Running Around, 9th May 2015

Running Around, 9th May 2015

This is the second of three related posts that I’m uploading. The first went up yesterday and the third will be up tomorrow.

So, on the Saturday 9th May, I had another early start.

I picked up Carlos Scholderle (#winelover ambassador to Spain) at 9:00 in Madrid and we headed straight for El Escorial, to Restaurante Montia. I met Carlos back in March in Zaragoza, when I was at a Slow Food event, pouring my Slow Wines.

The reason for going to Montía was

a) to drop off some Garnacha, Sauvignon Blanc and Malvar, and

b) to taste all my other wines with chef Dani with a view to future orders.

This was very happily convenient, as I just took along all the opened bottled that I had tasted the night before in the bodega with Ariana Rolich (see this post). Here’s the line-up:

Some of my white wines

This restaurant is one of the few places in Spain where I distribute my wines, along with Enoteca Barolo, and Le Petit Bistrot (now called Solodeuva) in Madrid, and Monvinic in Barcelona. I would really like to expand to more places, but again, I have so little time available for the sales and distribution task! It’s a full-time job really, so what can I do?

By happy chance we bumped into producer Charlotte Allan (Bodega Almaroja), from Arribes de Duero, who was also doing a tasting at Montia. She makes a really nice white wine called Pirita which I like a lot, from a field blend of lots of strange local varieties that I can’t remember the names of right now. After the tasting we went to a bar next door for some beers – to recalibrate our palates after all that wine! :)

Next stop - my bodega in El Tiemblo, but as we were running late and it was way past lunchtime, we went for lunch! After lunch we went straight to the vineyards, as that was the reason Carlos had come, ie to take photos and ask me questions for a publication he's working on.

The high altitude Garnacha vineyard in El Tiemblo:

Lying on my back looking downhill

Standing up looking downhill

The low altitude Garnacha vineyard in El Tiemblo:

Carlos taking photos

Does the neighbour use herbicide in his vineyard?

Close-up of herbicide use and non-herbicide use

Nice olive tree in the vineyard

Then, back to Madrid for an early night. Because the next day would be tough – see next post tomorrow (the third of three).

So ended another interesting and productive day. If only they were all like that :)

Pottering Around, 8th May 2015

This is the first of three related posts that I’m going to upload today, tomorrow and the next day.

I know it’s a bit late to be publishing posts that refer to events so long ago in the distant past (3 weeks ago! Gasp! Horror!), but unfortunately I’ve been really busy lately. Or fortunately! Depending on which way you look at it!

I think I may start to do some quick-n-dirty posts from now on, with nice photos, and some longer more thought-out posts interspersed every now and then. Otherwise it just takes me too long.

Pottering Around, 8th May 2015

Anyway. On this day, I was up bright and early and I went straight to the bodega; in the morning I sort of pottered around doing bits and pieces and tying up loose ends, as it were (bottling up samples, preparing some small orders for in Madrid, and tidying up a bit outside in the patio.

The patio is still looking like a mess! I’ve been trying to find the time to beautify it, but alas... progress is grindingly slow.

Here’s a few pics of the future arbour pergola chill-out area:

And here’s a few pics of the vegetable garden that I’m sharing with Daniel Ramos in the patio of our winery. Tomatoes, onions, peppers, courgettes, aubergines, lettuce, mostly.

And best of all, some proper wide-leaf Italian-style basil! With which to make jars of pesto sauce for the coming winter :)

Basil on the left, tatties on the right

The bodega itself is a bit of a mess too, and one of my main goals for this summer is clean everything thoroughly, including floors and walls, all tanks, vats, containers (steel, wood, clay, plastic), equipment (presses, crushers) and all other bits and pieces of stuff that I use.

After lunch, and very conveniently (for I had arranged it to be so!), I took delivery of an old barrica (600 litres, not the usual 225 litres) which I managed to find second hand and quite cheap too. It's been used for three wines so it shouldn't give too much oakiness to the wine any more. And being 600 litres, the ratios of volume to surface area are different from usual, which results in even less oakiness being transmitted. I'll probably use it for a Garnacha from El Tiemblo this year.

