Our last month in Japan! Many "sayonara's" to say to people who have been more than kind to both of us during the last 4 years. Some tears and some very special memories.

Oh, yes, Combebelle - well the weather has turned out to be rather "extreme" this month with snow and freezing temperatures in the middle of March which is unheard of here in the South of France! Has climate change finally made its impact on us here and are we looking at a future of long, cold winters...?

Generally, winter starts moving into Spring here in March. The early Spring flowers start to appear; the almond blossom is in full bloom and you can start to think about putting away your winter wardrobe. Well, this year, we have had 30 cm of snow in the middle of the month which effectively blocked off Combebelle from the outside world (yet again, this happened during the months of December-February as well) for a couple of days. And, we continued to have more rainfall which slowed down the work in the vineyard as you cannot get a tractor into the vineyard when it is too wet!

You normally start to see the first leaf-buds too but nothing was happening here at Combebelle. It was getting to the point where we were seriously behind on the work in the vineyard and we still had to complete the last of the pruning!

With the rain followed by some wam sunny days, the grass starts to sprout like mad and you need to plough this in before it can take hold. With the rain falling each week and only a couple of clear dry days in between, we were unable to do much ploughing and this could pose a problem with regard to timing for the next phase of vineyard work.
However, Frédéric did manage to do a lot of this and we knew that some of the work planned for in March would have to be done in April.

Yohanna managed to get the last of the pruning done just before Easter which is really the "limit" in terms of timing and next year we will be looking to do this earlier to keep in line with the rest of the vineyard. In theory, this will be one of the last plots to pick which being Grenache it would be in any case but I am hoping this will not be at the end of October as we need to pick this by hand and by then most of the seasonal pickers have moved on!

March was our last month in Japan so we made the most of this. My sister-in-law came for the first half of the month which was great as it meant I could revisit some of the places with her for the last time. We had a fantastic 2 weeks travelling around and on most occasions one or more of my friends joined us as well. We also planned another wine tasting with our importer which was fun. My proudest moment was when Patrick made his leaving speech in Japanese! This is quite an achievement and was greatly appreciated by all his colleagues.

And so, a new adventure begins.......