After our very wet period, now we have our dry, but very cold period! Since the last week of January we have hardly seen one cloud in the sky – it is really the polar opposite of the weather that we were experiencing before.

Of course, along with the clear skies come the frosty nights, and in the lower lying areas we have probably had at least 10 consecutive nights of frozen ground (more than one or two in a row is quite unusual). On some days this has been accompanied by a fresh breeze from the north, and although the thermometer might say 14/15°C (57/59°F), with the wind chill this is actually reduced to nearer 6°C (43°) during the day. Despite these cold conditions, I have no doubt that our team (still pruning out in our vineyards), are much happier in the bright sunshine than they were in the incessant, driving rain!

Inside the bodega, since the beginning of the year, we have bottled a couple of tanks, but otherwise we are still waiting for the young 2022 wines to finish their lees ageing.

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!!

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 2021 harvest is now well and truly behind us, and, as always at this time of year, our wine is sitting quietly on its lees. In our vineyards the pruning is under way, and the first of the Christmas gift pack orders are being prepared. Christmas orders for our export markets left the cellar some weeks ago. Indeed, with the global shipping problems that exist (and not to mention the post-Brexit delays on goods entering the UK), our overseas importers started to ship quite a bit earlier than they normally would.

Having said all that, preparing orders this year has been much more of a challenge than normal as there have been delays on nearly every product that we have ordered. Not only have prices increased on cartons, bottles, capsules and corks, but currently our label supplier can’t even get the paper that they require for printing! It’s fair to say that I have never taken the supply chain for granted (we normally hold buffer stocks), but at the moment trying to plan for wine bottling can be something of a logistical nightmare.

Meanwhile, on the weather front November was largely dry, until the final few days of the month. Skies were bright and clear, albeit that temperatures were distinctly chilly and autumnal. The first day of December is wet, and so our vineyard team have moved inside to catch up on a bit of labelling (and yes, we do have a bit of label stock left!)

Every tank of wine that we sell has to be tasted, and hopefully approved, by the official Rias Baixas tasting panel, before it can receive the official D.O. sticker allowing it to go on public sale. Before a tank can be bottled a number of samples are collected by the D.O. and taken to the Pontevedra office for tasting. The samples are also analysed and compared with our own analysis that we are obliged to send with the bottles. After everything is completed, we finally receive the stickers – known here as ‘tirillas’. This whole process can take a week or more.

Once a year these official tastings are suspended for a period of about six weeks. The reason?… Harvest time! (When the  members of the D.O. team are simply too busy to organise tastings). Of course, sales and shipments don’t stop during the harvest period, and so if a bodega experiences an unexpected surge in sales and hasn’t pre-prepared enough stock, then it’s just too bad, they simply have to wait for tastings to re-start!

In our own cellar the fermentations are almost at an end, and so we now have to re-focus our efforts into getting some wine out onto the streets! Thankfully, we do have a slight backlog of orders (even during a crisis), and so this week we have been busy restocking our warehouse in time for the holiday orders to be fulfilled.

For the past few months all talk has been concentrated around a certain virus – but what happens when a bottle of wine gets ‘sick’?

I should start by saying don’t worry, you can’t catch this virus from drinking wine! I am talking about a completely different thing…. bottle sickness. So what is bottle sickness and how does it affect what we drink? Well, to be honest, this problem is much more likely to be picked up by professionals when a wine is first shipped, and will normally have recovered well before the time it reaches you.

It is a phenomenon caused by travel, when the bottles are shipped over long distances, whether it be by road, sea or air. It can also occur when a wine has been recently bottled, again as the result of it being badly ‘shaken up’ – it simply needs time to recover (up to one or two weeks after a long trip)! It is difficult to pinpoint exactly why this occurs, but the effect, in the short-term, can be quite significant. The wine simply ‘closes down’ as many of the usual aromas and flavours that you would normally expect are simply not present. In addition, it can even appear to be a little thin and insipid. At this moment the wine can be described as ‘dumb’ (which in wine parlance does not mean stupid!).

It is important to know that this ‘sickness’ will not occur on your journey home from the wine shop or supermarket. However, if your wine is a little ‘closed up’ when you first open it, this could be just a touch of sulphur (added as protection at bottling). Simply swirl your glass and give it a few minutes to open up again – the best things are always worth waiting for!

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!

It’s looking very much like this year’s harvest will probably fall around the third or forth week of September, although there is still enough time for this to change. Whenever it eventually arrives, then it goes without saying, the bodega has to be prepared.

Believe it or not there is quite a bit of maths involved in the preparation – working out how many kilos we might have, converting this into liquid (approximate yield), and then working out how many tanks we will need to accommodate this. The reality is that we have already been working towards this for some time, ensuring that we are systematically emptying the tanks nearest to the presses first, as we move through racking and filtering etc. (Very obviously, the less we have to move the wine the better!).

As we move into the final stages, then it’s all about bottling, simply emptying the last few tanks before we finally need them. This week we will bottle two tanks, and then possibly one more before September.

