Well, it would be true to say that our blog has been a little abandoned this winter, but actually this is mainly because once the holidays are behind us, there is really not too much to write about! Apart from sending out orders, the only main activity has been pruning (although I feel that this subject has been pretty much exhausted over the years!) Anyway, this is thankfully now behind us for another year and our vineyards are primed and now ready for some warm spring sunshine (see today’s photo).

The month of February was quite cold and damp, but although it rained on quite a number of days, there didn’t appear to be too many days that produced heavy, saturating rain. Many days of light rain and drizzle, and also the fine ‘mizzle’ that hangs in the air and sticks to your clothes. Yes, we had some stormy days, with high winds and driving rain, but overall I wouldn’t classify this winter as being overly wet (perhaps the stats will prove me wrong?). March has started with a number of bright, sunny days, but with deceptively chilly breezes and temperatures not much higher that 15° or 16°C (almost 60°F). As a result, there is no real sign of budding just yet, but probably starting very soon.

Our 2024 wines are, of course, still sitting quietly on their lees, and have been subject to regular tasting by Angela and myself. They still look quite promising, and we will soon have to plan the different permutations of tanks for blending. (Yes, we do blend tanks, even with just one single varietal, to give our customers some ‘uniformity of style’ across the coming year, each tank being slightly different to the next).

Well, Albariño Day is finally over and normal life in the town of Cambados has been restored (where the majority of activities are centred). On the day itself (1st August) I was, as always, first in line at the door of the ‘Tunnel of Wine’ where visitors have a unique opportunity to taste many of the regions different albariños all in one place. There are more than 150 wines on show, and so I usually split my tasting over two morning sessions.

I consider myself to be a professional taster, and as such I feel compelled to make notes on every wine that I try (good or bad). Also, and I find this surprisingly unusual, I am one of the very few people in the room that actually spits after tasting! Heaven only knows what happens to other people and whether they are still standing by the end of each session, but I never really hang around for long enough to find out. Taste and gone, like some sort of wine Superhero!

Strangely, the combined act of tasting, making notes and spitting is so rare that it attracts quite of lot of attention, from those who are simply curious but also from the Press. I am sometimes very aware that there are cameras focused, and this attention did culminate in being interviewed on camera twice. Prior to that I had also pre-recorded a couple of videos that were sent to influencers in the UK, and were quite widely shown around the internet on Albariño Day. Internet fame for me has arrive at a very late age! Attached is one of the videos premiered on the day, but that was actually recorded in February (hence the heavy clothing!)

Breaking News!

DECANTER WORLD WINE AWARDS 2024

Once again our Castro Martin Family Estate has been recognised for it’s quality. In the extremely tough, well-judged and highly respected World Wine Awards, it has been awarded 92 points and a Silver Medal.

This wine had already received 91 points at a tasting of Spanish Wines in Decanter just a few months ago (so both they, and the wine, are at least consistent!).

Another top accolade of  93 points came from Tim Atkin MW, who also rated the wine as ‘Best value white wine of the year’.

92 points were also awarded by both the Wine Enthusiast (in the U.S) and the Guia Gourmets 2024 (here in Spain). Not a bad haul for one vintage!

The other good news is that we also still have stock of this wine to sell!

After spending six months resting on their lees the first wines of 2023 are now being prepared. However, as we still have good stocks of our (fantastic) 2022 Castro Martin Family Estate, the tanks which have been selected for this special wine will not be touched, perhaps for another few months at least.

Although we only make a mono-varietal albariño wine not every tank is identical, there are many variations, usually dependant upon the original source vineyard used to make each tank. For this reason, we always select a number of tanks according to their different attributes – flavours, textures, structure, balance etc.

I always equate this process to cooking, taking a number of ‘ingredients’ and trying to imagine how they might compliment each other when put together, but even more importantly, how they might evolve over time. There is a lot of trial and error involved, based almost entirely on the taste of each sample blend that we try. Once the final mix is decided, it is then down to the ‘simple’ task of moving thousands of litres of wine around the cellar, akin to one huge game of chess!

Of course, these wines need to be racked into clean tanks anyway (to separate the clean wine from their lees), and so by blending at this moment we can actually kill two birds with one stone (and thus minimise the number of times that each tank is moved). In some cases, these wines may never be moved again until they are actually bottled.

To be honest, blending is one of my favourite jobs of the year as there is always a great deal of satisfaction in tasting the ‘finished’ wines (after allowing some days for the individual component wines to marry together completely).

Meanwhile, in the vineyards, it is time to grub up and replant a few vines. These may have come to the end of their working life or perhaps simply started to die off, which sometimes happens. The weather over the last three weeks or so has been must better, with dry, sunny days many of which were tempered a little by cold easterly or northerly winds. Unfortunately, this is set to change in the coming days as yet more rain looms just over the horizon.

Since the very first time that I tasted the grape must of our 2022 vintage I must confess that I was very enthusiastic (or perhaps it would be fairer to say that, at that point, I thought it had great potential). We had enjoyed some pretty good vintages in both 2019 and 2020, although I have to say that I was never completely enamoured with our 2021’s (which was quite a difficult year).

A year or more down the road, after several months on its lees followed by a few months in bottle our 2022 is only just now starting to show its real identity. (I have said for a long time that it really takes a year from harvest, for our wines to realise their potential, and our 2022 Castro Martin certainly does not disappoint).

In Tim Atkin’s recent, and very comprehensive review of the 2022 vintage in Rias Baixas, he awarded our Castro Martin Family Estate 93 points and commented: “Unfiltered and lees-aged, this unwooded Albariño hails from Salnés Valley vineyards grown on a combination of granite, schist and sandy soils. Fuller flavoured and more textured than
the 2021 release, it has notes of oatmeal, pear, lime and kiwi fruit and the focus and salinity that come with the territory in this part of Rías Baixas.” He recommends drinking between now and 2027, clearly showing great faith in its ageing potential.

