2003 Petra 'Rosso' Toscana

Winery:	Petra
Location:	San Lorenzo Alto – Suvereto – LI -Italy
Wine :	2003 Petra ‘Rosso’ Toscana
Appellation :	Toscana (Indicazione Geografica Tipica)
Price :	~$60
Color :	Deep Violet - Black
Nose:	Freshly dug earth, coffee, concentrated blackberry and cassis
Palate / Balance / Flavors:	Beautiful rich open palate, active acidity moves the palate through rich plums, currant, orange peel, and fennel
Style:	Thoroughly modern – lushness of tannin texture, ripeness of fruit, weighty build. Has vigor to age gracefully for many more years.
Analysis:	Too tasty, forgot to save any to run analysis.
Comments:

A quick, post from Siurana, Spain

http://flickr.com/photos/18097654@N05/

Have been having a great time - no time to post, best bet if you want to see what I have been up to is to go to my flickr.com account and check out the photos.

I have basically been down the French /Spanish coastline from Perpignan to Barcelona, switched cars, then traveled to Tarragonna. From Taragonna into the Priorat district, which is amazing and beautiful, I am staying in Siurana, which is a totally incredible mountain-top village with amazing views - just have to be careful to not fall off a cliff when walking around!

Will be flying home tomorrow.

-Nathan

Badajoz

That evening, we went in to the city of Badajoz for dinner. This has been an entry point between Portugal and Spain for some time, and there are a lot of the old fortifications still visible, including some of the largest remaining Moorish fortifications still remaining in Spain, the fortress known as the Alcazaba. Though there were a lot of Roman ruins in the surrounding areas, including huge bridges and aqueducts, other than being a small roman settlement, it was founded as a city only during the Moorish rule.

We sat outside in the Alta Plaza near the Alcazaba, and had an amazing meal of tapas - Gambas, (large shrimp,) Jamon, goat's cheeses, and pork. Delicious!

San Vicente - on the way and back

This was a great day in many ways. I had been wanting to see this process since I first heard about the DIAM closure, and the plant tour really confirmed my trust in this technology as a top quality closure for high-quality wines.

In addition, the countryside was beautiful - cork oak forests, stone walls, mountains, plains, horses, sheep, cattle, even Iberian pigs. We passed through the hilltop fortress town of Alburquerque, with its impressive fortress guarding the valleys on each side and controlling the pass.

Maybe more impressive still was that I managed to have Jamon Iberico for breakfast, lunch, as a snack, and at dinner!

Oeno's DIAM closure (6) - Testing and sensory

Throughout the process of production, Oeno's laboratory is monitoring every step. All lots of cork flour are tested extensively after treatment, and any questionable result will cause that batch to be rejected and retreated until no trace of TCA can be found. "It is not a question of if the level is acceptable or not - the goal is to make it undetectable with the most modern methods available." They have 6 gas chromatographs - each of these babies is about as much as a Ferrari, last time I asked someone.

They also run tests on the completed closures, to ensure that no further contamination has occurred after the molding and shaping. I believe that Dominic said that they are in full compliance with ISO guidelines for manufacturing, and so this testing is just a part of their commitment to deliver the most consistent, highest performance closure to the industry.

We also smelled liquid from corks being soaked in the sensory lab. First, we smelled clean water, with no aroma at all. Next, traditional corks, with an earthy, woody aroma, some mushroom like character. After that, a steam treated cork, which was pleasantly woody, like cologne, without the mustiness or earthly aromas, much more clean and wood-like. Finally the DIAM, which smelled exactly like the water alone!

When we asked Dominic whether the DIAMANTE process could be applied to traditional corks, he said "you couldn't treat corks, because it would stretch them out of shape, but you could load planks into the machine, and punch them after treatment - it just would take an enormous amount of time and energy, since there would be much less surface area. But even so, this does not solve some of the other problems of corks - namely each one of them performs differently in terms of oxygen transmission and flavor masking or contribution - we want to make a better, more consistent product." I have found this to be true in my own trials - DIAM perform very consistently, natural corks are the least consistent closure available - one bottle could be perfectly preserved, while the next is aged and oxidized far beyond what it should be.

"You know" Dominic said, "in Bordeaux they say that there is no such thing as a perfect vintage, only perfect bottles. We want to make it so that every bottle can be perfect."