Here it is:

600 liter barrel, 2nd hand, from a winery in La Rioja

Then in the evening I met with Ariana Rolich, the store manager of CSW, who had come to see my vineyards and to taste my wines. So we did! After visiting a few of my vineyards near El Tiemblo, we tasted everything I had! Everything was showing well that evening/night. It must have been fruit day, with the moon and planets all lined up favourably! Even that horrible disgusting Chelva Early 2013 which I hate, was tasting not so bad to me. This is a wine that I was about to throw out because I thought that there was something wrong with it, but many people have assured me that it's perfectly fine! It's just that it has some aroma/taste that I don't personally like! As they say, there's no accounting for taste!

And here's the whites that we tasted through:

So ended an interesting and productive day. If only they were all like that J

Natural Wine fair in Madrid (and other ramblings)

Yes, incredible but true!  There's going to be a mini-natural wine fair held in Madrid this coming Sunday 10th May 2015. I say 'incredible' because it's been many years, if not decades, that natural wines have been produced, sold and drunk around the world, but the phenomenon seems to have passed Spain by. But mustn't complain! It's going to be a great event, and great fun shall be had by all :)

Save the date and the place, which is very conveniently very central and right next to Atocha train station:

Here's the list of the producers:

– Alexandre Coulange – Domaine Thuronis – Languedoc
– Jacques Broustet – Chateau Lamery – Burdeos
– Nacho González – La Perdida – Valdeorras
– Bárbara Magugliani y Joan Carles Torres – Can Torres – Ampurdán
– Manel Rodríguez – Wiss – Montsant
– Marcel Carrera y Ramón Viña – Vinya Ferrer – Terra Alta
– Miguel J. Márquez – Dagón – Valencia
– Rafa López – Sexto Elemento – Valencia
– Fabio Bartolomei – Ambiz – Madrid
– Julián Ruiz – Esencia Rural – Toledo
– Samuel Cano – Patio – Cuenca
– Juan Pascual López – Viña Enebro – Murcia
– Jose Miguel Márquez – Marenas – Montilla
– Ramón Saavedra – Cauzón – Granada
– Torcuato Huertas – Purulio – Granada
– Manuel y Lorenzo Valenzuela – Barranco Oscuro – Granada

And you'll be able to taste the wines of:

– Domaine Meyer – Alsacia
– Patrick Bouju – Auvernia
– Costadilá – Veneto
– Frank Cornelissen – Sicilia

Only €5 to get in, and you get to keep the glass! A bargain at twice the price :)

Other Ramblings

Well, I've been incredibly busy lately and amongst other things I managed to plant about 200 new Tempranillo vines in the Carabaña vineyard in the empty spaces where the vines were missing for some reason or other.

Here's a panoramic view of the vineyard from a few days ago. Note the grass just starting to grow, and the tubes protecting the newly planted vines:

Panoramic view of Carabaña vineyard

 And here's a view from the top! See the cane for the young vine to grasp onto, and you can just see the tiny vine at the bottom:

Bird's eye view!

I also managed to hoe up around about 30 vines or so, before my back said 'enough'!

Hi hoe, hi hoe, it's off to work I go!

Meanwhile, back at the bodega, I finally got round to bringing a barrica of Tempranillo 2010 from the previous bodega I was working out of, in Morata de Tajuña, two years ago(!) to my current bodega in El Tiemblo.

Due to the fact that a full barrica weighs about 275 kg, and in a not very accessible position, what I had to do was: pump the wine out of the barrica into a steel tank in the back of a van, load the empty barrica, drive to El Tiemblo, and then pump the wine back into the unloaded and palletized barrica:

Pumping Tempranillo back into its barrica

I also finally got round to tidying up the patio of the bodega a little bit. Here you can see the space next to the wall that used to be covered with brambles, which I had left alone on purpose last year, in the hope of harvesting some brambles! But there were hardly any to be had, so I uprooted the lot. Pending for May is the planting of some roses or other climbing plants that will help prettify that enormous blank wall!

