Happy Women’s Day! There are an increasing number of women winemakers here in our Rias Baixas denomination, including our very own boss and winemaker, Angela Martin!

In recent times I have noticed that a few reputable journalists have started to question our popular, and sometimes long-held beliefs about wine. Some of the doubts being raised are, for example, the use of points to rate wines, and more recently, the development and definition of ‘natural’ wines.

As you may already know I have never been a big fan of wines being rated or categorised by points – there are just too many possible anomalies. Some fear that the worldwide influence of the points system will eventually mean that certain styles will dominate (and possibly all taste that same), and that lighter wines could lose out, simply because they are less likely to get a attract good scores. Wine shop managers sometimes dismiss ratings as overly simplistic — numbers devoid of context, such as a wine merchant’s sense and knowledge of individual customer tastes. Finally, I have to add that over the years, points and medals have occasionally (in a few proven cases) been abused in order to mislead consumers. Conclusion? That the points system just might not be as effective as we have all come to expect.

It is the lack of official regulation or certification for using the phrase “natural wine” that has now created something of an existential crisis. It’s up to winemakers and those who sell, promote and drink their wines to decide whether a bottle fits the ‘natural’ bill. In an effort to distance themselves from this watered-down, misused and sometimes abused term, some producers who truly work with minimal intervention are now turning their backs on this new movement as a whole. For consumers, that only results in further muddying of a term and ideology that’s already steeped in confusion.

In our business we already have organic, biodynamic and sustainable wine making – the first two of these can be certified, and the third simply relies on producers to use common-sense and mindful wine making practices. However, this should not mean that we abandon or ignore the advances in wine making technology that has been made over the last decades – certainly we all want wines with character, but we also want wines that are reasonably stable and will not fall-apart too quickly!

There is a moment during the fermentation when the grape juice (or must) becomes wine – obviously when the degree of alcohol in the must passes a certain point. This week we have finally reached the end of our fermentation period, and so, without hesitation, we can say that we have wine. Our 2019 albariño “est arrivé”  (as they might say in Beaujolais)! Naturally, we are quite anxious to taste the new wine to see what the harvest has given us, but to be honest, this is probably the most difficult time of their entire evolution to try to pass any definitive judgement. The wine are still cloudy, extremely raw, and full of carbon dioxide (which at this point, is no bad thing, as it helps to preserve the wine and keep it fresh). It will be at least another few weeks before we have our tasting glasses poised, ready to draw any serious conclusions.

In the meantime, our renovation and repair work continues, but as the weather has now taken a turn for the worse (some periods of heavy, wintery rain), we have now moved indoors. In our stock storage cellar, we had a bit of a problem with the penetration of damp, and so, rather than just giving the area a quick lick of paint and hoping for the best, we decided to rip the cement rendering off completely and start again. In today’s photo you can see our guys hard at work doing the preparation work – we are just so lucky to have such flexible and versatile people!

The minute that the last press is emptied, and the last drop of juice is safely delivered to our tanks, the cleaning can begin. And this is a pretty big job because, as I have mentioned many times before, grape juice is very, very sticky!

Every piece of equipment that has been used has to be dismantled, the most difficult of all being our presses. Floors, walls, hoses, tanks (obviously only those that are now empty!) – everything item has to be washed and scrubbed until it is spotless. Today’s photo shows our case washing machine, which whilst never comes into direct contact with the wine or must, is still stripped to its bare skeleton to be cleaned.

Meanwhile, in the cellar, the wine making continues, carefully monitoring the progress of the fermentation, perhaps adjusting the temperature of a tank by a degree or two, to control how quickly it is advancing – nurturing and encouraging each tank like a small child!

At the same time we cannot afford to forget that we also have customer orders to prepare – as I said to someone only today, our job at the moment is like a juggling act – trying to keep everything up-in-the-air and moving along.