Oeno's DIAM closure (5) - sorting and shipping

At this point, the closures are essentially ready to ship to the next stage, finishing (which typically happens near their point of use - Napa Valley for my closures, some to Australia, and Champagne or Ceret France for most of the others.) Before they can ship, they get one last inspection - an automated machine looks at every single cork from many angles, rejecting any that are discolored, misshapen, have cracks, voids, or uneven surfaces. This was a fun process to watch, as a little puff of air sends the suspect closures off into one discard bin or another to be recycled back into the process.

They had a board of example defective corks as a reference, listed as critical, major, or minor failures. From here, the corks are baled, and shipped around the world.

Oeno's DIAM Closure (4) - molding and shaping

From the TCA extraction process, the treated cork flour moves via pneumatic conveyors to the next factory. Here, it is mixed with 'Microspheres' which are another patented part of the DIAM process. Basically, these are tiny polymer spheres, which when mixed with the cork and then heated expand. Once expanded, they hold their shape, but have some flexibility. They help to give their elastic properties to the closure, ensuring that after compressing, it will spring back to retain the closure in the neck of the bottle, even if the neck is somewhat irregular. Once this is correct, a very high grade, very inert polymer adhesive is added to make a coarse 'meal' which is pumped to the molding machine.

Depending on the intended use for the product, slightly different blends of the composite ingredients are used.

The molding machine is something like an automated cupcake maker. The machine packs the cork 'meal' into a series of small, cork-sized holes, and then compresses and heats it to expand the microspheres. An automated vacuum cleans up the excess from each form, and sends it to be recycled through the process. The molds travel around a conveyor to another machine which pops them out of the mold and into a bin which can be transported to the next step in the process after the corks are properly cooled. At this stage, the closures are rough, and slightly larger than their finished size will be.

The hoppers are moved to a warehouse where they cool and set. From here, they go through a machine that shapes them, polishes them, and champfers, or slightly rounds the edge of each cork. At every stage of the process, damaged, misshapen, or out-of-spec closures are kicked out of production, back into the recycling process.

Lots more photos and videos from my visit to the DIAM plant at my flickr.com site

Oeno's DIAM closure (3) - Supercritical CO2 - DIAMANTE Process

As we walked up to the DIAMANTE process factory, it DID look like something out of star wars. Tall silos contained untreated and treated cork flour, a huge compressed CO2 cylinder, compressors, pipes, coolant lines, electrical, and lots of other equipment that was difficult to totally understand.

Oeno has several patents on the process and equipment used in their TCA extraction process. The entire process is very complex, and uses many, many steps, but to simplify: They use supercritical CO2, which is CO2 at high pressure and moderately high temperature - this gives it some of the properties of a liquid and some of the properties of a gas. As such, it has huge ability to penetrate the cork granules to extract volatiles, and is very effective as a solvent to remove these contaminants. At the same time, it is relatively gentle on the structure of the cork itself, and does not cause physical deformation of the suberin. Nearly all of the CO2 used is run through an activated carbon filter to remove the TCA and other contaminants, and then it can be reused within the cycle again. CO2 is completely non-toxic, and is a byproduct of many other industries (even winemaking!) so this is considered an extremely 'green' method of extraction, and is now used in applications ranging from decaffeinating coffee to dry-cleaning clothing!

The actual treatment occurs in several tall cylinders, in a batch process. Dominic showed us their very first, prototype extractor, which was in a bay all by itself. "This is the only French-made machine in the entire plant. We have Italian machines, lots of German machines, some Japanese machines, but this is the only French, and now it is not used anymore." (I asked him if, as it was a French machine, it had decided to go on strike!)

We went outside to see where the TCA was collected, along with about 150 other compounds that they had identified so far, in a plastic chemical tote. We smelled it; it smelled vaguely corky, like sawdust and a little woody, but not overwhelmingly like TCA. They are collecting about 300 gallons of this stuff per week - it is completely non-toxic, and they have been discussing the possibility of selling it to some perfume companies, as several of the recoverable compounds are difficult to obtain, and are valuable in perfumery.

From here, the now-treated cork flour travels over to another plant where it is formed, mixed, and turned into closures.

