Just when you think you’ve seen it all!

I’ve talked about food and wine pairings many times before, but never anything like this. I have recently read an article about pairing wine with crisps (or as our American friends call them, potato chips)! Not only does the article make a comparison with generic salted crisps, but actually considers a number of different flavours, and recommends a different wine, or wines, with each one!

Now you can call me a wine snob, but pairing wine with different flavours of potato chips? Really?

For me, the only valuable thing that this comparison will highlight, is how the flavour of any wine can be altered completely by different foods (albeit that in this case we are actually talking about artificial food flavourings). Of course, it would not be uncommon to perhaps nibble a few crisps with a glass of wine as a pre-dinner aperitif, but I would never dream as to go as far as trying to make a ‘food’ and wine pairing! Perhaps if we were talking about tapas with wine, that would be more understandable, but a bag of sour cream and onion, or barbecue flavoured crisps? Well, for me that’s just a step too far.

By the way, albariño is recommended with salt & vinegar crisps!

OK, so the subject of lock down has nothing to do with wine, but it is still a topic of interest to almost everybody, everywhere at the moment.

How is it defined, and what should it mean? Certainly it seems that during this crisis, there are some widely differing ideas of how it is adopted, and perhaps more importantly, how it should be enforced.

Here in Spain we have been under a full lock down for more than a month. Opportunities to leave home are few, and these are strictly controlled – there are both police and army patrols, and fines are issued to transgressors, as simple as that. No latitude is afforded for exercise, except for those with dogs, and only essential shopping is allowed – food and pharmacy.

By contrast, lock down in the UK appears to be much softer, albeit that recent guidelines issued by the police have, if anything, confused the definition even more. It seems that there are now so many potential loopholes that it could make the thorny issue of enforcement even more complicated.

Of course, as no one has any previous experience of this particular pandemic, it is difficult to say which approach can, or will be the most effective. The problem is that whilst we are all still desperate to learn, the number of victims is growing day-by-day and only history will reveal who has made the most beneficial choices.

After more than a month of complete lockdown, life in Spain is a very long way from anything that resembles normality. Although we are, technically, allowed to continue working, there is really not too much happening in the bodega – with the exception of the vineyards, where work continues as normal. With the hotel and restaurant industry at a complete standstill, not only in Spain, but around the world, there is almost no turnover of stock. I guess the fortunate part is that, in the short term, our wine will not deteriorate and will still be available to sell once the markets recover. Perhaps the only significant consequence could be that, depending on how long our sales are curtailed, that we might need to adjust the volume of wine that we make in 2020. This is more to do with tank space than anything else.

In the wine cellar itself we are constantly reminded about how quickly the lockdown took effect. Shortly before it all started we had just embarked on a programme of upgrades to our equipment and infrastructure. For example, replacing all windows in the bodega was put on hold, as was work on an upgrade to our temperature control system. In the tank cooling system were are adding digital sensors and touch screen controls (with remote access), to give us greater control and the potential to monitor temperatures from home during fermentation. (I should quickly add that we do not work from home during the harvest, but we do occasionally go home to sleep!) Suffice to say that tools were quite literally ‘downed’ as we more or less abandoned the cellar, and we can only hope that work will be resumed, and completed in time for the next harvest!

Despite business grinding to a halt, there are some elements of what we do that carry on as normal. Our vines, for example, continue to grow, pandemic or no pandemic.

With the pruning and attaching to the wires now complete, we start on general vineyard maintenance – small, but yet, significant chores. These include removing any unwanted growth (for example, small shoots that start to grow out of the main trunk of the vine), removing snails (that climb and devour the new shoots), and attaching new pheromone traps (this eco-friendly trap uses synthetic pheromones to cause confusion and diverting mating insects away from the vines). In addition to this, and largely depending on what the weather does over the next week or two, will also determine if any treatments are needed, but clearly we still have to monitor the vineyards closely to assess what is needed.

(Today’s photo not only shows the current vine development, but also shows one of our pheromone traps)

Whilst Spain is almost at the end of its second week of lock down, the news is still very grim – in the last 48 hours we have seen the death toll increase to nearly 700 per day. Obviously it is the most populous areas, such as Madrid, that have been hit the worst, and locals were very worried when, shortly prior to the lock down, hundreds of Madridlenos decided to flee the city to seek refuge out in their Galician summer homes. Apart from the obvious health risk, the infrastructure (now in winter mode), was, and is, simply not geared up for this sudden influx of visitors. Supermarkets were stripped bare (in a country where panic buying hasn’t really been an issue at all).

Our streets are completely deserted, but today they were frequented by a rather unusual type of vehicle; a farm tractor with treatment tank being used for spraying the streets – presumably with disinfectant, and not a treatment for protecting grapes! Probably just as well there were no pedestrians….

Since last weekend Spain has been on total lockdown, everything is closed and the streets are deserted. It’s actually very eerie! Supermarkets are still operating, but as you will see from today’s photo, the public are carefully observing the rules of ‘social distancing’ as shops allow only a few people at a time to enter.

As a comparatively small business, we are already beginning to feel the impact, but all we can do in these difficult circumstances, is to continue monitoring government advice and react accordingly.

In the meantime, our primary thoughts are with our customers, staff, family and friends.

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!