More or less as predicted the day started under grey skies, and just a little light rain. Fortunately this was barely enough to penetrate the canopy, and stopped completely after about half an hour. With a very slight delay our picking team swung into action (although we made a decision to only harvest from our own vineyards) meaning that other grape suppliers would not be asked to pick today. In this way we can maintain complete control, in terms of the actual volume that we pick. The reason for this is simple mathematics, we need to calculate the weights required to ensure that our presses can accommodate every kilo collected.

The good news is that, so far, we have some very high quality grape must to work with – fresh, fruity, with good body and our usual bright acidity. A number of tanks have been racked and so fermentations can be started in a day or two.

Meanwhile in the vineyard, the anticipated rain finally arrived at 5.30pm. Picking was halted for the day, all grapes were covered and delivered by truck to the cellar. By 9.30 pm the final press had been loaded, and we were thankful to enjoy a comparatively short working day.

(By the way, todays photo shows the final part of the racking process – the clean must on top, and the organic residues at the bottom).

Well, the day started bright and sunny as we would always wish, but there is now rain looming just over the horizon. We really need to gather as much fruit as we can, despite the shortage of people.

For our own picking team it was a day of movement, finishing in one location and then moving on to the next, ending the day in our vineyard surrounding the bodega. Of course the advantage of working on ‘home turf’ is that no sooner are the grapes picked that they are delivered and transferred straight into the presses. It’s a very fast process. (Unfortunately not all grape deliveries are so quick).

Today, we also started work inside the cellar, racking the first tanks after a period of cold settling (when all the dust and other deposits sink to the bottom of the tank). After this process the cold grape must, now in clean tanks, will be allowed to recover a slightly higher temperature before we can start the fermentation. Although we prefer to use a slow, cool fermentation, the wine still has to reach 13 or 14°C before it can be seeded with yeast, otherwise the yeast simply will not survive.

Today’s machinery saga was actually not inside the bodega itself, but rather one of our tractors working in the vineyard. We have a forklift attachment on the back of the tractor that we use for collecting pallets to load onto the truck. Until today, when the clutch started to slip! For the time being we will have to use a different tractor until the other can be repaired.

I’m sure that I have mentioned the increase in grape prices in Rias Baixas. We are now seeing one kilo of grapes having double the value that it did only two years ago. In the end it comes down to two things, firstly, supply and demand and secondly those who can afford (or are willing) to pay these wildly exaggerated price. As if this isn’t enough, the other market that is under a huge amount of pressure this year is the labour market. There is an acute shortage of people to gather the fruit. Yet again, the larger, richer bodegas can afford to pay higher rates than the smaller, family bodegas – it seems that when it comes to paying grapes and attracting pickers, then money is no object for these big companies. I have no doubt, that once the money is paid, and they have the wine that they need, then the bottle price itself will probably be heavily and artificially subsidised too!

I wrote back in July I wrote about one particularly unscrupulous bodega that was at the epicentre of the surge in grape prices. Well, it appears that the very same cellar might have been employing some rather creative ways of producing more wine, such as bringing in grapes from other wine regions. I should add that this is, as yet, unproved, but that the Xunta of Galicia, the office of Fraudes (fraud) and our own D.O. are taking this very seriously, so much so that extensive investigations have been taking place. The result of this is that our D.O. office have released new, stricter guidelines for the 2022 harvest. Not only that, but there has been a much greater and more visible police presence on the streets, stopping trucks and tractors to check the origins of their loads. Only yesterday we had a group of police at the front of our very own bodega (although we have absolutely nothing to hide)!

Saturday is always one of our busiest days (a popular day for picking), and so the grapes flowed thick, fast but thankfully at quite an even pace. As mentioned before the grapes this year are ripe and healthy albeit that the alcohol is probably slightly higher than we would have liked.

Today’s drama with machinery was our case washing machine, which decided to work only intermittently. Absolutely not a problem on a busy day when cases have to be washed and re-cycled quickly!

Day two started as we would have hoped, with bright sunshine and reasonably warm temperatures – very good conditions for picking (for now). Our weather watch still shows that rain is on the way, if not on Sunday, then certainly on Monday, with the anticipated arrival of Tropical Rainstorm Danielle. Of course forecasts can change and sometimes be wrong, (owing to our proximity to the Ocean), but unfortunately this can work in both positive and negative ways.

One of our concerns leading up to this year’s harvest was the fruit itself. After such a long, dry summer our grapes were very healthy, but also just a little dehydrated. Fortunately, the heavy showers that we have had have changed this, and our first pressings revealed that there is at least a reasonable amount of juice. Potential alcohol seems quite high, possibly around 13.0%, and the level of acidity is also good. We will need more time (and more fruit) to give a more accurate assessment, but early indications are not too bad.