Here below you can just make out the tiny plants of lettuce, tomato, onions, etc:

 And the latest addition to the garden is some basil. The large-leaved Italian variety. I actually have lots more plants to plant, in fact I intend to cover that whole row, in order to make jars and jars of pesto :)

The main thing that I managed to do though was to bottle up all my 2014 vintage wines (Airén, Doré, Albillo, Sauvignon Blanc, Garnacha, Tempranillo), and free up all my fermentation vessels, and so I can relax over the summer knowing that all I need to do is wash them before use!

Here's where I store all my wines these days - in niches under the concrete fermentation tanks:

The Albillo niche

And lastly, yet another pending item on my "to do" list - this is the future lovely pergola, that will be covered in vines and hanging fruit, providing a shady decadent luxurious space for slothing around in easy-chairs and/or hammocks while sipping wine and nibbling on aperitivos! Alas, it won't be ready for at least another year:

The future decadent wine-tasting area

And really lastly, I was in a place in Madrid the other day where they had an interesting selection of extraterrestrial wines:

"Importados de otros mundos" = "Imported from other worlds"

Natural Wine Movement Entering Phase 2

I had a nice "Aha" moment a few days ago when I read Alice Feiring's article in Punch Magazine (here), in which she casually mentions that the Natural Wine Movement has moved on into "Phase 2"!  And then proceeds to discuss a whole batch of "Phase 2" concepts!

On the one hand I felt a sort of relief and I uttered a silent "At last! About time too!", because it was starting to get really tiresome reading the same old unfounded criticisms, attempted humour, and fantasy misconceptions coming from wine-writers and bloggers who either do it on purpose or who don't bother to inform themselves or do any due diligence on the realities of natural wine. Over the last year or so I've managed to restrain myself from actually replying to these posts in writing, but I haven't been able to stop myself from thinking up replies in my mind, which I find really annoying because I could be puting all that brain power to better use! Ha!

And on the other hand I thought "What? Phase 2 has started without me!!!? And here's me still miserably thrashing around with outdated and demodé Phase 1 stuff!!  This cannot be!"

So how to drag myself into Phase 2? I think I will actually have to write down all these mental replies to Phase 1 concepts that have been in my head recently. But not publically. I won't bore the people who read my blog with that sort of thing (again!). I will just pour it all forth onto paper in private, and it will be a sort of catharsis, a cleasing, an expurging from my mind of useless concepts, that have become boring, and that have served their purpose. I hope.

For me, these Phase 1 concepts include things like:

1. The semantic meaning of the word "natural" (Actually I dealt with that particular issue to my entire satisfaction here)

2. The existence or not of a "Natural Wine Movement", which has "champions", "dogmas", evil marketing ploys, etc  (I can sense a Hosemaster-style parody deep within me - if only I had the writing skills to materialize it!)

3. Blanket statements (humorous or not) about natural wines in general, ie "The champions of the natural wine movement believe that...."; "natural wines taste of ....."   Ach, these are just so stupid and annoying

4. Assorted nonsense, ie "It is essential to use SO2, otherwise....",  consipracy theories, ie "marketing to hoodwink the unsuspecting public", fantasy genre creative writing, eg "I raised my eyes heavenwards as yet another putrid brew was proffered to me by a bearded, tree-hugging ...", etc

Yes, enough of all that. Even though I find some of it interesting in its own right (like the semantics), I really ought to focus my mental energy on serious and interesting Phase 2 issues, and just totally forget about the denigrators.

And what are these Phase 2 issues anyway?  Well, Alice Feiring covers a good number of them in her Punch article, but basically, I believe that they all boil down to the question of whether a substance or a technique helps the wine express its terroir or not.

By focusing ALL my grape-growing and wine-making decisions through that lens (ie, whether it helps express the terroir better or not), all that Phase 1 nonsense above will automatically disappear from the agenda.

Example 1: Should I spray herbicides in my vineyard(s) to kill off the weeds or not?

Phase 1 answer: Herbicides are bad for the environment, kill micro-life, insects, pollute the ground-water, pose risk to larger animals and human vineyard workers and possibly neighbours and end consumers of the wine. Therefore no herbicides, irrespective of whether the wine will express the terroir better or not. Decision taken from a (higher) moral, philosophical (dogmatic) level, not from a (lower) mere wine-making terroir-driven level.

