This month’s news review is a meandering journal of images to scroll through at your leisure. The vineyard, fallen trees, floods, the bottling, various trips and family snaps - life’s rich tapestry.

We’ll leave the spring sales pitch for the not too distant future.

If you have any questions or comments, please email Georgie, Angela and Gavin by clicking this link – or simply reply to this email and Gavin will get back to you.

All the best

Gavin & Angela Quinney

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In the last few days, we’ve had the welcome sight and sound of the grues (cranes) flying overhead as they migrate northwards. It’s a sign that spring is on its way and all feels well again.

Looking back to January 1st, it was bitterly cold.

It’s no bad thing for the vines though, so that they get their winter rest.

A few days later, we had some lovely sunshine to follow on from the frosty starts. (5 January.)

These chèvres (goats) migrate from the next door village – accompanied by our friend Jean Pierre – and they too are welcome.

We then had a lot of rain, but it was Storm Nils earlier this month that brought trouble. We lost half a dozen large trees. (12 February.)

There’s a lot of chainsaw action still to be done.

Ange hugging our huge cedar near the château. The right hand pic gives you an idea of the size of it.

François, the satellite man, thankfully came to adjust the big dish on the roof. I reckon he could charge more as no sane person would do that for a living, using just a ladder.

The storms also brought heavy rains. You’d have thought it looked quite wet in the vines at Bauduc…

… until you’d ventured out to somewhere like Libourne, about 20 minutes north of us, close to the river Dordogne. (19 February.)

We’d driven further south that same day near the flooding at La Réole, overlooking the river Garonne and the surrounding valley.

It’s been too wet until this week to get into the vineyard with the tractors. There’s a fair amount of maintenance work to be done, such as Daniel and Nelly replacing some posts that hold up the training wires.

The winter pruning has all been done now.

Our handy battery-powered secateurs are not for the faint hearted, in truth.

We’d booked the last week of January for bottling the 2025 whites and rosé.

The quality of the 2025s is really good, so it’s important that we make sure everything goes to plan.

This is the second year running that we’ve used an outfit called Renfort, and we’re certainly happy with the job they’ve done. They bring around a dozen people plus all the kit.

I designed and wrote up all the labels before Christmas, so along with the bottles, Stelvin screwcaps and cartons, all the dry goods were delivered on schedule. It can be mildly stressful if one thing is missing.

Yields are much lower in 2025, but there are still well over 100,000 bottles, 85% of which are labelled and packaged up.

Weirdly, there are different pallets in general for the UK than for the rest of Europe.

We stack 112 boxes of 6 on VMF pallets for the UK, whereas we send 100 cases of 6 on Euro pallets to Switzerland.

As we have an idea of the volume for each, fairly immediate market, we now make full use of the bottling team to package it all up. The rest we can do ourselves with our own labelling machine - as we do for the reds, which aren't labelled and boxed when they're bottled, but later on, after ageing.

We still have some 2024 Sauvignon Blanc available. The 2025 will be more expensive due to lower yields for 2025. A smaller crop than usual for dry whites last year in Bordeaux is fairly par for the course. (I’ll discuss why in my ‘Bordeaux 2025 weather and crop report’ next month.)

Then onto the rosé. An early start each day.

Like the Sauvignon Blanc, we made less Rosé in 2025 than in 2024 (and we officially sold out of that wine last August, so we will run short).

Clear bottles are standard for rosé, but we recommend you keep the wine in its case, avoiding direct light as much as possible. Search ‘light strike’ online and that could put you off buying wine in clear bottles entirely; but we’ve found our rosé is fine if exposure is limited – eg, buy a case and keep the wine in there until you need it.

Watching the Stelvin screwcaps dropping onto the bottles at speed can be strangely mesmerising.

The 2025 sits alongside the 2024, style-wise – though the new vintage is slightly paler – and is much better than, say, the 2023.

Our Rosé is served by the glass at Rick Stein’s restaurants, and has been for 15 years now.

The Stein restaurants ordered over 1,000 bottles of the 2024 Rosé and 2024 Sauvignon Blanc per month on average last year, combined.

Fine for hardy pros when they’re stacking boxes at pace, but we’d suggest that friends at home don’t carry their 6-packs of wine like this.

One forklift truck for the shrink wrapping tent and taking the pallet down to the stockholding, where Nelly arranges it all.

