gharbour
Posts: 371
Joined: 4/30/2010
From: Savigny les Beaune, France
Status: offline
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This series of posts is the continuing saga of a father helping his son (Nicholas) and daughter-in-law (Colleen) realize their dream of starting a winery (www.MaisonHarbour.com) in Burgundy, France. If you didn’t catch my earlier posts please look beneath the title of this post to find “View related threads: (in this forum | in all forums)” and select “in all forums”. Now that there are over 10 posts in the series you will have to go into the search criteria and increase the number of hits from 10 to 20 see the first few posts.
With vacation over, work has picked up to full speed. We finished prepping the floor for pouring, with a wire reinforcement, two layers of heavy gauge wire mesh separated every meter by a heavy gauge 10cm x 10cm box. Below that is a layer of plastic sheeting to seal out moisture. Along the walls is foam insulation to allow the floor to move inside the old stone walls. See the photo below.
Once everything was prepped, Nicholas got a permit from the village to close the main street for the day, and scheduled a cement delivery. The truck he hired had a 20 meter pump to reach the cuverie. Unfortunately, there was a telephone wire that prevented its use until the driver was convinced to go up and over the wire instead of under it.
Then the concrete started and it came and came and came. There was no reprise until we emptied the first truck (below).
We had a second truck bring the final concrete required, which, was transferred from the new truck to the first pump truck then down the line.
We almost had another disaster (hail being the first see my post #7) at the end of the pour. The cement truck driver was cleaning his pump line by running a cleaning ball through it. Maybe, because of the high lift in the line over the telephone wire, it built up tremendous pressure and exploded without warning, sending about a quarter ton of concrete and gravel flying. It even blasted rocks completely through the open doors of the house into the back yard (see photo). Nick was closest at the time and he was covered from head to toe in concrete. He said it hurt quite a bit on impact. No one else was hurt, but we spent about 2 hours cleaning the neighborhood houses and Maison Harbour. Below is a photo that shows the pile of cement that hit directly under the exploding pipe. You can also see some of the concrete on backhoe from the blast.
Finishing took all afternoon as the concrete was very wet. In the end we poured a 20cm (8”) slab with but we used a 2% slope because the concrete was so wet it wouldn’t hold the slope well. We think it ended up closer to1.5%, as planned, but we haven’t measured yet. We’ll let it dry for a week then seal it, at which point we can start bringing in and installing the equipment that Nicholas and Colleen have purchased (fermentation tanks, destemmer).
No change in the grape maturity since last week so no photo needed. Nicholas and Colleen started talking with courtiers (grape brokers) again this week as some of them returned from vacation, but everything is still locked up wait to see what the weather brings.
A Bientôt
Gary
_____________________________
Gary Harbour
Chez Nos Coeurs
Savigny les Beaune
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Summer Adventure in Burgundy 11 - New Floor Concrete Pour - 
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