Winding down for the summer

Well, its late mid-June-ish, and all is well. More or less. The vineyards are beautiful (touch wood); the bodega is semi-prepared for the coming harvest; (touch wood); and the marketing and sales is going really well too (touch wood!).

Vineyards

I’m really happy with my vineyards. I've let all the grasses, flowers, thistles, etc grow all year, and now all I'm doing is cutting them all back around the vines, so that they will be easier to access during the harvest. The reason I do this, instead of ploughing, is of course to create a living soil and a living ecosystem, full of micro-life (bacteria and other invisible organisms) and visible life itself (insects and other small animals).

Flowery grassy vineyard, Garnacha, El Tiemblo, Sierra de Gredos

If the soil is rich and complex and alive, then the vines can take all the nutrients they from it. No more and no less, but just exactly what they need. The way I create this rich and complex and living soil is just to let everything grow, reproduce, die and decompose; and help the process along a little by cutting the grass and plants back with my sickle. I also keep the canes from the pruning and chop them up into tiny pieces.

At this time of year, dry grass and thistles!

Every few years I add some manure, which I bury near the vines. It's better to bury it because if you leave it on the surface all its nutrients are used by the surface grasses and it doesn't get down to where the vine's roots are.

By letting all the different species of grasses and plants grow, you create diverse and interesting habitats for many different species of insects; whereas if you plough up and keep the vineyard naked, then only one or two species can live there – precisely the ones that eat vine leaves and grapes! Obviously, because there's nothing else left to eat! So now you have to use chemicals to kill them because otherwise they'll destroy your vines and grapes!

This natural system, IMO, produces grapes of a much higher quality than industrially-chemically farmed grapes. The must of naturally farmed grapes is much more complex and interesting and contains a much wider range of components and micro-components; the bunches of industrially-chemically farmed grapes may be bigger and more impressive looking, but the must is diluted, unbalanced and poorer in diversity of flavours and aromas.

more grass

Each to their own. To produce millions of liters of 'affordable' supermarket wine at nice price points, it may well be necessary to pollute the environment and use lots of dodgy chemicals, but to produce small amounts of quality, terroir-expressing, comment-worthy fine wines, it's essential to practice sustainable, environmentally respectful and safe agriculture. IMO.

Next year I'm going to give my vines a fortifying booster, in the form of a horsetail infusion (Latin: Equisetum; Spanish: Cola de Caballo). It's been a few years since I last did this.
The other day I watered the 200 new Tempranillo vines that I planted back in April.

Bodega

The bodega is more or less under control too; it's just that there are lots and lots of minor loose ends to be tied up, but for which I never find the time.

For example:
- The patio outside
- Shopping for ‘stuff’: Hermetic lids, Boxes for harvesting, Crown cap machine, small bits n bobs
- Cleaning everything: steel tanks, tinajas, presses, crushers, floors, etc
- Bottling up some barricas
- Stick insulating panels back on doors
- Line a new tinaja with beeswax

Not much shade here - maybe next year!

I have to do all the above and more, but I have no time to do it all! So I have to prioritize and decide which tasks are more important, and which can be left till ‘later’. The main things are in fact done, ie most of the wines are sold, most of the bodega and equipment is clean and ready for the final pre-harvest thorough cleaning. I will just have to be philosophical and come to terms with the fact that there’s no way I can do everything and have everything ‘just so’ to my entire satisfaction. :)

Marketing and Sales (the unglamourous part)

No real complaints in this department either. One of my goals last year was to diversify my exports, instead of selling exclusively to JPS in the USA, and I’ve managed to achieve that. I now also export to Denmark, Belgium, France and the UK (see this page for details).

a nice big pallet of wine, almost ready to go

I also decided to try to sell in Spain too, but that is proving more difficult. I do sell regularly to three places in Madrid (Enoteca Barolo, SoloDeUva and Montia) and also sporadically to another few places. But I see two problems here: firstly there is a lot less demand for natural wines in Spain, it’s still very much a novelty, like it was back in the 80’s or 90’s in other parts of the world. And I have no desire to ‘evangelize’ or try to persuade to drink natural wines. My approach is “if anyone wants to buy my wines they are more than welcome to do so, but I’m not going to argue or justify.” That’s a completely different thing from providing information or answering questions, of course! Which I do, a lot!

