Today we start the 40th harvest in our current wine cellar. The bodega, completed by the visionary entrepreneur Domingo Martin in October 1981, collected its first harvest in 1982. (The Regulatory Council of the D.O. Rias Baixas was not established until 1988). Bodegas Castro Martin is one of the founding members of the D.O.

My first comment regarding this year’s harvest is, inevitably, about the weather. After two months of dry, arid conditions, we now find ourselves dodging the showers. Over the last few days there have been some fairly hefty downpours, which in the first instance (as I explained in my last post), were quite welcome, and no bad thing. The problem is that the wet weather now seems to be hanging around, and so for picking purposes, this can be quite tricky.

At first light today we were quite optimistic as there was plenty of blue sky in evidence. However, as the morning progressed, so the clouds started to gather, and at times, almost looked a bit threatening.

With one eye on the weather, the first grapes arrived mid-afternoon (by which time the sun had returned). As in previous years the 20kg baskets of grapes from our own vineyards arrived by truck, already palletised in the vineyard. This is very much the modern trend for delivery to wine cellars, which admittedly does save quite a lot of physical work in the bodega – offloading individual cases by hand.

Finally back to work after my brush with Covid, catching up and making final preparations for our harvest. The bodega is pretty much set up, all equipment cleaned and tested, so now all we really need is a few grapes!

After a couple of months of completely dry, mostly hot, sunny weather, we now have rain! So far, this is not such a bad thing, as long as it doesn’t persist for too long.

Under normal circumstances rain around harvest time would be considered a bit of a disaster, but this year that is slightly different. Firstly, and most importantly, the grapes themselves are in a good sanitary state, meaning that because of the hot, dry summer the risk of disease has been low (to date). Having said that, the downside of such a long dry period is that whilst the grapes are healthy, they are all ‘skin and bone’ (well, skin and pips actually), there is not a lot of pulp/juice. In a year when grapes are already selling at a record high this would mean that we are paying a huge amount of money for fruit with only very low yields. Economically, a disaster. At least now, given a little more time, the grapes will absorb a little of this rainfall, and return to something approaching a reasonable level of grape must (juice) without too much dilution.

Another small side benefit of the rain is that the fruit will be rinsed and clean. The lack of rain has resulted in the ground under the canopy being very parched and dry. If the wind blows then the dust from this arid ground blows into the canopy and leaves the fruit coated with a fine powder. If this fruit is pressed without being washed by rain, then the must will contain an amount of dust/soil particles that would require more time for settling after pressing.

My plan for this week was to start reporting on the build up to our 2022 harvest…. until I caught Covid! Not an ideal time, as preparations are now in full swing setting up the bodega for receiving grapes.

I have no idea where I may have contracted it, but the good news is that, I was able to isolate myself quite quickly, and, consequently, I don’t believe that I have passed it on to anyone else. Fingers crossed.

Of course, the latest variations of Covid strike people different ways, albeit that many of the symptoms resemble a good dose of flu – headache, fever, aching muscles and in my case, a bad cough. For me, the difference has been that it comes and goes in waves, one minute I think that I’m feeling better, and the next, I am lying prostrate on my sofa. The other common side effect is exhaustion – feeling completely drained, with no energy, and, unfortunately, that is exactly how I feel now.

Hopefully, I will be recovered in time for the harvest that we anticipate will start in about one week from now.

Over the last few months there have been some fairly serious supply chain issues – shortages of bottles, slow deliveries and not to mention some really significant price increases.

At one point the supply of bottles was a serious concern to us, as we were accumulating orders that we couldn’t fulfil, simply because we didn’t have the necessary materials in stock. The problem of bottle supply was complicated by the co-operatives and other larger bodegas who were virtually ‘cornering’ the bottle market, as they filled their yards and warehouses with bottles. As a slightly smaller bodega we were left scratching around, doing our best to acquire some stock (almost to the point of begging). It was a huge concern.

Eventually, the problem started to ease a little (as I guess, the big players had all the stock that they could handle) and we were finally able to procure a few pallets….. well, I say a few, but in reality we bought rather a lot!

Although it is possible to leave pallets of bottles in the open air, we prefer to keep them under cover to eliminate the risk of contamination by dust and humidity. Suffice to say that our already limited storage space came under severe pressure with pallets piled high, approaching every square millimetre of our warehouse.

At one point we were almost inclined to answer our phones as “Botellas Castro Martin” rather than Bodegas!!

OK, so I should start by saying that today’s post about ‘Black Holes’ has nothing to do with the James Webb Space Telescope and the plethora of discoveries that have started to unfold since its launch. Believe it or not this is to do with Spanish banking!

Some years ago, when an importer purchased wine from a bodega payment would be made quite simply by sending a cheque through the post (hence the often abused expression “the cheque is in the post”!).

These days, thanks to advances in technology, this old system has almost completely disappeared, and invoices are now mostly settled by electronic transfer. Using this system money can be moved almost instantaneously, although transfers between businesses usually take up to 24 hours within the same country, whilst overseas transfers should normally be completed within two working days (depending on the countries involved). Well, that’s the theory at least….

