I can’t quite remember which American actor was recently ridiculed when he suggested that he was looking forward to seeing Manchester United and Milan in the World Cup, but perhaps he wasn’t quite as stupid as you may think……

No less than 7 of Spain’s starting 11 players in last night’s semi-final hailed from FC Barcelona – so you might almost be forgiven for suggesting that Sunday’s final will be between Holland and Barcelona!

Following the final whistle of the game Spain went completely wild – I have never seen so many Spanish flags….. ever. The sound of car horns and fireworks reverberated around our local town well into the early hours of the morning, so I can’t even begin to imagine what might happen if they actually win the final on Sunday. It will be madness.

To finish on a slightly sad note, please spare a thought for Germany’s psychic octopus Paul, who correctly predicted last night’s result. The bad news is that he was apparently served up on a plate after last night’s match – the good news is that he went down perfectly with the Albariño!

Back in November last year I wrote briefly about how tasting perceptions may or may not be altered by different factors – weather, barometric pressure, the cycles of the moon, etc., etc.

Perhaps back then I treated the subject with a bit of scepticism, or maybe it’s just that I’m a grumpy old man who always knows best (as Angela will readily attest to). So, in the spirit of open-mindedness I decided to put it to the test…..

Now, I must be one of Amazon’s best customers here in Galicia, so in my latest order of books and software I added the small pocket tasting guide based on Maria Thun’s biodynamic calendar, simply entitled “When wine tastes best”. I must confess that there were two things that struck me immediately – firstly, that the ‘book’ was much smaller than I imagined (when I opened the parcel I thought that they had forgotten to pack it), and secondly, how detailed it is. It does not simply give the days on which your wine might taste better, but then this is also broken down even further, indicating the actual hour!

As I write this entry Angela is travelling again, this time in Barcelona. I think that I will await her return so that we can taste together, and see if we can come to some sort of consensus over this alternative tasting theory.

This might be life changing!

Well, today is the 4th July when our American cousins celebrate the separation of the American colonies from Great Britain. The signing of the Declaration of Independence is often marked by parades, barbecues, carnivals, fairs, picnics, concerts, baseball games, family reunions, and of course, lots of fireworks.

Unlike Spain, the U.S. do not enjoy many local or national (federal) holidays, but they do at least take an additional day when the holiday falls on a weekend (in Spain the day is usually lost). In the UK many bank holidays are taken on Mondays. For example, the May Day bank holiday is rarely celebrated on May 1st, except in years when the date happens to fall on a Monday.

Whilst we are on the subject of holidays, perhaps this is a good time to mention that for the very first time in our history, the Bodega will close for a very short summer break of one week – from Monday 16th to Friday 20th August. Apart from not being here to answer the telephone, this should actually have very little effect on the service that we offer our customers. We pride ourselves in turning orders around very quickly, and so even if orders arrive during this closure period, we should be able to prepare them very quickly upon our return.

So once again, a very Happy Independence Day to all our American friends and customers!

In my previous post you can see a guy clambering over a hotel roof for the sake of his art, whereas my photographic effort today is much more modest, with feet very much on terra firma (or sand to be more precise).

Having said that, crawling across our local beach on my hands and knees at dawn this morning must have looked a bit odd to passers-by. Perhaps they thought I was a drunk, and that I had been hitting the Albariño bottle for breakfast!

Anyway, I do like to keep a current library of different bottle shots, and of course, our association with the sea makes such a setting an obvious choice for a picture. The useful thing is that the Spanish are not really what you would call ‘early morning people’ (especially after celebrating their World Cup success of the night before), and so the beach was very much deserted when the sun came up today. You can take my word for it!

Now, I consider myself to be a reasonably enthusiastic photographer, and as you have probably guessed, I also love messing about in Photoshop. Having said that, even I would draw the line at scaling a hotel roof for the sake of my art like the guy in this photo. I was pretty taken-a-back to watch him climbing like a cat across a steeply sloping tiled roof just for the sake of getting a better panorama – he must have been 30 or 40 metres above street level and appeared to be wearing just a pair of normal street shoes!

Quite how he got out onto the roof in the first place is another story, but let’s just hope that the picture he got was worth the effort.