These days, a number of people have strong views about the use of sulphur in wine making, indeed, some people have a very low tolerance to it and can suffer side-effects as a consequence. Of course, used at the correct dosage, it is a very effective way to protect wine, preventing oxidation, which is why it has been widely accepted for so long in our industry. The key is using the correct amount. Too little and it won’t really be effective, whilst too much can more or less ‘kill’ a wine completely, so much so that it may never recover.

The presence is always most noticeable when it has just been added. I have no doubt that many a consumer will have received a quick waft of sulphur immediately after pulling the cork. However, given a little time this will dissipate (assuming that the wine hasn’t been over-sulphured)!

A week or two ago we ‘racked’ a few wines from their lees, and transferred them to clean tanks. Any time a wine is moved around the cellar, not only can it lose aroma, but it will also lose a few grams of sulphur too – thereby losing protection at the time it most needs it (during a period of tank storage).

Sulphur is available in a few different forms – one is pure sulphur, which is delivered in tanks and is extremely dangerous. Another is a diluted liquid solution. Usually when a wine requires a significant dose (at the end of fermentation for example) we will use the pure gas form. Whereas when the wine has just been moved and only requires a very small top-up, in this case we prefer the solution form, when we can really be more accurate (the unit of measurement is ppm – parts per million). To put this into perspective, sometimes we may only be adding a few millilitres of sulphur solution to a tank containing 9 or 10,000 litres of wine to move the level by one or two ppm!

As though we could ever forget, wine making is an annual cycle, and often, when I am writing our posts, I feel as though I am repeating myself (which is clearly the case, and not simply down to my old age!).

For example, we have today started to rack the first of our 2018 wines. After around 8 months resting quietly on their lees, we have finally started to transfer the first few tanks – leaving the lees at the bottom, and effectively skimming the clean wine off the top and moving it to clean tanks. Once this process has been completed, then these clean tanks will not be touched or moved again until we prepare them for bottling. The objective being, as always, to restrict the movement and  handling to the absolute minimum, which is of course, fundamental in a white wine cellar (reducing the risk of oxidation as much as humanly possible).

Today’s photo (just in case you had not seen this before), shows the lees left at the bottom of the tank – not pretty and not particularly drinkable either! Despite the fact that it takes the form of a brown/grey sludge with quite a thick consistency, it’s usefulness is still not at an end. This sludge will be collected in containers and sent to our local distillery to be used for making aguardiente. As you may gather, almost nothing is wasted, and everything is re-cycled or re-used wherever possible.

By the way, that is not dirt or rust on the inner walls of the tank, these are simply the tartrate crystals (potassium bitartrate) formed by the cold temperatures used during fermentation and ageing.

In all honesty, we will probably never be able to produce biological, biodynamic or completely ‘natural’ wines here at Castro Martin. Having said that, we do, and always have, used minimal intervention in our entire fruit growing and wine making processes, for as many years as I have been here (and probably long before that). As always, there are two main factors that stop us from overcoming the final obstacles in achieving official certification. Our weather, and at least a few of the controls imposed by our denomination.

For example, no commercially minded person is going to sit back and watch their fruit rot on the vines if there is something that they can do to prevent it – simply for the sake of preserving their biological or biodynamic status. On the one hand, and in certain vintages, it could be a viable option, but year-on-year it would probably be difficult to sustain. (By coincidence I have just introduced a key word – sustainable, and that is exactly how we are classified). We are sustainable producers, in other words we practice ‘mindful winemaking’ – always. always, always with one eye fixed firmly on the environment, and what we can do (within reason), to preserve it.

Of course, I also mentioned the controls of our denomination. By this I mean that if we were to produce a wine completely without filtration (to retain more texture), then if the wine should any single trace of cloudiness or was not crystal clear, then it simply would pass the control tasting and could not be sold as a Rias Baixas wine. This is just one example of the many controls that guide our wine making process.

Apart from only using a very light filtration, one of the steps that we could (and might) take to enhance our wine is to eliminate cold-stabilisation completely. We do this stabilisation to eliminate tartrate, that can, potentially, be precipitated by the tartaric acid in the wine to form (unsightly) tartrate crystals in the bottle. Unfortunately, most people don’t understand that this is actually the very same substance as the cream of tatar that we use in cooking – completely natural and completely harmless. Many consumers simply do not recognise this and could possibly return the bottle as being faulty. Just one of the downsides of minimal intervention.

