Roughly ten years ago we planted a new vineyard around the bodega. Any new vineyard yields virtually no usable fruit for the first few years, and it takes much longer than that to produce high quality grapes, so the return on investment can be quite protracted. Even at ten years old this ‘finca’ is still very young – the fruit that it produces now is not bad, but the very good news is that it is going to get much better in the years to come. Of course it goes without saying that all the vines that we plant, whether it be in new vineyards, or to replace old or damaged vines, are the very best clones of the albariño grape variety that we can lay our hands on.

 Although today’s photo is just another boring shot of the new bodega vineyard, I wanted to put it in as a tribute to David, Juan and Freddie, our young  and enthusiastic team who work very hard, often in inclement weather, to keep all our vineyards in tip-top condition. Our fincas are quite deliberately manicured like gardens in order to fully support our philosophy that ‘quality begins in the vineyard’.

The expression that I use to describe the state of this finca is ‘Ship-shape and Bristol fashion’ which is an old English nautical term, or to be more accurate, two separate terms from the 17th and 18th centuries which over the years have become married together. The city of Bristol is a port in the south west of England. Situated inland on the River Severn it experiences the second highest rise and fall of tides of anywhere in the world (I believe that this can be up to 40ft or 12/13metres). The old wooden Royal Navy ships that used the port had to be extremely strong as at low tide they would be left beached, resting on their keels, and therefore tilting over. Before they could use the port they had to ensure that everything was lashed down and secured, so that when it tilted its contents would not simply be strewn across the ship. 

The term ‘ship-shape’ refers to neat order; ‘Bristol fashion’ refers to the critical specifications that ships had to meet before entering Bristol. The phrase in its entirety therefore comes to mean ‘neat, tidy and well-ordered’. Some old phrases can be quite interesting, we often use them without really knowing their true origins…..

Roughly ten years ago we planted a new vineyard around the bodega. Any new vineyard yields virtually no usable fruit for the first few years, and it takes much longer than that to produce high quality grapes, so the return on investment can be quite protracted. Even at ten years old this ‘finca’ is still very young – the fruit that it produces now is not bad, but the very good news is that it is going to get much better in the years to come. Of course it goes without saying that all the vines that we plant, whether it be in new vineyards, or to replace old or damaged vines, are the very best clones of the albariño grape variety that we can lay our hands on.

 Although today’s photo is just another boring shot of the new bodega vineyard, I wanted to put it in as a tribute to David, Juan and Freddie, our young  and enthusiastic team who work very hard, often in inclement weather, to keep all our vineyards in tip-top condition. Our fincas are quite deliberately manicured like gardens in order to fully support our philosophy that ‘quality begins in the vineyard’.

The expression that I use to describe the state of this finca is ‘Ship-shape and Bristol fashion’ which is an old English nautical term, or to be more accurate, two separate terms from the 17th and 18th centuries which over the years have become married together. The city of Bristol is a port in the south west of England. Situated inland on the River Severn it experiences the second highest rise and fall of tides of anywhere in the world (I believe that this can be up to 40ft or 12/13metres). The old wooden Royal Navy ships that used the port had to be extremely strong as at low tide they would be left beached, resting on their keels, and therefore tilting over. Before they could use the port they had to ensure that everything was lashed down and secured, so that when it tilted its contents would not simply be strewn across the ship. 

The term ‘ship-shape’ refers to neat order; ‘Bristol fashion’ refers to the critical specifications that ships had to meet before entering Bristol. The phrase in its entirety therefore comes to mean ‘neat, tidy and well-ordered’. Some old phrases can be quite interesting, we often use them without really knowing their true origins…..