It seems that we now have our first cases of coronavirus within a few km of our bodega! A young man, recently returned from Madrid, has been admitted to a local hospital.

Of course, we will take every precaution that we can to stop it entering our business, but the reality is that there is a limit to what we can do. We can thoroughly wash our hands, and disinfect some surfaces, but there are just so many ways that the virus can be transmitted. Short of a complete lock-down, all we can really do is to minimise the risk.

As restaurants and hotels empty, as consumers stay at home, it is inevitable that consumption of our wines will be reduced. We can only hope, for everyone’s sake, that the whole episode will be behind us sooner rather than later.

Happy Women’s Day! There are an increasing number of women winemakers here in our Rias Baixas denomination, including our very own boss and winemaker, Angela Martin!

Parts of Europe (focused mainly around the UK), have been battered by a series of winter storms in recent weeks. The equivalent of months of torrential rain falling within hours (as seems to be a recurring story around the world these days). The most significant of these storms are given names by the countries that first detect them, based solely on the idea that they will be easier to track by everyone if they can be more easily identified. The latest of these three storms was named Jorge, as it was first tracked by the Spanish Met office, albeit that it arrived on UK shores long before it reached Spain.

Last night we braced ourselves for a stormy time here in Galicia, but whilst it was certainly wet and windy, it was not nearly as destructive as it had been in the UK. A bit of a non-event to say the least.

Today is actually quite sunny, and not anything like the conditions that our team expected to face as they finish the final days of pruning. It all goes to prove that our weather predictions here on the Atlantic Coast are, well, sometimes quite unpredictable!

I guess that our guys are quite grateful that today we have a day inside the bodega making cartons. After 4 or 5 days of warm sunshine, today is quite grey and miserable, and so we are preparing the materials required for bottling a tank of wine tomorrow.

Our albariño is always stored in tank, and only bottled as and when it is required. We follow quite a simple rule (especially relevant for white wine), that the larger the storage vessel, the longer the wine will stay fresh. So obviously, storing wine in a air-tight tank, topped up with nitrogen, will preserve its freshness better than it would by bottling the whole vintage as soon as the wine making is complete. In the same way, a magnum generally keeps better than a bottle, and a bottle better than a half bottle, but of course all this will depend on how any sized bottle is stored.

Anyway, it occurred to me, that in all the posts I have ever made, I have never really mentioned our cartons. They arrive flat-packed and therefore have to be assembled. We normally do this the day before in order that they don’t absorb too much humidity from our damp, Galician climate. I should also mention that whilst some of our cases might not be the prettiest, they are actually selected for their strength, and how well they can protect our wine in transit…. after all, it’s a long journey from our bottling hall to say, a restaurant table in Melbourne!

In Spanish, if you want to encourage someone to ‘get a move on’, one of the expressions that is used is “ponte las pilas”, which translated means ‘put the batteries’. Today at Castro Martin, we were, quite literally, putting the batteries!

We have a small, electric pallet truck that we use for stacking our stock in the bodega. Technically, I think it is known as a pedestrian operated pallet truck, simply as it is not a model that you can actually sit on. Like all re-chargeable electric vehicles, it’s battery has a limited ‘shelf-life’ which, not unlike your mobile phone, will eventually stop holding a charge (or at least charge for such a short time that it becomes almost redundant). Our pallet truck has now reached that point.

The replacement battery was sent in advance, so that it would be ready, in situ, for the technician to simply come and install. Although, as often happens, things are never quite that simple…. Firstly, we had to use a second forklift just to hmanoeuvre the super-heavy battery in and out of our small machine. Then, having taken out the old one, we lowered the new one into position, only to discover that the manufacturer had sent the wrong size (and capacity) for the model we have!

At the end of all this time and effort, we eventually ended up exactly where we started – with a battery that doesn’t hold its charge.

After year’s of discussion, debate, argument (and perhaps just a little coercion), Brexit is finally done… on paper at least. Of course, there are still a further 11 months of negotiation to complete before we finally know how the UK economy will emerge from this, the biggest political upheaval in modern history.

At midnight last Friday (11pm UK time) it was all over, with perhaps just 52% of the UK population in celebration whilst the other 48% were possibly still reeling in shock and disbelief. To say that the UK was polarised by this event is something of an understatement. Crowds gathered, corks were popped – some for joy, others in consolation. Some wanted bells to ring out around the nation, whilst others held candlelit vigils. It was a moment of great division.