Oeno's DIAM Closure (2) - steam cleaning

Though this is not a part of the production process for the DIAM closure for the USA market, Oeno is continuing to treat some of the 'cork flour' with steam cleaning to extract volatiles and TCA. They are not the only company to use this process, I believe that many of the large cork companies are using this, particularly on their technical closures, such as 1+1 and twin tops. Oeno is mostly using this closure for the spirits industry, to be made into bar-tops - one peculiar feature of TCA is that it is more sensory active in low-alcohol beverages, such as wine. Seems that it is most noticeable at between 4% to roughly 11% alcohol, and then the alcohol has a masking effect. So for malt whisky at 40% alcohol, or even Port wine at 19%, the closure choice is more forgiving. For wine, particularly more delicate styles; champagne, belgian beer closed with a cork - these products are all at particular risk of taint by TCA.

Dominic stated that the steam cleaning process can reduce TCA to below 2.0 ng/l (that is less than two parts in a trillion!) which should be around the threshold for sensory impact for a sensitive individual. They sample continuously during the steam treatment, and if a lot does not pass their testing, it is sent back to be run through the treatment process again. In this way, they can guarantee results below 2.0 ppt, but as Dominic says, "that is not enough. We are still selling TCA, so we had to progress from this."

From here, we started to walk over to the most recent part of the plant.

"Now, we leave the medieval behind and enter the space age!"

More photos from the DIAM plant at my flickr page.

Oeno's DIAM Closure - (1) source cork & sorting

To see the way that Oeno has been operating, in contrast to the older technology under which corks are being produced by the company leasing the remainder of the production space, we crossed over to the other side of the property. (I am trying to make it clear that although they operate on the same property, and though it is illustrative to see traditional cork production side by side with the high-technology used in the DIAM manufacture, there is no connection between the two other than a business arrangement to lease space.) Though Oeno is phasing out of natural cork closures at the moment, when they were producing them, they came at it from an entirely different direction - the soaking of the cork bark was done in gleaming, stainless steel - pressurized steam tables, and the condensed steam was filtered back via what looked like a reverse osmosis filtration system, so that the water was always free of cork tannin buildup and other unwanted contaminants.

For the DIAM closure, the cork sourcing is not so critical as for traditional corks - the part of the cork that they need is the suberin, the waxy, slightly spongy layer found under the bark of the cork oak tree, (Quercus suber.) We walked to the covered storage bays where cork that was destined to become DIAM was stored - it is made up largely of scraps that are too small to be useful for making traditional corks, remnants from planks that had been punched out into corks already. Dominic, the director of the company showed us a plank that had been punched. There were worm holes, tree bark, and other problems with the cork all around where the closure had been punched out, and one could extrapolate that there were problems in that closure itself as well, wherever it was now. "We find sometimes bugs, bullets, rocks, all sorts of things in the cork that are not desirable."

We put on our earplugs and entered the large warehouse where the initial processing takes place. Hoppers full of cork are dumped into a chipper, which breaks down the cork bark into small pieces of near uniform size. Heavy objects fall out at this point, and sure enough when we pulled the pan back to find what had come through, we found wire, a nail, bits of woody bark, small stones, and lots and lots of shotgun pellets - someone must be doing a lot of bird hunting in the cork forests!

From here, the cork is run through a series of centrifuges - this allows the engineers to select only the suberin portion of the cork oak - bits that are more or less dense are separated out and become waste, which will be used as fuel to provide energy to the plant. Of the total tonnage of cork that comes through the plant, less than 50% by weight is the suberin which is desirable for closure production - this is still much more efficient than traditional cork manufacture. As Dominic says, "there is actually much more cork in a DIAM than in a traditional cork!" by which I think he means that as a DIAM is more uniformly made from suberin, it contains much more of the desirable material than traditional corks, with their inclusions, voids, and uneven density. (And much fewer bugs, nails, stones, dirt, air, and bullets!)

Once the cork is sorted, it is sifted once more to ensure a uniform granule size - from here it can go forward to the next processes, designed to extract TCA and other unwanted volatiles from the cork.

(For those of you who may remember the Altec, this was the extent of the processing for that closure. It was assumed that the rigorous sorting would exclude TCA, which was believed to reside most commonly in the barky parts of the cork tree. Oeno does not have any further connection to Sabate or the Altec closure, except for having purchased the company and the patents, and Oeno has expanded their technology far beyond that of the earlier closure.)

San Vicente de Alcantara

When we reached the Oeno closure plant in San Vicente de Alcantara, it was quickly clear that a lot of processes were happening at once. Recently, Oeno has completely put its faith in the DIAM line alone, abandoning the sale of traditional closures. Instead, they lease their old plant out to a traditional cork producer; this one mainly makes the discs that are used on the base of champagne corks, rather than full size still wine corks. This process can make use of pieces of bark that are too thin to punch a traditional cork from.