My experience in Spain, however, is not quite so straightforward, and perhaps could best be described as erratic. When a customer pays us by transfer we usually receive confirmation (a copy of the transaction), providing us with the exact time and date that it was completed. Unfortunately, this is where, on some occasions, our money vanishes into a ‘banking black hole’ and then magically re-appears up to a week later in our account. This normally only happens when we start to follow up the missing transfer. Personally I think that this is a scandal, and certainly should not happen in this day and age. Do you sometimes get the feeling that your money is being manipulated?….

Well, I really don’t know what more I can say about our weather, except that it continues to be both changeable and unpredictable. Having said that, I am sure that many wine regions around the world are telling the very same story. There has been no sustained period of any type of ‘settled’ weather, and indeed it continues to vary wildly almost from day to day. Take this weekend for example – Saturday sunny, with a warm wind and temperatures in the high 20’s °C (towards 80°F), and then Sunday morning cold and wet, with temperatures nearly 10°C lower at about 17°C (63°F). The other weather characteristic of 2022 is that, when there has been sunshine, the air temperature has often remained cool – refreshing in some ways, but again, not really great conditions for our fruit.

To repeat my story of the other day, our cellar is still full to bursting with prepared orders. Of course, we love this scenario, but we now just want to get them out and on the road! Road hauliers have somehow been reluctant to give us firm dates for collections as yet, and my guess is that this is to do with the current shortages of both containers and drivers. We now find ourselves is the strange situation whereby we have stopped preparing large orders until we have more space!

The good news is that we have orders, but the bad news is that we have nowhere to store them!

Owing to the current supply chain problems and delays to our orders of dry goods, we are now obliged to hold much more floor stock than usual. One of the items in short supply is bottles (which are possibly more valuable than gold to wine producers at the moment). With this combination of additional stock holding, and preparing large orders, we are simply running out of storage space, and this is also compounded by the fact that we are obliged to bottle even more stock again early next week, thereby adding to the congestion.

Yesterday I was was down in our cellar arranging pallets, trying to make the most of every square centimetre of space. Believe it or not I was actually using a tape measure at one point, calculating the best permutations to maximise the space that we have available. In effect, it was really like a huge game of Tetris as the pallets were slotted into their spaces!

Hopefully, we will be able to get some of these big orders on the road

This morning, in the bodega, we received a truck fully laiden with gold. Well, it was actually full of bottles, but at the present time (for a wine cellar), that is almost as valuable.

I have talked before about the ‘perfect storm’ when all the stars aligned to create a supply chain crisis, but since that time we can now add the crisis in Ukraine to the list. Businesses are still playing catch up, the supply of raw materials has dried up (for some sectors), and the sharp increase of energy prices have all added to a system already under extreme pressure.

Since the turn of the year, and possibly even before that, the demand for bottles has increased. This is due, in part, to the soft drinks industry. New taxes have been applied to the use of plastic bottles in packaging, and so may producers are now turning back to glass as an alternative. (I say ‘turning back’ because only a few decades ago the vast majority of soft drinks were sold in glass. In effect, we have gone full circle).

Over recent months, large cellars around Spain have been stocking up on glass, adding further pressure to an already oversubscribed market. Consequently, we have been almost begging our supplier on a daily basis to send us bottles, and today we took a small, but positive step in helping to overcome this major concern. It’s a simple equation: no bottles=no wine, so we hope that this delivery will be the first on many over the coming months.

The winter of 2021/22 must surely be classified officially as ‘dry’. Over the last month or so there have been a few light showers, but nothing of any real significance. It is only in the last week that we have experienced some heavy downpours, but to be honest, we would probably need at least another few weeks of this to replenish this winter’s shortfall completely. Having said that, it appears that this might not happen, as the sun has now returned and the immediate forecast does not predict much rainfall.

In the vineyards our pruning is finished and we are now simply tying the last few vines before this year’s vegetation springs into life. The only real benefit of the dry weather has been the slightly more favourable conditions for pruning.

As we get closer to springtime, our thoughts return to the cellar, where our wine has been resting quietly on its lees. Of course, we taste regularly over the winter, but it will soon be time to consider blending and racking, and the launch of our 2021 vintage.

Of course it is not my ambition to become an influencer on this new-fangled interweb thing, I am very much of a different generation. Indeed, when it comes to computers I am barely out of the two-fingered typing stage! When I was young we simply didn’t have access to computers either at school or at University, and my first piece of tech was probably an LCD wrist watch some time back in the 1970’s.

Having said all that, it is always gratifying to know that people do occasionally read our blog, and visit our website. Indeed, Google analytics gives me all the information that I could possibly need, albeit that it doesn’t tell me what our site visitors had for dinner….. yet!

Just a few days ago I noticed that we had reached one small milestone on the internet – we have now passed 250,000 views of our picture gallery. Perhaps that is a tiny number compared to some of the larger protagonists in the wine world, but for a small, family-owned Bodega in the middle of nowhere, we are quite happy about it. Here’s to the first million!