On a more practical note, no harvest would be complete without some sort of technical problems! 2022 is no exception. Apart from a very small issue trying to connect a printer in the grape reception, the main issue of the day was losing one of our two presses for more than 3 hours in the evening. Firstly, we had to wait for the on-call engineers to arrive, and then it took them some time to discover and fix the actual issue. As a result, Fran and some of our other guys were working more or less all night!

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.

In the last week or two, despite the baking temperatures, we have been clearing the corner of one of our vineyards. Yes, this did involve cutting a few trees, but I should emphasise that we did seek the appropriate permissions, and that the trees that we cut were mostly eucalyptus, not indigenous to Galicia, considered by many to be invasive, and the cause of many a forest fire in our region. There were two, or perhaps three reasons for doing this work….

Firstly, because we are obliged by law to clear forest areas and scrub land, precisely to reduce the risk of fires. Secondly, because this small piece of land is actually registered as a vineyard, and has never been exploited as such. And thirdly, because of the price of grapes at the moment!

This third reason is actually a major concern for Rias Baixas this year, and all because of one single bodega! I shall not name the property concerned (perhaps for liable reasons), but every bodega locally knows exactly who they are, and that they are owned by a much larger Company from outside Galicia. The simple fact is that they are desperate for grapes, and as such have been making ridiculous, unsustainable offers to local growers, often going door-to-door and poaching thousands of kilos of grapes from their neighbouring wine cellars. I should mention they the size of the bodegas that they are plundering from are not small, and have been left very, very angry indeed (something of an understatement).

Suffice to say that these tactics (apart from being completely unethical), have caused an artificial surge in the demand for grapes, and will no doubt result in highly inflated prices, just at a time when consumers are reducing their spending, and perhaps seeking opportunities to trade-down a little. Enough said, I will stop before my blood boils!

For reasons that one day might become clear, this vintage has been particularly demanding, and as a result, today’s post is long overdue. The last couple of weeks have been fully occupied by the small matter of the wine making. To do things well demands quite a lot of thought and attention, especially when the vintage has not been altogether straight forward.

Following on from a largely unpredictable summer, the 2021 harvest itself has produced a few just a few twists and turns that we might not normally expect. For example, as I have already mentioned during the picking, the amount of grape must extracted from the fruit was lower that it would normally be, perhaps by as much as 2% or 3%. That may not sound like much, but when multiplied by many thousands of kilos, it soon adds up.

So, despite the bosses of our D.O. loudly (and apparently proudly) proclaiming that this was the biggest vintage ever, the numbers alone do not begin to tell the story of how the year 2021 has unfolded. In the end, there is one simple adage that I believe to be true, more often than not – that bigger does not always necessarily mean better.

Over the last couple of vintages I has used the term a-typical to describe the wines that we have produced, largely because they have been very ripe and perhaps just a touch too alcoholic. It was not uncommon to see wines of 13%, 13.5% (or even higher) in both the 2019 and 2020 vintages, whereas this year we are very likely to be somewhere closer to 12%, or perhaps 12.5% – in other words, much more in the style of a typical albariño.

To be honest, I think that is so much more to tell about 2021, that I will really need at least a few more posts to explain everything that has transpired this year (and as a result I will probably have to completely re-write my vintage report)!

Yet another day dawned with clear blue skies (apparently the last before a few days of rain). The ‘final’ day of picking (we hope), which was planned to be a simple mopping up operation, but has since turned into, what could be, a full day of harvest. The grapes just keep on coming!

The complication that we have, as I have explained in previous years is that we have to wait until every last grape is in before we can start the last presses. The reason being that we have to spread the loads in each press evenly, because if they run with less than the minimum load, then we will cause serious damage.

Inside the bodega, with the first tanks racked a few days ago, we are now preparing for fermentation. This simply means that we allow the tanks to recover temperature sufficiently for the yeast not to be rendered ineffective. We chill the tanks for settling, and then release the temperature control to allow them to slowly increase again. Once they reach about 14°C then we can usually get started (dependent upon the type of yeast that we decide to use).

Finally, at about 8.30pm, the final grapes arrived, kilos calculated, and presses loaded for the last time in 2021. Once the final count was made the quantity of grapes processed was actually more than anticipated, although the volume of juice yielded was almost exactly on target.

Today is yet another sunny day, although from Friday onwards, three days of rain is forecast… we shall see. The good news is that this will almost certainly be our last full day of harvest, unless our picking crew can pull off some miracle. (On the very first day the team established a new bodega record for collecting grapes from pergolas by hand – 24,500 kilos in 8 hours – not bad going!). By the time the rain arrives (assuming that the forecast is correct), we will have everything safely collected, and we will continue with the wine making process, as well as a full programme of deep cleaning.

As the day progressed, we were making some headway, but it very soon became apparent that there might be more picking left for tomorrow, or at least more than we thought. Of course we are quite happy that we have more kilos, which will help to compensate a little for the low yield of grape must at pressing.