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.

After 2½ months of almost incessant rain, we finally have a break. The last few days have been cold with bright blue sky, and the forecast for the coming days is for more of the same. Although the rainfall has been persistent, we are probably quite lucky that we did not suffer too many extreme downpours that could have caused flooding. (In this respect, I am referring specifically to the Rias Baixas region, as other parts of Spain have not fared quite so well).

Today’s picture shows the Ria of Pontevedra (located about 10km south of our bodega), just as the cloud begins to break and bright sunlight bursts through…. a most welcome sight, especially for our heroic team still working hard on the pruning no matter what the conditions.

Inside the bodega itself there is not too much activity. There has been a very welcome trickle of export orders, especially as January can be a particularly lean month. The 2022 wines themselves are resting quietly on their lees, and our regular tastings still do not disappoint.

With the harvest now well and truly behind us, activity in the bodega is still quite frenetic. At harvest time all other activity stops – no bottling, no labelling, our mission is focused purely on collecting and processing grapes. Consequently, as soon as the picking comes to an end and the winemaking is under way, we can then turn our attention to our other day-to-day work.

Today’s picture shows a corner of our warehouse that was completely emptied to create additional working space for the harvest. The top photo, taken shortly after harvest, shows the area after deep cleaning. The bottom picture shows the very same space as it is today, full of orders ready to be collected. As you can imagine, our bottling line has been working overtime (although that’s not unusual at this time of year).

With the fermentation of our 2022 wine coming to an end, we recently lined up samples of each tank side-by-side in order to taste our new crop. It’s actually quite a difficult exercise, even for an experienced taster, as naturally, the wines are still very raw. However, the really interesting fact is that, even at this early stage, the differences between the wines harvested from our different vineyard locations is already starting to emerge. The vinification techniques that we use are the same for every tank and so the apparent differences really do come from the provenance of the fruit. Without going into specific detail, it has to be said that we are pretty happy with the overall result. We are still optimistic that 2022 could be very good. Patience is now the key, in order to see if our babies evolve into the mature adults that we really wish them to be!

A few days ago I was a guest on a ‘digital tasting’ organised by Tim Atkin MW. Tim had visited our bodega a couple of weeks earlier, and during our conversation I had described our recent weather as a bit topsy-turvy (upside down, or in a state of confusion). Little did I know that Tim would quote me on this during his introduction.

In the last couple of days, since this Zoom tasting (all the participants were sent sample bottles), there has been yet another example of the extremes of our recent, crazy weather. On Saturday temperatures hit about 36°C (97°F) and our local beaches were packed (for those who could stand the heat). On Sunday the cloud rolled in, and by Sunday afternoon, through until Monday, the thermometer never hit much more that 16°C (61°F) – less than half of the previous days temperature. This was accompanied  by a very fine ‘mizzle’ hanging in the air (a cross between a light drizzle and mist from the Ocean).

Today, Tuesday, we are bracing ourselves, with a forecast high of more that 40°C (104°F). This temperature is expected to continue at least until the weekend. Having said that, a week of two ago most of Spain was affected by these high temperatures, but luckily, our small, isolated corner of northwest Spain had pretty much escaped. This week it appears that we are not quite so lucky.

Back in April the process for selecting Galicia’s best wines was launched by the Xunta de Galicia. Wineries from every Denomination Ribeiro, Valdeorras, Rías Baixas, Monterrei and Ribeira Sacra, were invited to submit their wines, as well as the ‘Viños da Terra’ from other Galician communities. There were special categories for small, boutique wineries, oak-aged wines, sparkling wines, ecological wines and even ‘toasted’ wines (although I have to admit that I am not entirely clear as to what that last category actually represents, I usually associate this with oak-aged).

A blind tasting of the 405 entries was held in Santiago de Compostela last week, judged by a panel of some 20 experts, including our very own winemaker, Angela. As a member of the official tasting panel of the D.O. Rias Baixas Angela was invited to adjudicate at the event, over a period of 4 days. Naturally each session was divided into regions and categories, and each session comprised of between 20 and 30 samples.

Tastings like this might sound like a fairly glamorous experience, but I can tell you, from my previous life as a buyer, intense tastings like this is actually very demanding, both physically and mentally. To do the job well, and professionally, requires total concentration from the very first wine, to the very last – every wine must be given a fair and equal opportunity, even if your palate starts to feel a little jaded.