Even high end Bordeaux have to modernize and sometimes abandon the sacred "blend". And they still deliver in terms of labeling.

What I'm working on:
- Setting up a better comms system than Whatsapp + telling whoever happens to be here. (Whatsapp is already an innovation from this year).
- Researching containers to test & develop new products.

Had taken some nice shots during the harvest I'd forgotten about.

It's almost impossible to extract meaningful information from any single document, but putting all of them together there's a glimpse of a story that appears.

We can only improve what we can measure. (And we're getting computers pretty good at measuring stuff, but nothing beats manual fine tuning).

The wine ecosystem is still probably without equal in Bordeaux. We have more than enough choice for mobility bottlers that come directly inside our cellar.
Cleaning.

Bottling !

I've managed to scan all 77 documents, for a total of 500 pages and gave them all to Gemini to get a title, summary, and full transcript for each. It's insane but it basically works.

Scanning setup

I've found hundreds of documents about the Château, dating back to ~1720 (so far before our family acquired it in 1936). And there's a lot of mysteries (I'll dig deeper into that later) about who built this estate, so I'm trying to do a bit of research. Problem, most of it look like this.

I'm really interested in the vineyard's history with relation my family, but also at what happened before, as it's existed since long before my great-grandfather acquired it (1936). This is the oldest proof I have that there were already grapes growing more than 100 years ago.

This is the actual bottling. We have one coming soon, I'll try to take some videos.

bsky.app/profile/gero...

As a kid, we still had a "bottling" machine in the cellar, that would directly fill the bottles from the vats and close them - that was cool but too expensive to maintain, so we now use external services that come with theirs. But we still have the labeling machine, which is almost as satisying.

Found this letter from my great-grandfather about one of his first visit to the Château in 1937. Lots of mundane things about maintaining a vineyard, but one thing caught my eye: the wine they were making was at 8-9 degrees! The same location was sometimes as high as 15º this year.

Identifying rows was much more feasible from the orthophotos. This is the best measure of the total amount of vines I actually have, and I like the idea of knowing exactly where are all my rows. Almost 100% claude-vibe-coded this time

bsky.app/profile/gero...

So I hope to get several things out of the orthophoto. First, a proper measure of the vineyard and the plots. That's simple: just import the photo into qgis, draw the polygons by hand and I got a pretty good estimate.

Phytosanitary care feel like spraying liquid money, and we're not even organic. How can we use less? Let's try to vibe code a vineyard-mapping project for precision agriculture.

It's hard to know for how long people have been making wine at the Château de Brague, but it's likely more than 3 centuries. It's one of my big project to better understand its history.
Small anti-chronological thread of what I know so far.