After a slightly fraught, late night yesterday, the new morning didn’t start so well. One of our famous Ocean mists had rolled in from the Atlantic leaving the whole area shrouded in a cold, damp cloud. We knew however, that the sun would eventually burn through, and by mid-morning it had done exactly that – picking was not delayed.

Today’s minor trauma was a puncture! The trailer on one of our tractors burst a tyre, but quite fortunately, just as it was arriving at the bodega and not in the middle of it’s journey. Of course we had the equipment on hand to make a relatively speedy repair, and so I guess it was hardly worth mentioning!

In the meantime the grapes continue to arrive, today in a steady flow, rather than yesterday’s late rush. Apart from yield that I mentioned yesterday, there is another attribute that we have noticed in this year’s fruit. There appears to be more variation in bunch sizes (related to individual vineyard sites), than in previous years, which is why we always pick plot-by-plot in a strict order. Obviously this variation is down purely to our Spring weather – cool, damp and hardly ideal for the flowering period. On a more positive note, the warm, dry conditions during August and September have probably yielded better quality than we had anticipated.

By the way, as I mentioned in my previous (special) post, the new case washing machine has had an amazing impact on our grape reception – cases can now be washed the moment that they are emptied into the presses. No more stacks of dirty cases, and no more hosepipes!

This is a special post simply to explain a significant delivery that arrived late last night. A few days ago I wrote about a window that we had made in the wall of our grape reception to accommodate a new piece of kit – well, the ‘kit’ finally arrived late last night (at 11pm, and much, much later than promised!). It is a new machine for washing the plastic cases that we use for picking, before we re-cycle them and send them out to be re-used.

Until now this was a job done by hand, with a hosepipe – it was slow and very labour intensive, especially when you consider that we have up t o 2,000 cases in circulation during harvest (and each one will be re-used several times).

When the machine arrived we were still busy, but we did not hesitate to connect it straight away, and press it into service. At that point there was still quite a backlog of cases to be washed, but within 20 minutes half of the mountain had disappeared, using two guys and leaving our cases almost spotlessly clean.

I am absolutely convinced that this will be a great investment, and will significantly streamline our operation. By next week we will probably be asking “why didn’t we buy this years ago?”

Well, after a spring and summer of variable and sometimes unexpected weather the 2018 harvest is finally upon us. Despite all these fluctuations the start date is pretty much as we anticipated – we had always predicted around the third week of September, and here we are, 19th September…

The great news is that the weather is being kind to us, in the morning there was a slight autumnal chill in the air, but with a clear blue sky. As the day progressed the temperature both inside and outside the bodega started to rise, and by midday the first grapes were already in the cellar. The familiar droning noise of the presses (that will continue unabated for the next 7 days or so), started to fill the air.

Unfortunately, owing to a slight (transport) miscalculation on my part the grapes did not arrive as quickly as we would have hoped, indeed the last grapes to arrive were rather late….. mea culpa! The good news is that they were all quite healthy, the only difference being that we have noticed that they are not yielding quite as much juice as we would normally expect when we press them – more on that as the days progress.

(Today’s video showing the first delivery of 2018 grapes is probably the shortest ever made – I really must learn how to control my new mobile phone!)

With the 2018 harvest only a few days away, as happens every year, our attention turns to the weather. At this time I seem to spend a lot of my spare time browsing weather websites – sad, but true. As I have said many, many times before, it then just becomes a question of deciding which forecast/website to believe. Being so close to the Ocean there is nearly always some degree of variation, and there is a great temptation to select only the sites showing the most favourable conditions. Unfortunately history has shown that this does not work, and generally speaking it’s best to keep an open mind – almost to expect the unexpected. Even when every site is showing wall-to-wall sunshine it is still advisable to check at least once or twice a day, as they can sometimes change on almost an hourly basis. It’s often a tough call knowing what to do, especially when the information is slightly contradictory.

For the last few days Angela has been busy analysing grape samples from different locations, and despite the relatively good weather in August, and so far this month, there is still some variation in ripeness, and we will have to pick in a strictly controlled order – plot by plot (weather permitting, of course!).

When people in the UK mention the ‘hole in the wall’, they are usually referring to a cash machine or ATM. Unfortunately the hole that we have just made in the wall of our grape reception does not dispense cash, but it will still serve an important purpose during the harvest.

The questions we now ask ourselves are – is it at the correct height, is it the correct size, will it work?