It helps to have enough space. We restored this building 25 years ago, so it’s seen a lot of wine pass through.

Bottling the wine without labels is normal for Bordeaux reds, and most good châteaux keep their bottles in metal box pallets like these, until the wine is ready to be labelled up and shipped in cases – usually to order. Metal box pallets of wine can be stacked and use up less space – one pallet of made-up wine cases (like the one on the left in this photo and in the picture above) takes up a lot more space and can’t be stacked in the same way.

Post bottling, and it was off to Wine Paris, a huge trade fair which takes place each February. This year, there were over 6,500 exhibitors showing their wares to more than 63,500 visitors allegedly, according to our friend Richard Siddle. Georgie (our eldest) and I went up on the TGV – Bordeaux-Paris is 600km by road but a mere two hours on the faster trains – and we spent two and a half days in the ‘France’ hall. We don’t present our stuff at trade shows, but it was a good opportunity for us to taste what’s on offer from other regions.

Then, for me, it was my annual pilgrimage to Zürich, taking the freshly bottled wines to our Swiss importer, Philipp Schwander MW. These 'wine skins' (bought from the shop at Château Haut-Bailly) have always done the trick, touch wood.

We tasted the new Sauvignon Blanc 2025 up against the current 2024 and the Rosé 2025. We also tasted our soon-to-be-released 2022 Bordeaux Supérieur rouge alongside two other Bordeaux reds, which I introduced to Philipp in 2019, and that he's been buying ever since.

‘The Man from Del Monte said yes’. (You’ll need to look that up if you’re not of a certain generation.) Both wines will be in Philipp’s March offer to his private customers in Switzerland, at €13.90 Swiss Francs per bottle (c €15.20/£13.30).

Philipp also sells our 2021 Blanc de Blancs Crémant, and, looking back to the start of the year, we've had several occasions to open a few bottles. Both Bugs, right, and Georgie have their birthdays in January.

Bugs’s friend Ann kindly bought the balloons and came up with a new expression when the letter B had a puncture. We had an excellent dinner, right, to celebrate Georgie’s birthday at a charming place called Vivants in Bordeaux. Her boyfriend Paul, who lives in Bordeaux, is next to her in both pics.

Another January trip to Bordeaux and a traditional, family stop at L’Entrecôte with David, Ange’s dad, and our Tom. It’s also traditional for me to be the one who queues, as there are no bookings and it’s probably the busiest restaurant in the city.

Ann kindly took these photos for the 2026 Quinney family album, here with David above. Naturally, we all complained at having to squint with the winter sun.

It was great to have this rare shot of us all together at home. January 2026.

At long last, we’re able to update this one in ‘about us’ on our website. This was from the harvest of 2016. Ten years ago. And aww, the dogs… (Margaux, Pavie and Palmer).

As ever, it was lovely to borrow Tom, now 22, for a few weeks. He flew back to Montreal, Canada, in January. And although we’re planning on having another dog, or two, Goose the cat has been a huge family favourite since 2012. He’s rather enjoying the peace and attention in the meantime.

Visitors sometimes ask us – especially in the summer – if there’s a quiet time of year when we can get away on holiday. We discovered by happy chance that early to mid-January is just such a time, and we have the huge fortune of being invited by a great and generous friend to his chalet near Chamonix, on the other side of France. This was the view from our bedroom – this alone is worth the drive (about 7-8 hours from Bordeaux). I often think the French do not realise just how lucky they are.

Angela loves the skiing, and the company of course, while my main role is to be head sommelier. Best of all is the hospitality from Trish and the delicious food by Atlanta.

There’s a point in life where the proportion of skiers versus walkers seems to level out. That’s Mont Blanc behind.

Walking in the mountains is a complete joy, especially on the allocated pistes. ‘Senior’ piétons (60+) can also benefit from a whopping €5 discount off the normal rate (€25) for the ski lifts.

Happy walkers in the mountains. What a treat.

Back to the vineyard and time to get the branches of the freshly pruned Sauvignon Blanc vines tied to the training wires.

The girls pulling out the dead bamboo this week.

We’ll soon be ready for another growing season.

The farmhouse has had a winter rest along with the vineyard.

The first guests arrive in April. We’re currently full in 2026 with every week booked up until the end of October.

Another Van Blanc has turned up at the château (yesterday).

Onwards and upwards.