Vinification (Quality Wine)

Organic Winemaking

In the winery we make a big effort to make quality wines that are naturally tasty, complex and express the place and year in which they were made (ie, the 'terroir'); and at the same time to care for the environment and our customer’s health.

Minimum intervention.


1. No Chemicals

Basically, what we do is NOT to add chemicals or substances to the must or wine. There are many chemical products which can legally be used to adulterate wine. It's possible (and even legal) to add sugar, water, acid, yeasts, artificial flavours, enzymes, wood chips, etc to the wine, but we have chosen not to do this.

by default, we don’t add sulfites to our wines, which is allowed by the European organic/ecological legislation. Most wineries (even organic ones) add some sulfites. It is used to kill bacteria, especially the vinegar producing ones, and to inhibit oxidization. We sometimes burn sulphur wicks in our stainless steel vats and oak casks after cleaning them. And sometimes we add sulphites at bottling, if (and only if) the buyer expressly asks us to do it; otherwise we don't add sulphites.

We don't have anything against the rational and sensible use of sulphur, and I'm not implying here that just because we don't use it, our wines are automatically 'better'. It's just that I don't see the point of using it if it's not needed.

On a few occasions whe have added sulphur to our wines, when we thought that it was absolutely necessary.

2. Clean, clean, clean

We are very, very scrupulous about cleanliness and hygiene and we spend lots of time cleaning tools, materials, machinery, etc. It’s a great bore, but we believe that it has to be done, if you don’t want to use chemicals.

3. Our wine making process

Our winemaking technique is so simple and straight-forward that it almost seems pointless to write about it!

White wines:

We take our quality white grapes to our clean winery and we crush the grapes using a clean manual crusher. We then pour the crushed grapes (pulp, pips, skins and stems) into a clean manual cage press using clean buckets. We press the grapes and we pour the must from the press into a clean stainless steel fermentation tank, again using buckets. When fermantation is finished (after about 2 or 3 weeks) we rack the wine off into another clean stainless steel tank. And that's it!

We don't buy in cultured industrial yeast. We just use the natural yeast(s) that are present in the vineyard and in the winery.

Red wines:

We take our quality red grapes into our clean winery and we crush the grapes using a clean manual destemmer-crusher. We then pour the crushed grapes (pulp, pips, skins and sometimes with stems and sometimes without the stems) into a clean stainless steel fermentation tank, using clean buckets. We let the wine ferment on the skins for a certain number of days, and punch the cap down manually a certain number of times a day. Then we press the wine off the skins using a clean manual cage press. We then pour the wine into a clean stainless steel tank, again using buckets. We rack the wine off once into another stainless steel tank. And that's it.

As in the case of our white wines, we don't buy in cultured industrial yeast. We just use the natural yeast(s) that are present in the vineyard and in the winery.

(Last year we also used an electric motor powered crusher, an electric pump, and a pneumatic press for a larger lot of Tempranillo (about 3000 kg). We configured the settings on the press to press as slowly and gently as possible so as to avoid all risk of crushing the pips, which are bitter and horrible!)
 
Crianzas:
 
Using our young red wines, we fill clean oak barrels and leave them alone for a certain number months, depending on the characteristics of the wine and the age of the barrel.