The longest day, but the shortest summer

Please don't get me wrong, I am not announcing that summer is over already, but having just celebrated the longest day of the year (21st June in the Northern Hemisphere), we now look forward to possibly our shortest summer.

Our calendar for summer 2011 will have to be altered dramatically, as we plan for the early harvest. The first thing to disappear will be the planned closure of the Bodega for one week in August. Indeed, the week that we wanted to close may well end up being the week that we start to pick, so I guess that I might have to ask our team to work instead!

But the preparations for harvest actually start much earlier than that....

Not only do we have to order all the materials that we need, but obviously we have to ensure that we have enough space in our tanks to receive the new wine, and this usually involves a programme of bottling to create a bit of spare capacity.

As the wine has to pass through cold stabilisation, filtration etc. before it is bottled this also takes time and forward planning, and so working backwards from the anticipated harvest date, it means that we will probably have a very short summer indeed.

To finish on a more positive note, at least I will save on a bit of sun cream this year!

Time for wine

Over the last couple of months we have been 'tarting up' the entrance hall to our wine cellar, and you my recall my post about a huge photo montage that I set up on one of the walls.

Perhaps inspired by my wife Angela, and the fact that she is always late for everything (a woman's prerogative I think they call it), I have now created a huge clock on one of the other walls!

But this is no ordinary clock lifted out of a box - it is my very own creation. To be honest I don't recall where the idea came from, but the concept is really quite simple. The numbers are replaced by wine bottles. This apparently 'simple' concept was however, much more difficult to translate into reality.... To begin with cutting the bottles in half proved to be almost impossible, and then sticking them to the wall was also quite a problem. It's possibly not until you actually cut a bottle in half and see its profile, that you realise how fragile it really is, and suffice to say that applying glue to a thin, sharp rim of glass is no easy task either, requiring the patience of a saint (I have to admit, not one of my greatest virtues).

So, after a couple of hours with a glue gun, not to mention my very sticky fingers, you can now see the result.

I wonder if this will mean that Angela will be on time in the future? Probably not!

Home made

Our recently refurbished out building used to be accessed by a pair of old wooden doors, which, quite frankly, were falling apart.

We asked one of guys, Fran, if he could come up with something better, and the picture above shows what he made. Please bear in mind that this door was not bought from some Do-It-Yourself warehouse, but was made completely by hand, from scratch!

To be honest, if it was me, I wouldn't know where to begin, but some of our guys have a natural talent when it comes to this type of thing and I think that this effort proves exactly what I mean.

Obviously Fran is quite skilled with a welding torch, so perhaps if I buy him a few pieces of scrap metal and give him a picture of an Aston Martin he just might be able to come up with something......

Our 2010 albariño - still under wraps

OK, so it's yet another very bad play on words...... The fact is that we are currently having the tank rooms repainted in our bodega, and as you can see, all the tanks have been covered with plastic sheeting. There's not too much action in our cellar at the moment as we leave the wine to relax slowly on it's lees. It might be April or May before we finally start to 'disturb' the tanks again, so what better time to take advantage and give the place a fresh lick of paint?

If you have seen any previous posts relating to our tank room, you will already know that the walls were previously a sort of loud, orangey-yellow colour, which I guess you could argue brightened up the place a bit. However, the choice of colours on the special humidity/mould resistant paint chart is probably even more conservative than that of the Mercedes-Benz range, so inevitably we have opted for grey.

At least you won't need to wear sun glasses inside the wine cellar when you visit us in future!

Wonder Wall

The front of our Bodega is south facing, and during the peak summer months is not only one of the hottest places on earth, but is also one of the brightest. I think that to call it a 'sun trap' would be something of an understatement, and I'm surprised that my car tyres have not melted before now..... you get the general idea - it's hot and very sunny.

One of the downsides of this used to be that the minute you stepped in through our front door, you were immediately faced with a very stark contrast (and not only in temperature). I think it would be fair to say that our entrance hall was a little bit dull, with not too much much natural light, and also a style of decor was just a little bit dated and on the drab side. Entering from the very bright sunlight it did not exactly lift your spirits!