[:en]The shocking fact is that for less expensive wines, the cheapest element of the price that you pay is for the wine itself – the actual 75cl of white, pink or red liquid in your bottle! When you consider the amount of effort that goes into producing a single bottle (from growing the fruit, harvesting, converting it into wine, bottling it and packaging it), the fact that this can actually represent just a tiny fraction of what you pay is really a bit of a scandal (speaking from a wine producers point of view, of course)!

I guess that the same could be said for any number of products that you might find in your weekly shopping basket – we are after all, simple fruit farmers. The only difference being that we take the production one step further by fermenting the fruit into alcohol. And thereby lies the key word….. Alcohol!

The moment that the bottles and pallets leave our door is when the costs start to mount up. Transport and shipping I have already mentioned, but once our wine crosses the Spanish border, it immediately become liable for the duties and taxes of the importing country. It’s only when you start to examine these additional levies a bit more closely, that you see the cost of a bottle really beginning to accelerate.

When goods eventually arrive at their destination then they can also attract further warehousing and handling costs. Depending on the type of customer, they could then attract further, onward distribution costs even before they arrive anywhere near a consumer.

Now we can finally talk profit! Of course the wine producer himself has already extracted a very modest cut, and then the importer will add a further margin before passing the bottles on to a retailer or restaurant. Of course the profits made by shops and restaurants are already well documented, and it is probably better that I don’t comment at all – suffice to say that these can be quite “healthy”.

The net result is that with all the handling, distribution, taxes and duties etc., a very modestly priced wine can end up being quite a bit more expensive. A very frightening calculation (working backwards), is that a bottle sold in the UK for around £5.00 leaves almost nothing at all for the cost of the wine itself![:es]The shocking fact is that for less expensive wines, the cheapest element of the price that you pay is for the wine itself – the actual 75cl of white, pink or red liquid in your bottle! When you consider the amount of effort that goes into producing a single bottle (from growing the fruit, harvesting, converting it into wine, bottling it and packaging it), the fact that this can actually represent just a tiny fraction of what you pay is really a bit of a scandal (speaking from a wine producers point of view, of course)!

I guess that the same could be said for any number of products that you might find in your weekly shopping basket – we are after all, simple fruit farmers. The only difference being that we take the production one step further by fermenting the fruit into alcohol. And thereby lies the key word….. Alcohol!

The moment that the bottles and pallets leave our door is when the costs start to mount up. Transport and shipping I have already mentioned, but once our wine crosses the Spanish border, it immediately become liable for the duties and taxes of the importing country. It’s only when you start to examine these additional levies a bit more closely, that you see the cost of a bottle really beginning to accelerate.

When goods eventually arrive at their destination then they can also attract further warehousing and handling costs. Depending on the type of customer, they could then attract further, onward distribution costs even before they arrive anywhere near a consumer.

Now we can finally talk profit! Of course the wine producer himself has already extracted a very modest cut, and then the importer will add a further margin before passing the bottles on to a retailer or restaurant. Of course the profits made by shops and restaurants are already well documented, and it is probably better that I don’t comment at all – suffice to say that these can be quite “healthy”.

The net result is that with all the handling, distribution, taxes and duties etc., a very modestly priced wine can end up being quite a bit more expensive. A very frightening calculation (working backwards), is that a bottle sold in the UK for around £5.00 leaves almost nothing at all for the cost of the wine itself![:]

There used to be an advertising campaign on UK TV for bars of chocolate. The slogan was something to the effect that it took 1½ glasses of milk to make one bar of chocolate…. without actually specifying the size of the glass, or the bar of chocolate!

In the world of albariño I can tell you that it takes approximately 1½ kilos of grapes to make one 75cl bottle. Of course this seemingly simple calculation can sometimes be compounded by the price of the grape itself. Even if a bodega owns 100% of its own vineyards (which not too many do in Rias Baixas), the cost of grapes still fluctuates. Of course, yield can be controlled to a certain degree but will always vary a little, and labour cost in the vineyard can change according to the growing season, depending on how much work is required. Then there is also the cost of buying, maintaining and running tractors and other equipment that has to be factored in. On top of this, if you are then obliged to buy additional fruit on the open market, it can become a bit of a lottery. Grape contracts do exist, but some can end up being quite meaningless as market demands can often put a strain on persuading growers to honour them!

So once we have our 1½ kilos bought and paid for, safely in our tanks, then what else needs to be included in the final bottle price? Believe me, it’s a long list! Materials for making the wine, materials for bottling the wine, labour costs, and not to mention the overheads of running the bodega itself – electricity for machinery etc. Next comes the outer packaging, cartons, pallets, pallet wrapping, even before we can even consider moving the wine.

In export we are rarely involved in the cost of transport, but there will always be some element of (expensive) road haulage involved. With pallets weighing in at over 1000kg each (even using our Eco friendly lightweight bottle) the cost of moving them around, especially by road, does not come cheap. Sea container transport does work out much cheaper, but then this is usually limited to customers outside Europe, with the odd exception.

With all these elements quickly adding up the wine is finally on route, and the cheaper part of the final bottle cost has been explained. The really expensive part of the calculation I will save for another day!