In reality, after all the brouhaha, the ‘celebrations’ ended up being a bit of a non-event. For me, there was one person in particular who summed up the moment beautifully by offering us the best possible solution – “we’ll just have a cup of tea and go to bed”!

For now at least, we have no real option but to sit back and see what the future brings for our trade with the UK.

What a difference a week makes! I just thought I would post a couple of very recent photos – on the left, from last week, and on the right from yesterday, simply to illustrate what it can be like to live near the Ocean. This is by no means to show how beautiful it can be, but really to demonstrate how it can change from day-to-day, often without warning, and sometimes within hours.

Of course this is Galicia, and so these changes are quite normal (especially in winter). In summer, however, it is not always easy to work with these sudden variations, when alternating heat and humidity can wreak havoc in the vineyards, providing perfect conditions for disease.

As pruning continues, our guys in the vineyards soldier on, come rain or shine!

Of course, like every other business we get a lot of spam e-mail (despite all sorts of protection and filters!). Some of these mails are simply annoying, others malicious, requesting that we click onto some spurious link, and then finally, there are the scams. These arrive in many different guises, some quite sophisticated whilst others are downright stupid and obvious. For example, the classic – winning $10 million for a lottery that you never entered!

One of the latest scams, that I receive quite regularly now, is for wine competitions….. Someone has finally twigged that wine competitions are big business, and that there is a lot of money to be made. The problem is the way that it has been done. Quite unconvincing invitations with scant detail, requesting that we pay only 1 Euro deposit to enter, and then pay a full fee after we receive the result. My belief is, of course, that anyone stupid enough to enter, will almost certainly be guaranteed to win an award!

The format is just a simple text e-mail, and thereby lies the second mistake. These invitations arrive in groups, and within a period of 24 hours we will receive invitations for China, Singapore and Japan, all using an identical mail, with only the names and addresses changed in each one. The sponsoring publications for these competitions are quite obvious false – “Shanghai Paper, Singapore Newspaper and Business News Japan”. They don’t even bother to create convincing names!

In a second group of mails, we will receive invites for the UK and USA. This time for the “London Newspaper and America Wines Paper”. Not at all convincing.

Oh, and by the way, the wine samples for EVERY competition, regardless of the country, are apparently gathered in one place…. in Paris. Seems like someone in Paris could be enjoying a big party with free wine!

The other day, completely out of the blue, I was invited to a tasting. That, in itself, would not seem odd, except that this was a tasting of the Aglianico grape, on this occasion made in the Puglia region of south-east Italy! An old and very well-known variety in Italy, Aglianico is characterised by its deep crimson colour, together with an unexpectedly high level of tannin and acidity (making wines with excellent ageing potential, and explaining why it is sometimes referred to as the ‘Barolo of the South’). This tasting however, was not of mature wine, but young, raw wines exclusively of the 2019 vintage – a bit ‘mouth-puckering’ to say the least!

Please don’t ask me why there would be a tasting of young Italian wines in a fairly remote part of Galicia, but suffice to say that it was held at the oenological research centre here in Ribadumia. Not, I should add, anything to do with the possibility of planting Aglianico here in our region, but rather as part of a private research project – I was simply a guest taster. Of course, as a former wine buyer, I had actually bought wines of this grape/region for my former Company, and, I suspect, that I may have been the only taster in the room with previous knowledge of this grape!

It seems that the Christmas holidays get longer and longer each year, and that pretty soon we will need re-training when we eventually arrive back at work.

The evening of 24th December is an important celebration here in Spain, and is always accompanied by a huge family meal. Throughout Spain (not only in Galicia), the tradition is to eat an enormous amount of seafood as a starter, when we obviously hope that this will be washed down with an odd glass of albariño or two – the perfect accompaniment.

The second part of the ‘festivos’ is New Year’s Eve, where, like everyone else, the Spanish greet the start of the New Year. Unlike other countries, however, the celebration usually kicks off with yet another big family meal, and yet more seafood.

As if that wasn’t enough the Spanish holiday period is extended into January by Reyes – the day of Epiphany when the Three Wise Men arrive at the Nativity bearing gifts. Of course, this give rise to yet another big family meal, and in some households is the time when Christmas gifts are actually exchanged.

All in all, it is a very drawn out holiday period, and to be honest it is almost a relief to be back at work!