Phase 2 answer: By killing off the weeds, and microbes and insects, etc I am reducing biodiversity and placing the vines at risk of attack by disease, insects, etc because I have killed off the preditors, and I will be obliged to use more chemicals to combat this possible attack, which will affect the quality and taste of the grapes. Also the herbicides have empoverished the nutrient quality and quantity of the soil, and it may be necessary to use additional chemical fertilizers. The vines will be unbalanced, will lack certain elements and have an overabundance of others, and will not be able to produce balanced complex healthy must. Therefore, no herbicides, and seek other solutions. Decision based on soil-vine-grape-must-wine quality, which happily coincides with the environmental aspect of the question.

Example 2: Should I add any SO2 to my wines?

Phase 1 answer (by a sans-soufriste): No, never. I believe that SO2 is a barrier between the expression of the terroir and the taster. Any level of SO2 means that the terroir has not been expressed as well as it could have been expressed.

Phase 1 answer (by me): By default, No. If my grapes are healthy and my equipment is clean, there is no reason for me to use any SO2. But if I need to use some small amount for whatever reason then I will.

Phase 2 answer: hmmm, this one is more tricky! Lets see. If I'm making a young wine to be drunk within the year, then my Phase 1 answer above is valid. ie, assuming that my grapes are healthy and my equipment is clean, there is virtually no risk of the wine spoiling. It will certainly evolve, but not spoil. So my choice is one of taste: do I want to 'stabilize' my wine, in terms of colour and possible aromas and taste? or do I want to let it evolve naturally, ie becoming darker, losing its fruitiness, becoming more sherry-like? Which is the most faithful expression of the terroir?  Is the expression of the terroir better in say January when the aromas and tastes are fruity and intense? or the year after, when there is less fruit, the wine is more Sherry-like, and has other different non-fruit complexities?  If I add SO2, the wine will never evolve (or will it evolve much more slowly?)

But what if I want to make a 'crianza' or vin-de-guarde type wine which will have a long elevage both in barrel/amphora and in the bottle? Well, I have to plead ignorance here. The oldest wine I have is a Tempranillo 2010, which was bottled in 2011, and was made without any SO2, and it's still showing perfectly well! I don't know. I will have to think, and read, and ask about this.

Example 3: What containers should I use? Stainless steel, clay amphorae, concrete, plastic, wood?

Phase 1 answer: is based on the pros and cons of the characteristics of each material. Eg, stainless steel is easy to clean, and poses a very low risk of contamination, but it's expensive, completely non-porous to the atmosphere, and there are possible electro-magnetic issues.

Phase 2 answer: hmmmm, tricky again!  In the Sierra de Gredos or in the SE of Madrid I don't have hundreds of years of experience and opinions and consensus of what the terroir ought to be like, to draw on, like in say in Burgundy or Chianti. How do I even know what to aim for? La Mancha has historically only ever produced vast quantities of table wines (with a few isolated exceptions) and Sierra de Gredos is in a similar situation, ie no critical mass of producers/tasters/commentators/consumers of quality wines. Any suggestions welcome!

Cheers! Give me more juice!

Achieving Things While Pottering About the Bodega and Vineyard

It's amazing. Back in January I started writing down a list of all the things I manage to achieve over time. Before that I just had my usual "to do" lists, which never seemed to get any shorter - the items changed but they stayed the same length, which was kind of depressing as it seemed that I wasn't getting anywhere or achieving anything.

But now I feel great! I can look at my "Achieved in March" list, for example, and I can remember (and feel great about) all those things which I did, but which I would have forgotten about! Easy!

I've even broken the list down into categories, because otherwise I get all confused and overwhelmed! It just goes to show that there really is a lot more to winemaking than just pottering around in the bodega and in the vineyards!