Once the cork is harvested, it is trucked in from the countryside on large flatbed trucks. It is then stored in a cork yard – basically a large woodpile, until ready for processing. Processing starts by immersing planks of cork into boiling hot water – this water quickly becomes pretty filthy. We were here on a Monday, the start of the work week, when the water is fresh – even so, it looked pretty much like a boiling pot of witches brew, with foamy suds and brown, tea-colored water. You can imagine that by Friday, you don’t want to be the guy buying corks from that days soak…

After boiling to moisturize the corks and leach some of the flavor from them, the cork is taken in and stacked to dry flat. After dry, it is sorted by hand, by men with large knives that cut off the sections that are suitable to punch corks from, and the rest is discarded. These selected chunks of cork are then taken to be punched out one by one by an operator with a foot pedal operated machine. The narrower discs for Champagne corks are sliced automatically from thinner sheets of cork.

From here, the corks are graded by two women who look at every cork as it passes down a conveyor in from of them. Rejected corks are thrown back into the waste – the ones that pass go into large bags from where they will be shipped to finishing facilities, where the corks will be bleached, further sorted, and finally branded, sealed, and shipped to clients who will use them to close their wine bottles.

This work is incredibly labor intensive, and done with archaic machines and surroundings. It is difficult to imagine that there is much traceability here, and because these corks are then sold on to other companies, it is impossible to know where they will end up.

Extremadura

The region I am visiting is called Extremadura – it is a vast part of the interior of Spain. Wide plains, low mountains, ruined castles and walled cities as far as you can see under a brilliant sky. It nearly looks like the African savannah, with huge, thickly trunked cork trees spaced evenly, with cattle and the famous and delicious pata negra (black footed pigs, which are used to make Jamon Iberico,) pigs feeding in their shade on grass, tubers, mushrooms, and acorns. Here along the border and into Portugal is where most of the corks used in the world are grown. Once it reaches maturity at about 65 years of age, a cork oak can be harvested about every 11 years – the cork harvesters cut around the trunk carefully, and remove the thick bark – all without harming the tree, which then begins to grow back its skin over the next years.

A little background – Corks have been used to close wine (and other) bottles for hundreds of years. They have certain properties that make them ideally suited for this task – they are compressible, but rebound to their original dimensions, allowing them to form a secure seal even in an imperfect bottle neck. They are water tight, but allow small amounts of oxygen through them, allowing wine to oxidatively ‘age.’ They are a renewable resource, and provide nesting habitat for endangered African storks.

At the same time, they have some drawbacks that have been recognized for just as long. As a natural product, each one varies in how much oxygen can be transmitted through it. This means that bottles can vary widely from one to the next, based on too much, or not enough oxygen being available to the wine. Sometimes they leak. Other times, they cause the wine to taste dank, like a root cellar, mushrooms, or wet cardboard. This last symptom is known as ‘cork taint’ and is one of the major issues that the wine industry has been struggling with for years. The main compound responsible for this aroma is called 2,4,6 Trichloranisole, or TCA for short. This compound, along with its related TCB, and others, can affect 3-10% of wines closed with a cork, depending upon who you talk to. The worst part about it is that many consumers do not know about TCA, and when they open a tainted wine, they have to assume that the reason that they do not like the wine is that it was not skillfully or carefully made.

Despite increased awareness and heroic efforts by the cork industry (which has been facing severe competition from artificial corks and screwcaps,) to review and improve their processing controls, analysis and traceability, this problem still exists. Even purchasing the very highest grade, most expensive corks is no guarantee of a solution – although very low grade corks may have increased incidence of problems, at the higher level TCA still exists.

The company that I have travelled to Spain to meet with is called Oeno Closures. They are an offshoot of a traditional cork company that has been working on this problem for a long time. Their approach is novel, and they hold several patents related to a process which produces a closure, called DIAM which is warranted to have TCA levels at below detectable levels in the wine, (less than 0.5ppt with current technology; it is aroma active around about 4 parts per trillion!!)

I have used these closures in the past; hesitantly at first, but the more that I have worked with them, the more I appreciate their good qualities. There is no one best closure for all wines, but this is certainly a great tool to have in hand, and the leap forward that their process represents should spur further effort and research into solving the problem.

