There is, and has always been, a somewhat strange, romantic notion surrounding the food and wine industry – owning your own restaurant, or perhaps having a wine with your name on the label is actually a very fashionable idea, or so it would seem.

There are a growing number of Hollywood stars that are putting their names to a wine or vineyard – Francis Ford-Coppola, Dan Ackroyd and Antonio Banderas, to name but a few. Indeed, our very own Cliff Richard (an English pop star from the 60′s), has also put down roots in the Portuguese Algarve, if you’ll pardon the pun. His property, Adega do Cantor, also boasts an English wine maker, Max Birch.

Then only today I discover that the one and only Lady Gaga is thinking of branching out into wine production too (sorry, that pun was not really intended), surveying wine properties in Sonoma, California. In the very same article they mention that actress Drew Barrymore, and pop star Fergie have also purchased vineyards. Now I doubt very much if any one of these will be rolling their sleeves up to do the pruning, or drive the tractors, but they will no doubt, be looking forward to sampling the fruit of their labours. I should mention by the way, that Drew Barrymore’s wine is actually a Pinot Grigio from the Trentino region of Northern Italy, and is described as “fresh, dynamic and fun” reflecting her own style and personality!

If these wines are truly a reflection of the people who make them, then my own wine would have to be old, tired and grumpy!

Having been absent in New York for a few days I am now playing catch-up. As I have said many times before, there is still a lot of hard work to do following the actual picking before Angela and I can even think about putting our feet up for a while.

The cellar is a very cool place to be at the moment, and I mean that quite literally. With our temperature control system working over time it is actually quite a chilly place to work, and despite the sun outside, you will often find us walking around in jackets and fleeces.

Although we still firmly believe in true quality being derived from the vineyard, the wine making itself certainly has a big influence in the style of wine that we create. Our objective is to always to make a wine that is typical of our denomination, but at the same time giving the wine a structure that will stand the test of time. Now, I’m not saying for one moment that our albariño will keep for ten years in bottle, but we certainly don’t want to make something that will fall apart after six months either. This is all determined by our vinification,  that gives our different wines their distinctive Castro Martin character – known and loved by all who drink them! 

Angela would kill me if I started to give away her wine making secrets, but suffice to say that quality is not created by accident, but by people who are obsessed by what they do.

After the first day or so of this year’s harvest, we quickly discovered that there were more grapes than we anticipated. Indeed, it had already been mentioned in the local press that previous records were likely to be broken.

I did write very recently that in the case of kilos produced that biggest, quite simply, does not mean best. Obviously there are ways of controlling this in the vineyard – the system of pruning, green harvesting, selective picking etc. However, even by the time that fruit arrives at the cellar door there are still options available for improving quality, one of which is in the pressing.

Our two pneumatic presses are electronically controlled, which means that we are able to adjust any single action of the pressing cycle that we require. The two most basic aspects of this are time and pressure.

In an ideal world we would make wine using only the first ‘free run’ juice (pretty much the juice that escapes when the grapes are pressed under their own weight before any pressure is applied), but unfortunately that would not be economically viable.

So in the end, when the yields are a little high, one option is to reduce the time of the pressing cycle, and more significantly, the pressure used to crush the fruit. In reality we never use the maximum pressure anyway, as this will simply extract the phenolic compounds from the grape seeds and stalks that cause bitterness and astringency in wine. In this way we extract better quality juice which obviously helps to improve the finished product.