- Bodega
- Vineyards
- Orders delivered
- Samples sent
- Visits attended to
- Tastings gone to
- Paperwork done
- Contacts made
- Other

Well, I won't bore you all any more with this nonsense!  Instead here are some nice photos for you to enjoy, one photo for each of the above categories:

Bodega:

Hundreds of liters of wines bottles up and stored

Vineyards:

Four vineyards pruned: Carabaña, Villarejo, and two in El Tiemblo

Orders delivered:

Un petit pallet pour Paris

Samples sent:

Some samples prepared and ready to be sent

Visits attended to:

Attending to a visitor

Tastings gone to:

Explaining something at Enoteca Barolo

Paperwork:

Bodega books that have to be filled in with numbers

Contacts made:

I have a list of about 25 contacts, just from the Vitis Vinifera tasting in Barcelona the other week (from biz cards and memory jogging) that I ought to follow up. It's on my to-do list, but quite far down on the scale of priorities!

Other:
- I managed to get myself interviewed on Radio Aragon; blah-blah-blah natural wines blah-blah-blah
- I'm working on new labels (again) for next year
- I wrote three posts in March for this blog
- ... and some more trivial stuff.

Any questions, just post it here below, and I'll answer you asap.

Two Visitors to my Vineyards and Winery

Like I'm sure I've mentioned before, it's not all hard work in the vineyards and winery - sometimes I get a 'day off' when someone comes to visit, even though it's still considered to be 'work'. A bit like when I travel to a wine fair :)

The first visit was about two weeks ago, by Clara Isamat, of Vinos Compartidos, based in Barcelona. She's producing a video documentary on natural wine, with a chapter or a section for each producer that she's selected. She working with a production company called Entropia Films.

Here's me and Clara, in the patio behind the bodega, on the old weighing station

So basically I spent all afternoon/evening with her and her film crew, blah-blah-blah, answering her questions, and holding forth on all sorts of issues related to natural wines, skin-contact whites, conventional wines, fine wines, the environment, globalization of wines, ingredient labelling, quality, etc, etc.

Checking the quality of the Sauvignon Blanc Amphora

Bottling up, the slow way

Fishing out a glass of Suav blanc

 Here's Victoria and Martí of Entropia Films doing a bit of post-production on the fly

Next day, more of the same, but in the vineyards. Nice and early so they could "catch the light" which is more beautiful just after sunrise!

Here we are in the car on the way to the vineyard. Can you believe that I'd never seen a selfie-stick before? Amazing! This one had a blue-tooth connection to a clicker!

A selfie-stick

I think it's that way

Check out that vine!

Pruning or posing?

Clara brought me a present, a new wine toy called "Kit de Cata" or "Tasting Kit", which consists of special wine socks that you can slip over a bottle of wine when you're playing a blind tastings! Otherwise, you have to wrap the bottle up in silver foil, or use a paper bag, or other inelegant solution! :)   It's great fun, and impossibly difficult to guess the wine (unless you're a professional taster, who tastes many different wines every day). You can get these lovely socks here: adivinosvino.com

Blind tasting wine socks by adivinosvinos

But I have to say that I've had at least two minor blind tasting triumphs over the last few years: one was when I gate-crashed into a monthly tasting held by a club in a village near Madrid that I happened to be passing through one evening; and I knew they were there so I thought, why not?  Well, the first wine was ridiculously obvious to me, because as luck would have it I'd recently tasted lots of them at a wine fair in London!  It was a Georgian wine and when I declared my guess everyone looked at me like I was mad. But I was right! :)

But anyway, I'm getting distracted! The next visit was by Mario Siragusa, a grapegrower and winemaker from Piemonte, Italy. I'd met hime in Turin last year at Banco, a natural wine bar and bistrot in the old part of Turin, during the Slow Food event back in October last year.

This visit was just for pleasure and no business, but we were blah-blah-blah all day anyway, again about natural wines, additives, ingredient labelling, etc, etc. Mario is a collector/drinker of old vintage wines, and he brought me this as a present:

Vintage Barbaresco 1971

He has more of the same at home and he says that it will be perfectly drinkable. Probably. They say you never can tell with such old wine. I'm starting to take an interest in old vintages, both for the taste and for the collection thing. If only I had more time! :)

Here we are in the Garnacha vineyard in El Tiemblo, Sierra de Gredos:

Fabius et Marius in vinea stant

 And here I am, extracting some Albillo 2014 to taste:

Extracting a sample of Albillo 2104

I really must come up with some other method of taking samples!