The other difficulty with selling wines in Spain is that I don’t have the time, resources or skills required to be a distributor! I can only just manage those three places I mentioned above, and even then it takes me weeks to respond to orders! What I really need, I suspect, are some proper distributors! J

Winding Down

So, time to wind down and try to relax. The first thing I have to look forward to this summer is the H2O Natural Wine Festival, held in the village of Pinel de Brai (Tarragona).

Next up will be the Albillo harvest, at the beginning of August. (Albillo Real is a very early ripening variety!) Then there will be a respite of a few weeks, until the regular varieties become ready for harvesting all through September and October.

Before, during and after those two events I hope to hang out in Barga (Tuscany) my family’s home town, and apart from doing the usual odd-jobs about the house and garden, I hope to expand my knowledge of Italian wines at the local enoteca – Colordivino, set right in the centre of the old part of town :)

Pruning our Sustainable Vineyard

Last Saturday 6th Feb we were pruning again, this time just three of us (no students!) so we managed to do quite a lot (about 200 vines) relatively speaking, but unfortunately we took far too long over lunch, otherwise we could have done maybe 300 vines!

Juan prunes a vine

The two photos below show the same vine, before and after pruning

                      Before                                                After

The next two photos below show the same vine before and after sawing off a dead ‘arm’

                       Before                                                      After


Here we can see a ladybird (US: ladybug), a bit out of focus (sorry, will do better next time). Ladybirds are our friends! They are super-predators and eat all sorts of nasty aphids and bugs that attack the vines/grapes. This is just a small part of the vastly complex biodiversity that we work to create in the vineyard, as opposed to using industrial agro-chemicals that poison the environment and affect peoples’ health.

"I say ladybird, you say ladybug"

More biodiversity! This is a holm oak sapling (one of five) which has sprouted right next to a vine. We are going to transplant them to the edge of the vineyard next day we go.

Holm oak sapling 1 of 5

Below left is a vine that has gone wild, ie the grape variety (either Tempranillo or Airén) that was grafted onto the rootstock either didn’t take or died off at some point. There are about 100 of these wild vines in the vineyard, and we are planning on regrafting them this Spring with a different variety. Any suggestion as to which variety we should select?

                   Wild                                                  Tamed

Above right  is what was left when I’d finished with it! The reason we prune these vines back is not for any ‘production’ reason (the bunches are tiny and the berries are tiny too) – we only do it because they grow enormously long and smother the neighbouring vines (which are about 3 m away!).

Recycling and sustainability

Here's a summary of what and how we're recycling.

Recycling of bottles:

Right from the start of this organic wine project (5 years ago), we have made an effort to reuse our bottles. Apart from the obvious envirnomental reasons for recycling, there is also an economic benefit - both for us (the producers) and for you (the consumers). This is because we pass on the cost savings to the end customer by keeping our prices lower than if we had to buy all our bottles new.

Each new bottle costs us around €0,20 if we were to buy a whole pallet of 1561 bottles, and it would cost a lot more if we were to buy smaller quantities. We estimate that our consumers return about 50% of the bottles over the course of the year, which we then wash and reuse.

It's easy to return your bottles to us (in theory!). Just leave your empties at your pick-up point on delivery day (or a few days before if possible) and we'll take them away. You can also take them to the winery of course whenever you pop in for a visit.
We can also use wine bottles that are not ours, but in this case, we'd really appreciate it if you soaked the labels off first.

Cardboard boxes:
We've never actually bought any 6- or-12 bottle boxes, ever! We have this arrangement with a wine-bar whereby they keep their empty boxes and we pick them up every week or so. A classic win-win situation, as we get free boxes and they get free trash removal!

Corks:


Used corks can't be used to reseal a bottle of wine, but you can return them to us if you want. We've accumulated several thousand so far and we're saving them up make 1) anti-fly curtains for the doors and windows of the winery and perhaps 2) cover a wall of the winery like this shop has done: [link]

Reuse of stems, skins and pips:
We have two uses for these materials. Usually we take it all back to the vineyard where it decomposes/composts and so we improve the quality of the soil by adding organic matter. Some years we make grappa/orujo using a still.

((Vinos Ambiz - sustainable vineyard, natural, genuine, authentic, good quality wine expressing the terroir, recycling as much as possible, improving the fertility of the land, doing our bit for the environment and people's health))

The Vineyard in Carabaña

This photo was taken in January 2008, just before we started pruning. See the long unpruned shoots. The vines are both white Airén and red Tempranillo all mixed up together in the same vineyard. Field planted to barley in the background.