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.

This morning I was in the vineyard behind our Bodega, mostly to check on the progress of our vines. The rain has finally stopped, and the forecast tells us that the week ahead should be bright and dry… we shall see! After such a prolonged period of cold, wet weather we have just made our first, precautionary, treatment of the year, a small dose of sulphur. Clearly, spraying ‘contact’ treatments in wet conditions would be of no use, and a complete waste of both time and money. Now we simply have to take full advantage of the dry conditions. Anyway, it seems that the plants are healthy and that growth is already quite rapid (a combination of sun and moisture in the soil).

Whilst I was surveying the vines I caught sight of our young oak trees, which 12 or 13 years after being mere acorns, have now grown into something much more substantial (see today’s photo). You may not recall, but the significance of these young trees (to us at least) is that the acorns themselves were gathered from the white oaks newly planted at the 9/11 memorial in New York. I guess that, strictly speaking, we maybe should not have imported acorns in our luggage, but to be honest, we are now quite happy that we did.

We have now just passed the Spring Equinox and this weekend it will be time to change our clocks to ‘summertime’.

Having said that, as the Easter weekend approaches, our spring weather continues to be erratic. After a couple of day of warm sunshine, we have now returned to our more usual grey skies, showers and much colder temperatures. The forecast for this holiday week is for rain and more cold weather, which is not great for local tourism as some visitors may well be discouraged from even coming at all.

Of course, Galicia is known as being a part of ‘Green Spain’ where we have far more rainfall than other regions. I truly believe that many foreign visitors to Spain (and also this verdant corner of Spain) come with the preconception that Spain is always hot, that it is the land of “sun, sand and sangria”. As I look out of my window at this moment, I can assure you that nothing could be further from the truth!

From a wine producing point of view, our hope now is that this combination of very cold, wet conditions does not produce hail, as the new buds of this year’s new growth have already appeared in our vineyards. As always, we simply have to keep our fingers crossed.

Back in February I said that, whilst the weather had been warm that it was not exceptional… I was wrong. We have just learned today that February 2024 was the warmest February ever recorded, extending the run of monthly records to nine in a row. This is, of course, can be attributed to global warming (where greenhouse gas emissions are trapping the heat). Temperatures in 2023/2024 were also boosted by an ‘El Niño’ weather event. The warming gases helped to push the monthly average about 1.77C warmer than “pre-industrial” times (before humans started burning large amounts of fossil fuels).

March, however, has seen a drop in temperature – both daytime and during the night. This comes as a slight relief to us in that, had the February trend continued, there was a danger that budding in our vineyards would take place even before pruning is completed – really not good for the plants. Quite apart from that, assuming that this cycle continued we may well have been harvesting our grapes in mid-August, which for our area is unheard of. (Our earliest recorded harvests have been at the very tail-end of August, but never earlier than this).

Unrelated to this was an innocuous accident that took place, whereby our vineyard manager has badly sprained his ankle on his way to work. This was at the very end of January, and he has not worked since then, despite the fact that he is desperate to come back. Winter is one of the busiest times in our vineyards (owing to the pruning), so this really could not have happened at a worse time for us.

It’s been a fairly quiet start to the New Year, although a few customers have been stocking up after the Holidays, which is always welcome at this time of year.

For us, the Christmas and New Year period will go down as the season of techie nightmares! For long periods of the holiday period both Angela and I suffered from both software and hardware issues meaning that we did not have access to our computers and/or files, but each for completely different reasons. Anyway, it appears that these trials and tribulations are mostly behind us, and so we can now move forward into 2024.

January itself was mostly unsettled and quite wet, which, of course, is only to expected in Galicia at this time of year. Having said that, since the end of the month and now into February the temperatures have been unseasonably warm, up to a high of around 21°C (70°F). Whilst this is not particularly extreme, it only goes to show how variable and unpredictable our weather can be, and also that forecasts these days, are not always accurate.

Whilst the sunshine itself is quite welcome, the warmth is not good for our vineyards. This should be a dormant period, and the danger is, that if these very mild conditions persist, then the vines themselves might start to bud too early, exposing them to the threat of frost should temperatures suddenly fall.

After two months of rain, it appears that the last two weeks of December might actually be a little more pleasant. Cold, but at least dry and sunny. Indeed, in the last few days we have seen our first frosts of winter, which are always welcomed in our vineyards as a way of killing at least a few pests. These cold temperatures also reduce the vine’s metabolic activity, conserving energy that can be used for growth and fruit production during over the coming year.

Inside the bodega it has been slightly traumatic in the last week or two. My business laptop overheated (a replacement battery was at fault, although at least it didn’t explode, as sometimes can happen!). The keyboard was damaged and so I have been working with a USB keyboard and no battery at all ever since. Finding a new laptop is more difficult than you would think. It is almost impossible to buy a new laptop in Spain with an English keyboard. To cut a long story short I bought one in the Republic of Ireland, which I am now still in the midst of setting up.