Actually, there was a third recent visit - by by Nacho Bueno, but he has his own blog (here) so he can write about it himself! :)

Pruning Update – March 2015

Like I mentioned in a previous post (here), I seem to be on schedule this year as far as the pruning is concerned.

Below are the vineyards that I attend to myself, but apart from the grapes from these vineyards, I also buy in grapes from local grapegrowers (if they agree to abide by certain conditions).

Carabaña Vineyard (Field blend of Airén and Tempranillo; 1 hectare total)

This vineyard is all pruned already:

Airén and Tempranillo vines all prunes in Carabaña

All I have to do now is pile up those canes into bigger piles so that the ‘tractorista’ can come and pulverize them while at the same time cutting back the high grass and flowers and plants and thistles. This will happen in April/May so that he only needs to come once, because by that time of year the growing season for grass and flowers is over, so they won’t grow back.

Most grapegrowers either burn the canes or ‘dispose’ of them by taking them to the municipal dump. But I believe that it is much better to return the vineyard material to the soil.

Another pending item in this vineyard is some manure. I’ve been trying to contact an organic sheep and goat farm up in the mountains near Madrid, to arrange for picking up about 10 t of manure, ... but so far to no avail. Here’s some pics of the last time I did it:

insert photo

And yet another pending item here in Carabaña, is to replant some new vines in the spaces where the original vines have died. There are about 200 such spaces. I’ve already bought 200 pre-grafted baby vines, and they are ready for planting, in April. They are Tempranillo grafted onto American rootstock “Paulsen 1103”. I really should have taken my own cuttings from the vines in the vineyard and grafted them myself (selection massale), but I don’t have the skill. I would need to do a course or work with an experienced grape-grower.

I actually already attempted to plant new vines back in May 2013 (see this post). All went fine but most of the new baby vines died over the summer due to lack of watering! Live and learn. I will have to make sure I water them a few times over the summer this time.

insert photo

Villarejo. Malvar (1 ha)

This vineyard is all pruned too. Here I also have to make big piles of canes for the tractorista.
In this vineyard I like to do a secondary pruning during the summer months, to ensure that no canes, leaves or clusters are in contact with the ground, and that there is a gap at ground level so that the wind and air can circulate freely. Otherwise there is a risk of creating a humid, jungle-like environment under each vine, with the possibility of mildew and oidium.

Malvar vines in Villarejo all pruned 

El Tiemblo I. (Sierra de Gredos). Garnacha – low altitude (0.25 ha)

I am about ¼ done. I hope to finish pruning before the end of March – one more day’s work should do it.
Here I am going to do a rather strange experiment: around this olive tree (see pic below) there are about 7 vines that could climb up it, and I am going to allow them to do so, instead of pruning them normally. I’ve been reading some ancient Roman texts on viticulture recently (Pliny, Columella and others) and I was fascinated to learn that the ancient Romans had 3 systems of grape-growing: 2 just like our modern methods today, ie low bush vines (fr: en gobelet, or sp: en vaso) and trellised along wooden structures or fences (similar to our modern wires); but they also had a third system – training vines up trees!

Garnacha vines in El Tiemblo, about 1/4 prunes

So hopefully I shall be able to harvest (somehow) about 50 kg of tree-borne grapes with which to make some ‘Roman’ wine!  I already have an amphora to make this wine in. But first I have to line it with beeswax. There is a good video on YouTube that I am going to follow, and then I will make my own video when I (attempt to) line my amphora.

El Tiemblo II. (Sierra de Gredos). Garnacha - high altitude (1 ha)

At the time of writing I haven’t started pruning this vineyard. I am leaving this one to the last because it is quite high in the mountains, and there is a slight risk of late frost. So the later I prune, the later it will sprout, which will reduce the risk a bit.

The other day when I was checking the vineyard, I came across two goats!  This is OK at this time of year, because there is nothing to eat; but it would be bad news if the goats could get in after the vines have sprouted, as they could eat those lovely tender and tasty vine shoots!  I will have to check and mend the fence!

Goats in the Garnacha vineyard,
El Tiemblo (Sierra de Gredos), as yet unpruned