So, what is it for? I can hear you asking. Well, unfortunately I’m not going to tell you…. not today at least. I will only say that it will accommodate a new piece of kit (due to arrive any day now), that will significantly improve the efficiency of our harvest (we hope!).

Vamos a ver – Let’s wait and see!

There is something a little less savoury that they don’t tell you in the guidebooks about Galicia – that it is a major entry point for drugs, not only for Spain, but for the whole of Europe. The same little idyllic beaches, hidden coves and inviting ‘Rias’ also provide the perfect landing grounds for the small boats of the international drugs trade. To the naked eye there is very little evidence of this, apart from the occasional road blocks on our local roads and motorways. Traffic is filtered down to a walking pace as you are obliged to weave your way through hoards of police vehicles, whilst being surveyed by heavily armed police (some wearing face masks). All a bit sinister….

This local ‘trade’ is so widely acknowledged that the Spanish TV channel Antenna 3 actually makes a highly acclaimed drama series about it – Fariña (which means ‘flour’ in Gallego – the slang word for cocaine). Obviously it is set, and filmed in Galicia, using almost exclusively Galician actors. In fact, it is so local that they were actually filming in our own street last Friday. The road was closed intermittently for periods of the day, and to be honest it was a bit of a struggle to stop them filling our bodega car park with their vehicles.

Unfortunately, they did not film immediately in front of our building, and so the hours that I spent applying make-up were completely wasted!

We are always proud to say that our wines are sold around the world, and sometimes pop up in quite unusual places. Apart from cruise ships and airlines our wines have been found at the London Olympics, in Hong Kong department stores, at this year’s Wimbledon, in hotels and restaurants on the island of Malta and even in a famous Winery restaurant on the Mornington Penninsula near Melbourne! To be honest, I’m quite sure that there are many other remote and unusual locations that we simply haven’t discovered as yet!

Fortunately we also are sold quite widely around the UK, but we just didn’t know (until this week), quite how widely…. Our daughter (confusingly, also called Angela), was travelling around Scotland with her French boyfriend Matt, and hopped across to the Isle of Skye, in the remote northwest corner of the country. Clearly there is not a huge choice of places to stay, but they found the small but highly rated Uig Hotel, located, by coincidence, in a place also named Uig (not Portree – apparently that’s quite important).

Imagine their surprise to find just one albariño on the restaurant wine list – our very own A2O ‘Sobre Lias’ – Slàinte!

There are certain telltale signs that start to emerge as harvest time gets closer. For example, the products that we use to elaborate our wines start to arrive at our door.

For example, today we have received several cases of yeast. It goes without saying that we would prefer to use naturally occurring yeast (that forms a layer on the skin of the berries), but unfortunately this isn’t always the best option. One of the big problems is sustaining the fermentation until it’s complete. In some wine growing areas, and with some grape varieties this would perhaps not present a problem, but in Rias Baixas our own natural yeasts are really not strong enough to do this work on their own (and more especially with our temperature control working at low temperatures). The result would be half-fermented tanks that need re-seeding; hence our choice to preempt this problem. It’s sad but true that not everything happens as nature intended, and therefore it sometimes requires a helping hand along the way.

The yeast that we select is very neutral, and doesn’t impart any unnatural flavours or aromas to our finished wine. We grow albariño, we sell albariño, and guess what?…. we want it to taste of albariño!

A few days ago I received an e-mail from Blogger, the website that hosted our original blog. The mail asked if I wanted to continue maintaining our old Blogger site (naturally, I said yes). To be honest I was not aware that the old site still existed, but apparently it does.

Our first blog was created in 2006, and continued with Blogger until 2011. We moved from this site to upgrade to WordPress, a software that allowed us to simply integrate the blog into our main website – incorporating everything under one ‘roof’.

So, if you quickly want to catch up on what we were doing back then, or simply want to see how often I have repeated myself over the last 12 years, then take a quick glance at the old site by clicking HERE

Although we still have a few weeks left to run before we actually start to pick any fruit there is still plenty of work to do in the bodega. (Not too much happens in the vineyards now, it is really just a question waiting for our grapes to attain perfection!)

In the meantime, we are just completing the final bottling, and ensuring that we have enough ‘floor stock’ labelled and ready to go, for any orders that we might receive during the harvest itself. Over the coming weeks we will certainly need to be focused on our wine making process, rather than worrying as to whether we have enough stock to sell!

Thankfully, having warned our customers in advance of this complicated period, many are actually collecting orders now. So whilst we don’t exactly have a queue of trucks waiting to collect, there is still a very healthy flow of wine leaving for overseas.