Apart from this positive review and the points, our Castro Martin also appeared on Tim’s ‘Podium’ of awards for different categories of the 2022 vintage. He rated this wine as ‘Value White Wine of the Year’ (bearing in mind that many of the wines above ours in the general ratings are premium cuvées, older vintages, limited editions and special elaborations, that attract a much, much higher price in the market. As a former wine buyer myself I am very proud of this accolade as  we always preach that quality/value is a very key point in the philosophy of our Bodega.

Of course, this score can be added to the 92 points that we also received for our Family Estate 2022 in the Guía Vino Gourmets 2024. I highly recommend that you buy a bottle (or two) to savour with your favourite marisco!

I think that after publishing so many posts during the harvest I have been suffering from a bit of ‘writers block’. On several occasions since the harvest I have been sitting in front of my screen, trying to think of something to say. Of course, there are a number of things that I could have written about, the weather, the new wine and important Consello meetings to name just a few, but putting something into words has been difficult. So let’s have a try!

Since finishing the picking our weather has been changeable, if not typical for the time of year. The first few weeks after harvest were, somewhat ironically, dry and warm, but then around the middle of October the picture changed completely. It has been raining every day with just a couple of storms thrown in for good measure. There has hardly been any sunshine worthy of note. Perhaps we should just be thankful that we have not actually suffered from any flooding, as has occurred in many other places.

Inside the cellar, we have been tasting our 2023’s (on one occasion with a group of Irish visitors), and the consensus seems to be that the wines are really quite good, and certainly better than we originally anticipated. With all the complications caused by the poor weather this year our expectations were really quite modest, and so, if I am being honest, we have actually been pleasantly surprised by the result.

Thankfully another bright day to continue our campaign. Most of our more distant vineyards (no more than 10km) have been completed, and now we are working a little nearer to home. This being the case it makes transporting our fruit much more easily. Today we are not relying on any big trucks, but have reverted to our more ‘traditional’ method of a shuttle between the bodega and the vineyards using our tractors and vans. The downside of this is that we are moving individual cases by hand rather that using pallets and forklifts in the vineyard. In this way, it is a bit more labour intense, but then on the upside, with smaller, more regular grape deliveries it means that we can keep our presses ‘fed’ and working. (Using the truck method, we have periods of inactivity, until suddenly, we are faced with a delivery of 14 full pallets – about 10,000 kg).

Today we picked our ‘Bodega’ vineyard, just a small 1 hectare plot surrounding the wine cellar. Our tractors shuttle grapes straight into the grape reception, and so from picking to the presses can almost be measured in minutes, rather than hours! If only all of our vineyards we so close, it would make logistics a whole lot easier (and many a bit cheaper too).

Of course, the advantage of not having to wait very long for our fruit to arrive is that we can load the presses much earlier than some other days, especially when we are waiting for growers to deliver their crop at the end of their working day. Instead of finishing the presses in the early hours of the morning, our last press was completed shortly after midnight (albeit there is still quite a lot of cleaning to do after that).

Today’s photo shows the ‘bagazo’, or pomace as it is known in English. This is simply the remnants of the grape bunches after pressing (sent to the distillery to make ‘aguardiente’ (eau de vie or grappa in other countries).

Well, last weekend we celebrated the annual Albariño Festival here in Galicia, or in Cambados to be more precise. The programme of events included one of my very favourite tastings of the year, when it is possible to taste more than 150 wines (mostly albariño) under one roof. It is known as the Tunnel of Wine, and has grown in popularity over the last 12 years, since the idea was originally conceived. Entry is now controlled to a maximum number of tasters during each session, but for me the solution is, and always has been, to arrive early and start at 11am prompt when the doors open. In this way I can normally taste in relative peace and quite for the first hour or so, and by that time I usually completed a few tables and so am well away from the entrance door.

I think that I have always said, since my very first taste of the tanks, that I consider the 2022 vintage to be pretty good, and this was indeed reflected in my notes. Overall the standard of 2022 wines is quite a bit higher than 2021 (which, after all, had proved to be quite a difficult vintage), and I believe that there were quite a few potential stars in the making – including our own Castro Martin wines, of course!

As more and more consumers are coming to realise, albariño wines from the Rias Baixas denomination can, and do improve with age, albeit some much better than others (it really depends on the producer and the style of wine they make). I fully believe however, that our own Family Estate wine could evolve into something really exceptional over the next year or two. Only time will tell.

At this time of year (apart from the pruning) perhaps one of the most important jobs in the bodega is quite simply to taste the tanks. As I have mentioned many times before our 2022 wines are resting quietly on their lees, but even so it is vitally important to monitor their progress – like keeping an eye on sleeping baby. (You assume that no harm will come to them, but you still need to make sure, if only for peace of mind).

Of course, things can go wrong, for example if the lees are not clean, they can impart off flavours to the new wine. Then we are also looking out for ‘reduction’. Reduction occurs mainly during fermentation when the yeasts are short of nitrogen, or become stressed. Having said that not all reduction is bad, there are also some important wine aroma compounds that form a part of the otherwise volatile sulphur compounds.

OK, so I don’t really want to get too technical, but suffice to say that these are some of the potential problems that we have to look out for.

On the plus side, I still think that our 2022 wines are really good, and have a great future – but there is one slight caveat to that statement. We will have to wait for them to show their full potential. Naturally, they still have another two or three months on the lees, before we will even start to disturb them, but certainly, in the case of the 2022 vintage, the longer we can wait the better.