I guess that you must be thinking that I have not posted for a few days because I’ve been glued to my TV screen watching the World Cup football. Well, that is only half true. In fact I have been in England for almost a week, where I noticed that the country appears to be consumed by World Cup fever – every other car has an England flag, and even some staff in banks and post offices are wearing England football shirts….. but then, football is not really the theme of today’s post.

Just before I left, I read an interesting article in the local press mentioning that the French have now started to plant Albariño in the Herault region, near Montpellier. It does not surprise me to learn that the Galicians were very quick to dismiss this latest development, in effect saying that they do not consider it to be a serious threat, and that the Albariño from our region will always be superior to anything that the French can produce. Quite a natural reaction I guess.

Far more worrying to me was the almost casual remark at the end of the article, which more or less said “Oh, and by the way, they are planting Albariño in New Zealand too”. New Zealand is the home of many a fantastic Riesling, and the Kiwis certainly know how to handle cool-climate white varietals down there. I expect that in the future we will face much stiffer competition from New Zealand than we will from the South of France – but then this is just my opinion.

Now here’s an interesting footnote to this story – if I take out my favourite shovel in Pontevedra, and start to dig straight down through the centre of the earth, I will eventually emerge near Greymouth on the south island of New Zealand – not too far from the heart of wine making country. Just for a bit of fun try visiting this website, and see where on the earth you would emerge. Happy digging!

Well, it’s that time of year again! Over the last few days my writing hand has been aching as I have been busy completing forms to submit our wines for the 2011 wine guides. Even is this electronic age many of these forms are still sent either by fax or by regular mail and so have to be filled out by hand – many of the same details, year-in, year-out.

Indeed the only thing that usually changes are the wine descriptions, and of course the wine samples themselves, but this year we at least have something new to say…… our ‘Sobre Lias’ labelled wines are introduced with the 2009 vintage.

The closing date to submit to many of the guides is the end of June 2010 (for publication in 2011), which means that with the additional ageing that we make ‘on the lees’, the wines are only just ready in time to be considered, and the bottles are sent very last minute.

Yesterday, I prepared no less than four sets of samples (and paperwork), but thankfully this annual chore is now pretty much behind me. As far as I am aware there is only one more publication that needs samples before the end of July – I will wait a little longer before I do this as our 2009 wines are still very young and ‘edgy’ at this stage in their development.

Ambush marketing? Flash mobs? What comes next?…… Dirty dancing??

One of the latest scandals to hit the current World Cup competition arrived in the shape of 36 young girls dressed in bright orange mini-dresses, mingling with Dutch supporters. Their dark secret was that they were actually ‘placed’ there as part of a marketing stunt and were advertising a beer, but unfortnately not the official beer of the tournament – hence the problem.

They were promoting that well known Dutch beer ‘Bavaria’, named after one of Holland’s lesser known ski resorts! (Like you, I would have assumed that this was a German brand). Strangely, from the pictures I have seen, their dresses carried no branding, so how they were actually identified perhaps only Sepp Blatter will be able to explain.

Anyway, having forked out millions of dollars, the marketing people at Budweiser were more than a little upset about this unauthorised advertising attempt, and consequently this group of rather attractive ‘supporters’ were ejected from the stadium.

Apparently this ‘ambush marketing’ as it is known, is being used with increasing frequency, whereby one company will gatecrash a large event in order to promote their product without the usual financial outlay. If only I had known this before I could have gatecrashed a couple of local fiestas myself, brandishing a bottle of Castro Martin Albariño!

It  also makes me wonder – didn’t the real ambush start when the this Dutch beer was named Bavaria?

The grass cutting season is upon us, or should I say the grass slashing season. It was only yesterday when I discovered that the piece of machinery that we use to ‘cut’ grass in the vineyards, technically, is known as a grass slasher. It’s fairly logical really….

The piece of kit (similar to the photo above) that we attach to the back of our tractors does not actually have blades, and therefore does not cut. In reality it uses some fairly heavy duty steel chains that rotate at high speed horizontal to the ground, like a giant strimmer that removes pretty much anything in its path. Of course this includes any small stones or rocks laying on the ground which are ejected like rifle bullets, so you really don’t want to be standing near this machine when it’s working!

Obviously grass ‘slashing’ is a time consuming chore, but for our vineyards we think that it is a much better option than herbicide.