Badajoz, Spain

Just waking up - we drove yesterday from the airport in Lisbon, to Badajoz, Spain. I was sleepy, despite having slept most of the way from Philly to Lisbon. Tylenol PM is my best friend on this sort of flight; I can't stand being packed in tightly for so many hours, so it is a good way for me to go to just sleep through it.

We picked up the car - it was tiny, due to some miscommunication with the travel agent, and they did not have a larger vehicle that they could upgrade us to. We squeezed me, Chris, Nicole, and our bags into it barely - but we are going to have 2 more people with us tomorrow, so it promises to be interesting!

The countryside looks a lot like California - loads of oak trees, (though these have their lower trunks stripped of bark, as they are harvested cork trees...) and the ground is very dry looking, with mountains in the background. Lots of fortified cities and ruined castles everywhere you look as well. Olive trees, some row crops, and cattle.

We stopped at a rest stop for espresso and a bite, and there were bullfight poster advertisments up on the walls everywhere. A couple of the guys we met up with later at the hotel, from another winery, were in Pamplona over the past couple days and did the Corrida del Toros, or rather they were there, as the police kicked them out of the street before it started. They said it was over before you knew it, and they think that they saw the back of one of the bulls as it went by, but that was it. It sounded crowded, dirty, and exhausting to be with so many thousands of people.

When we got to the hotel, we spent a couple hours by the pool. Love smelling warm fresh air with no hint of the huge fires that have been burning by us lately!

Getting off this morning to grab breakfast, then head about 70 miles from here to the factory to see how they process corks. Am looking forward to this!

Europe - Take two

I know I just returned a few weeks ago from a great couple weeks in Spain and France, but I recieved an invite on my return to travel to Portugal Spain and France to tour the cork forests and processing plants owned by the French company Oenocorc, whom I have worked with a fair bit. I mostly have used their unique DIAM product, a zero TCA engineered closure. As I am in the airport typing on my iPhone, I will talk about TCA in a further post.

I will be getting on the plane here in Philly to land tommorrow am in Lisbon, then travel across Portugal to the Spanish border at Badajoz. This is near the forests and the initial processing plant. Then we fly to Barcelona, to travel to the finishing factory in the French Pyrenees. I will even be near the Pyrenees stages of the Tour de France, and Chris said we may try to catch a bit of it.

I didn't even fully complete my last travelblog, but I guess these trips will run together.

I forgot to mention! The part of Spain where the corks grow, Extremadura, is famous for its Jamon Iberico! Stay tuned!

Port Bou, Spain

When taking the train along the southwest coast of France, going into Spain, you have to change trains immediately upon entering Spain at Port Bou. There were a couple of hours in between trains, so I grabbed my bags and headed down into the village.

Port Bou seems to be a small, sleepy village, (granted, it was Sunday,) that clusters around a small, sheltered port on the Mediterranean. Tall cliffs surround the city on every side, so it was very still, sunny, and warm, even vineyards were growing on steep terraces over the town. There is a trim embarcadero along the sea, and a gravelly beach right in the midst of the town, with restaurants and hotels clustered around, facing the small harbor. Through a cleft in the rocks, you can see out to the broader sea, a narrow alleyway which you would have to shoot through to get a boat to open ocean. There were sunbathers on the sand, and children scrambling over rocks near the cliffs, exploring the tidepools.

I sat at a restaurant across the street from the sea, and ordered the menu of the day - fried sardines and paella, with a carafe of rose. The sardines here are delicious - larger fish than what we are accustomed to calling sardines here, and they are fresh, simply slit along the belly to clean them, a scrape of the knife to take the larger scales away, and then dredged through a light flour and salt batter before being dropped in olive oil. They come out crispy, delicate, and delicious - you can pretty much scrape them lightly off the bone with the tip of your fork, flip them over and repeat. Delicious! The last time I had sardines this good was at Pilar, in Napa, and they were Santa Barbara caught sardines.

The Paella was just okay. It was oily, and seemed to be heated up rather than made to order - but then they have a restaurant to run.

I wish I would have had more time to enjoy the sun, sit on the beach, and sip rose, but I had to get on my train back to Barcelona.

More pics, click here

Convection oven, toaster oven, and hotplate

I really love our new kitchen. The convection oven, the range with a really high-powered burner and fine control at the low-end, especially the dishwasher, and the easy access to the refrigerator, with the freezer down below, and the refrigerated shelves up top, where you can see them easily. Now I know that kitchens get fancier than ours - but this is really good compared to what I am used to, and we do just fine with this setup.

