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.

Well, our short summer closure is almost at an end, but at least the weather has been kind to us. Of course, I don’t mean for the purposes of topping up my tan, but much more from the point of view of our fruit now ripening on the vine. For the last couple of weeks there has been a lot of warm, even very hot sunshine, with temperatures mostly between 25° and 30°C (77° to 87°F), including an odd couple of days touching 34/35°C. A period of sustained warmth and sunshine was just what we needed, and we now live in the hope that this could continue through to the end of September.

The latter part of July and the month August are the peak periods for visitors to Galicia – in some resorts we even experience long traffic queues, often heading in the direction of our local beaches. After leaving London some years ago, I freely admit that traffic is something that I don’t miss at all.

Today’s photo shows a Portuguese circus packing up at the end of their short summer season on the coast. For us the end of summer merely signals that our harvest is now looming on the not-too-distant horizon!

I was reading a post on the Facebook page of our D.O. There is an interview with the ‘SpanEnglish’ actress Belinda Washington. To be honest I had never heard of her – possibly because despite being born in the UK, she now works as a television actress in Spain.

In the interview she was saying how much she loves Galicia and the food and wine – drinking her lovely, fresh albariño with scallops, lobster, fresh fish and…… hedgehog! I was shocked.

Of course, I then realised what had happened. The default language on my computer is English, and sometimes Google will automatically offer me a translation. Now, strictly speaking, in the context of what was written, the translation was correct, it did indeed say hedgehog, the subtle difference being that ‘erizo’ means hedgehog, whereas ‘erizo de mar’ is actually a sea urchin. Although the article really did say erizo, I would assume that they didn’t really mean hedgehog. (Or perhaps it’s a delicacy that I have missed and could be the prefect marriage for our albariño!)

Although Spain has many ‘Festivo’ days over the year, not all of them are National Holidays. Some are Provincial, some are Local, and some are even based around festivals, such as the Tinto wine festival in our own village of Barrantes. Many of the National holidays are religious, and today’s ‘holy day’ is no exception. In fact it is not the exception, but rather the Assumption of Mary (when the Virgin Mary ascended into heaven).

Religion aside, this day also signals the start of a short recess for the Castro Martin team, when we extend this single day  into a break of just over one week. It is our last chance to re-charge the batteries before the onslaught of harvest! Harvest time itself is very demanding, both physically and mentally, and so it’s really important to give our team time for some well deserved R&R before we effectively ‘kick-off’ the new season.

Our local weather has now improved a little and should be fine and sunny for the duration of our break. Of course, we have our fingers crossed (as always) that these conditions may extend until the end of September. Unlikely, but we live in hope!

There is still a lot of work to do in the bodega before harvest time, and so we really have to work out our priorities. Number one on the list (as always) is a pre-harvest deep clean – all the equipment, tanks, pipes, pumps, presses, floors etc… everything!

Having said that we still cannot overlook our long-term commitment to the environment and reducing our carbon footprint wherever possible. Consumption of energy in the bodega spikes at harvest time, when we have both presses and refrigeration equipment running flat out for long periods of the day (refrigeration 24/7 for probably 4 or 5 weeks). In an attempt to compensate, we have embarked on a programme of renewing all our internal lighting. By the time the harvest starts, I believe that 99% of the lighting in the entire bodega will be replaced by low consumption LED.

Large parts of the bodega are already complete, and apart from the energy saving, there is another minor bonus that we have noticed immediately. The light is instant – there is no delay, and the flickering that we have come to associate with the old florescent tubes is history. Suffice to say that the old system will not be missed!