On top of all this the WhatsApp account on Angela’s mobile phone was hacked a day or two ago. This might not sound to bad, but the hackers can do a lot more damage than you might think and trying to contact WhatsApp by any means is more or less futile. They simply send you into a loop of never ending, and mostly useless suggestions. In the meantime the hackers are soliciting money from Angela’s contacts by any number of different rouses. The lesson is quite clear – NEVER click on any link in any message unless you know that it is completely legitimate.

After all these trials and tribulations the only thing now left to say is, enjoy the Holidays and have a healthy, safe and Happy New Year.

So, it seems like the end of the 2023 marathon has finally arrived. It has been a campaign fraught with difficulties, starting with the technical problems of our two very first presses, to our steadily depleting picking team (towards the end). To be brutally honest it has been long and exhausting and I’m sure that every single member of our team will be looking forward to getting home and putting their feet up – I can hear the sighs of relief from every side!

Of course, as I explain ever year, on the final day, we have to wait until every grape is inside the bodega and weighed before we can load the final presses. Obviously we don’t want to be left with an odd pallet of grapes that we can’t press. The minimum capacity of our smallest press is 3,000 kg and so every kilo has to be calculated and evenly distributed to make full loads.

Early assessment of the wine is good, supported by well balanced analyses from our lab. Good concentration of fruit, surprising viscous (despite the recent rains), albeit with an average alcohol a little lower than last year. We estimate somewhere between 12% and 12.5%.

Now that everything is done in the vineyards our undivided attention shifts to the cellar, seeding and monitoring fermentations for the next couple of weeks.

Well, we’re still here…. the harvest that keeps giving and giving, which is actually a euphemism for saying ‘never ending’. After so many days I feel like I am running out of things to say.

The weather is good, and our (smallish) team of pickers are working flat out to try to bring this year’s campaign to an end. As I have mentioned in one of my previous posts there is an acute shortage of experienced people this year. Luckily the core or our picking team are very loyal to us and work extremely hard. Unfortunately other bodegas have not been quite so lucky. We hear tales of groups abandoning the job mid-harvest as they discover that a neighbouring bodega is paying a euro or two more. These days it feels like the main consequence of these things is always financial – last year bodegas were obliged to pay a top price for their grapes, whereas this year it is for the pickers. Post Covid we have been hit with every possible type of increase. Grapes, pickers, transport and every single element of our packaging, all at a time when end consumers have much tighter budgets to work with.

I think I mentioned that many of our pickers also work in the sea, gathering seafood. The evidence of this is clear when you see their improvised lunch table. On an upturned grape case, they set up their small stoves and today, tuck into one of my very favourite types of shellfish – razor clams, or ‘navajas’ as they are known locally.

Despite the slow progress outside, our work inside the cellar continues as more tanks are seeded.

It looks like the bad weather is finally behind us, and so we should now simply be able to concentrate on final days of harvest and winemaking.

On the subject of winemaking, today is a very busy day down in our tank room. Racking several tanks and seeding three more, which for a bodega of our size means a lot of work. The racking process is comparatively simple, as I have explained many times in the past. The ‘seeding’ process (adding yeast to support the fermentation), is, by contrast, quite a long and drawn out procedure when done correctly.

The first phase of seeding is to rehydrate the yeast, very much as you would do in baking. Simply add water, at body temperature (about 37°C or 98°F), and leave for at least 10 minutes (left hand photo). Once the yeast is rehydrated we start to add grape must from the tank, bringing down the temperature in small increments. To goal is to reduce the yeast mixture to within about 5°C of the tank that we are seeding. For example, if the tank to be seeded is at 15°C, we need to reduce the yeast mixture to about 20°C before we can add it to the tank. The problem is that we cannot simply add the cool grape must to the yeast in one go, a huge and sudden change of temperature would simply kill the yeast. This is why we add the grape must slowly, bit by bit, stopping between additions to allow the yeast to recover. During this process, and once the first grape juice is added to the warm yeast mixture, it immediately reacts with the sugar and produces a thick foam (sometimes depending on the strain of yeast used). The two middle pictures show the foam, and the last picture is an artwork by Angela, adding the initials of our business!

To be honest, I wasn’t sure whether to call this Day 8 or Day 9 of our harvest. Yesterday, apart from some work in the cellar, our picking was halted for bad weather. Forecasts on Friday said that we should expect heavy rain for most of the day, whereas the reality was that it rained during the night, but by mid-morning it had stopped and then remained completely dry (and even quite sunny by the afternoon). Having said that, it was good to give our people a rest, as with a smaller team, they have all been working that bit harder.

On a bright sunny Sunday morning we re-launched our campaign, with the hope that in a couple of days we should be finished (hopefully sometime between now and Christmas!!).

Today we picked one or two of our smaller, more local vineyards (probably just over 1km from the bodega). Using a combination of tractors, vans and a small truck we actually managed to move everything into our grape reception quite quickly. With the presses working all afternoon the end result was that our bodega team did not need to work half of the night, and they were probably all at home, safely tucked up in bed by midnight!