In Avignon, I got a good reminder that it is not the quality or layout of the kitchen that matters - it is ingredients, understanding of these ingredients, and organization that makes for really good food. I ducked into a wine bar with a kitchen that was turning out really solid regional food - I sat at the bar which also was the kitchen, and watched as two waitresses and one cook turned out plate after plate of food for a packed room and patio - with only a small convection oven (like the kind they use at Starbucks to heat up your disgusting breakfast sandwich thing,) a basic toaster oven, and an electric hotplate. There was a commercial dishwasher as well, and a sink, but that was essentially it! They were making oxtail, toasted sandwiches, roasted marrow bones, soups, salads, plates of cheeses, escargot, beef tartare, and many other things at a breakneck pace while keeping the diners happily plied with glasses, tastes, or bottles of wine from a blackboard listing around 30 selections.

The people next to me turned out to be friendly and fun; Franck is in the cork business, selling to wineries all around France. Kris is a baker, and sells her breads out of Les Halles, nearby. They were really fun, and we ended up going out for drinks at a friend's restaurant with an American chef. It was a great last night in France before catching the morning train back towards Barcelona.

More pictures from Avignon here:

Chateauneuf du Pape

Without question, the most famous wine region in the Southern Rhone valley is Chateauneuf du Pape. It is located within view of Avignon, and takes its name from the castle which the Avignon Popes had constructed overlooking the town as a summer residence, (translated: New Castle of the Popes.) The red wine made here is based on Grenache, with some Mourvedre, Cinsault, Carignan, Syrah, and Terret Noir - they are often fragrant wines with relatively high alcohol for France, commonly just below 15%. It is common to use large, older oak casks for the elevage of these wines, so they do not have the intensely oaky character that is so common in new world wines, or in Burgundy or Bordeaux - this wine is more about the grapes and the place than about the winemaking technique. To me, when young they have a floral grapiness with defined astringent tannins, while remaining decently acidic and agile on the palate. With age, they lose some fruit, and the floral moves toward dried petals and spices, sometimes they have almost a mineral, gamey 'blood' aroma, and the tannin structure does not seem to move appreciably. It is common for these wines to age 20 years with proper cellaring, and even longer than that in the best cases.

I learned a fair deal about the appellation just by being there. It is a relatively large area when compared to a Burgundy commune - a bit over 3000 hectares (nearly 6,200 acres of vines.) It encompasses a range of soils, aspects, and elevations, but the defining soil is on the plateau to the east of the village - a vast plain of potato-sized rocks cover the ground (up to 30 meters deep in places,) with vines struggling up out of the meager ground. Red wines are 'goblet-trained' or grown like a small bush, with just a small post to cling to. Their clusters hang within 6 inches of the ground, which helps them to catch reflected light from the rocks (improving color in the grapes,) as well as keeps them warm through the evening as the rocks give off their accumulated heat (moderating the acidity of the fruit.) My back hurt just thinking about working and harvesting in these vineyards - you'd be bent double all day, with only a loose pile of shifting rocks to stand upon. Probably a lot of twisted ankles and sore backs!

The whites looked much more familiar. They were trained in rows on a standard VSP-type trellis, and were planted on some of the less stony ground in most cases. The whites were the eye-opener here for me; while 95% of the wine produced in Chateaneuf du Pape is red, and this is the bulk of what is exported, the whites were uniformly delicious. Rich in texture, dry, with balanced acidity and minerality, they seemed loaded up with white peach and apricot flavors, and floral/herbal aromatics. The blancs are based on Grenache Blanc, with Roussanne, Clairet, and Picpoul.

We tasted wine at a couple of domaines, then went up to the Chateau to see the view over the tiled rooftops of the village. From here, one can see Mt. Ventoux, Les Dentilles, the beginning of the alps, and the wide bend of the Rhone river as it splits to encompass an island near Avignon. The Chateau is mostly a ruin, however there is a meeting room in the "basement" of the castle which still functions as a banquet hall which can hold 200+ people for a feast. Several people whom I know have been at banquets here for their induction into the society of Chateauneuf du Pape (mostly for being influential in spreading the reknown of the region, or for importing and selling the wines of Chateauneuf du Pape throughout the world.) In order to be inducted, you have to memorize and recite all of the allowed grapes for the appellation (there are something like 13 or so of them, mostly with difficult names...) Then there is much drinking, eating and drinking. That would be very fun to be a part of someday!

More photos: click here for my flickr.com account