In the end, it is just not as straightforward as some might think – we can only strive to do our best, whilst respecting the controls and the climate that we have to live with!

Of course, I should have pointed out from the offset, that there is no official recognition or certification for the category of ‘natural wine’ – but clearly, as the name implies, they are simply made in the most natural way possible, with nothing added and as little as possible taken away. As I have mentioned before, the downside can be that the wines themselves are inherently unstable. For example, a natural wine might have no sulphur added (leaving them prone to oxidation), they might not be fined to remove proteins (leading to protein instability and cloudiness in the wine). They are also largely unfiltered – a process that cleans the wine, but also removes body and flavour (according to the type and level of filtration used). In the case of natural white wines, they will certainly not be cold-stabilised (and can therefore develop tartrate crystals in the bottle). If the consumer is happy with this, and accepts a multitude of potential flaws, then why not?

To be honest, all wines are ‘natural’ – certainly they will be manipulated by technology or perhaps ‘chemically’ at some point, but never to the extent where flavourings or colourants would be added. For example, some commercial wines (in some wine growing areas) might allow the addition of grape concentrate to sweeten, or tartaric acid to correct the balance, but even these additions are strictly controlled and limited. (I should add that in the case of albariño, we never need to add acidity – the balance in our wine is simply achieved by chosing the optimum moment to harvest).

Perhaps the only way in which the ‘flavour profile’ of a wine can be manipulated is by the choice of yeast added. For example, in some extreme cases, exotic fruit flavours can be infused into a wine by the use of certain yeasts (which can either mask the natural fruit completely or distort it, almost beyond recognition). At Castro Martin, whilst we are obliged to seed our wines with yeast, we always select a very neutral strain that allows the albariño fruit to shine through. OK, we add yeast, but the flavour of our wine is still natural.

Over my last few posts I have broadly outlined many of the steps that we already take to keep our wine as natural as possible, and in my next post I will talk about possible future developments that we are considering.

A couple of weeks ago we attended a very interesting seminar – ‘Making wines with low SO2 (sulphur dioxide) content’.

One of the most defining characteristics of a ‘natural’ wine is that it will certainly be low in sulphur – sometimes with no added SO2 whatsoever. Added sulphur has two roles to play in a finished wine: Firstly, it acts as a microbicide, killing bacteria or any remaining yeasts that could eventually lead to spoilage. Secondly, it prevents oxidation of the wine, by preventing or reducing interaction of wine with oxygen.

During fermentation yeast will naturally produce a very small amount of SO2 (and so it will always be present), the question is – is this enough to protect a wine in the medium to long-term? For example, it’s worth noting that premature oxidation is actually a very common fault in ‘natural’ wines.

Our seminar talked of this, and offered alternative solutions, products to be used in the grape must to replace SO2, yeast strains that produce very little natural SO2, and pre-bottling additives – all apparently quite natural. We tasted two Spanish white wines from the 2018 vintage made using the low-sulphur products….

When I was a wine buyer, one of the most important issues for me was not only the quality, but mainly the longevity of the wine – looking into its future and trying to imagine how it might evolve. (Bearing in mind that many of my purchasing decisions were made in the producers cellar, tasting raw wine from tanks and barrels). If a wine tasted ready for drinking from the first sip, then the likely hood was that it would not last the course. It is rare that a good or great wine will show it’s true colours during its infancy – and that is where the buyers judgement comes into play.

I say this because of the two 2018 wines in the tasting. They were fine for drinking NOW, very commercial styles, but simply ready to give a bit of ‘instant gratification’. Perhaps perfect for the two wines in question, but not really for our albariño, which can often be consumed two or three years down the road. I’m sorry to say, that we will almost certainly continue with our current policy of adding a little pre-bottling SO2, simply because it works for us, and our export customers (who require an extended shelf-life).