 Harvest diary at Chateau Palmer - Margaux

Chateau Palmer - Wednesday, August 31. 2005
At Chateau Palmer new grape reception area for vintage 2005
We have installed a new grape reception area in the court outside the vatroom: a 6 meter sorting table for selecting bunches, machinery to separate grapes from stems and the crusher. 34 people will be needed to keep things running smoothly.

Chateau Palmer - Thursday, September 15. 2005
A beautiful blue sky… Another summer-like day in the vineyards of Chateau Palmer! 
Phenolic maturity continues to progress and tomorrow we’ll return to the vineyard to taste the Merlots grapes. 

Chateau Palmer - Tuesday, September 20. 2005
Status check?
After a little rain (10mm) last Friday, at Chateau Palmer, the beautiful weather has returned: Sunshine, but above all, a northern wind that will prevent any development of botrytis cinerea. We’re finishing the final adjustments in the vat room. The big moment will be Thursday the 22nd of September at Chateau Palmer, with one week of advance compared to the 2004 vintage. We’ll begin this harvest at Chateau Palmer with two plots of Merlots destined for Alter Ego. Undeniably, the quality of the tannins and the fresh fruitiness of these grapes make them a natural choice for the seductive style of the other wine of Chateau Palmer.

Chateau Palmer - Friday, September 23. 2005
Usefulness of the sorting tables
Silence yesterday on the Chateau Palmer blog! The first day of harvest required all our attention. It was a day of adjustments. 

The grapes at Chateau Palmer are magnificent and we could almost say that the sorting tables are useless this year! If the bunches don’t require much selection before destemming, many stem fragments remain, however, attached to the grapes at the exit end of the destemmer. Perhaps more so this year due to the lack of water that the vines have undergone the past few months? After destemming, two conveyor belts allow us to get rid of these stem fragments and conserve the noblest material of the grapes.

Chateau Palmer - Monday, September 26. 2005
The first tanks of Merlots are fermenting!
At this morning's tasting of the first tanks filled last Thursday, we discovered a slight effervescence at Chateau Palmer: the yeasts have begun their work of transforming the sugar in the grapes into alcohol and carbon dioxide. The vat room now has an extraordinary fragrance that we were impatiently waiting for. We continue our meticulous pumping over (wetting the cap of the grape skins with the fermenting wine) to gently extract color, aromas and tannins.

Chateau Palmer - Wednesday, September 28. 2005
The last day of picking Merlots
This evening, at Chateau Palmer, we’ll finish the Merlots harvest with the same beautiful weather that we’ve had since we began picking. We can already say that the 2005 vintage will be a great year for Merlots at Chateau Palmer: the first vats where fermentation is well advanced are full of promise, the musts are extremely dark and the first tannins extracted are concentrated and smooth at the same time. Tomorrow we’ll pick the young Cabernet Sauvignons plots with the hope that the coming days are as promising as those we have already lived.

Chateau Palmer - Friday, September 30. 2005
Petits verdots harvest
While we just finished harvesting the Merlots, we decided that for today, Friday the 30th of September, we would pick the three plots of Petit Verdot. This old grape variety from the Médoc has a reputation for being fully ripe late in the harvest, being typically picked at the end of the season. At Chateau Palmer, over the past few years, we have noted that if the yield is limited (to about 35 hectoliters per hectare) Petits verdot ripens remarkably well and can be picked early in the Cabernet Sauvignon harvest. Even if this variety only represents 6% of our vineyard at Chateau Palmer, it is very often an essential element to our final blend. Its peppered aromas and fresh tannins bring a capacity to age and a certain complexity to the wine of Chateau Palmer. The Petits verdot of the 2005 vintage is magnificent!!!

Chateau Palmer - Friday, October 7. 2005
The 2005 harvest is finished!
This morning we picked the last two plots of Cabernet Sauvignons at Chateau Palmer, under a sun as dazzling as that of the 22nd of September.

The harvest conditions have been quite simply exceptional. Now that the last grapes are in the vat room, we can affirm loud and clear that the 2005 vintage will mark the rich history of Chateau Palmer.

Chateau Palmer - Wednesday, October 12. 2005
The first drainings. Today we ran off our first tank of Merlots: after 8 days of fermentation and 12 days of maceration, we decided that it was time to separate the wine from the grape pomace for tank n°1.The free-run juice (the wine that runs off naturally) is separated from the press wine (the wine that remains in the grape pomace and is extracted by gentle pressing).

This first run off batch is at the height of our expectations: lots of complexity, a beautiful level of maturity that conserves a great deal of freshness. A great sign for the future at Chateau Palmer!

Philippe Delfaut - Chateau Palmer

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