Of course, all that has changed. A lick of fresh white paint, some drastically improved lighting, and a huge montage of brightly coloured photos on our wall, now add a bit of sunshine to our interior too.

This new selection of photos actually serves two purposes; not only does it add to the colour, but it also includes various pictures of the cellar and vineyards at work. So if you happen to be visting on a dark day in the middle of November, you can still get an impression of how Castro Martin looks at brighter and busier times of year.

Just as a footnote for any budding photographers amongst our readers - my pictures were actually printed and mounted in Germany, using a company called Whitewall. They offer a very wide selection of frames and mountings using only top quality materials. For example, we opted for original photo prints with aluminium backing (Lambda print on Fujicolor crystal archive paper with UV foil protection). Whitewall also provide their customers with a very efficient professional colour management service, and all at a very reasonable cost.

And no, before you ask, they are not paying me any commission!

From shed to warehouse

We live a very dull and sheltered life here in Galicia, where simple things (such as renovating an old outbuilding),  become just a little more exciting and important than they probably should. To give you an example, the highlight of our weekend could be a visit the town centre of Barrantes to watch the traffic lights change or perhaps a visit to the local supermarket...... as you may surmise, not much happens here in this quiet corner of Spain, and more especially in winter!

What I guess I am trying to say is that you're probably all quite bored with my story of rebuilding our 'garden shed', but I did at least felt compelled to bring this tale to some sort of logical conclusion.

Above, you can see the rather dramatic transformation - from a pretty run down, delapidated storage area, with old wooden beams, exposed brick walls and a leaky roof, into something altogether a bit more modern, weatherproof and presentable.

It all goes to show that our work here is not always as glamourous as you might think!

Castro Martin - the mother of all bodegas

A few years ago Bodegas Castro Martin celebrated 25 years in it's current location (built in 1981, first vintage in 1982), although Angela's family had been vinifying albariño for generations before that.

In 2010 Galicia's largest and best known co-operative Martin Codax also celebrated 25 years since their foundation, back in the year 1985. To celebrate this special anniversary they published a magazine which included a lengthy article written by the co-op's first President - Manuel Noya Figueroa.

Imagine our delight to read in this article an acknowledgement of the help given by Castro Martin in the birth of Martin Codax, and therefore in the development of the denomination as a whole.

We have always been very proud of the foresight shown by Angela's father Domingo Martin Morales in building one of the first 'industrial' sized bodegas in the area - also the first to incorporate stainless steel tanks for wine storage in Rias Baixas. Very few people will realise however, that these futuristic facilities were also utilized by what was to become, the regions biggest co-operative.

Before the building of Martin Codax was completed, their first vintage was bottled by hand and then transported to Castro Martin in cars and small trucks to be corked (obviously the prevention of oxidation was less of a priority at that time)!

I should also mention that in 1985 Castro Martin was already an established name in the area, and Angela believes that it was not a co-incidence that this new co-operative decided to incorporate the name Martin in their brand......

And the roof goes on....

Last week we removed the roof from one of our outbuildings, and replaced all the lintels with something a bit more substantial, as you can see from my photo. The concrete looks a bit more secure than the old tree trunks that we took down!

Being on the Atlantic coast as we are, there can be some pretty fierce storms during the winter, not to mention the high winds that accompany them. The previous roof was very much on its last legs, and was already supported by a couple of jacks, and so its replacement was pretty much imperative before the onset of winter.

And speaking of weather (as I always do), the sky over Galicia is still blue and the amount of rain since June remains as truly minimal. Not that I'm wishing it upon us, but it really does have to change soon.

Roofless, but not toothless....

I was going to try to attract some additional attention to our blog by putting in a title such as 'Castro Martin goes topless', but then I discovered that I had already used it (a couple of years ago when we had our tanks repaired, and the workmen had to cut all the tops off ). Believe it or not, it does, temporarily at least, increase the traffic to our site as web surfers use their search engines to look for more interesting pictures. Imagine their disappointment when all they get is a wide angle shot of one of our old storage sheds with no roof!

Now, speaking of old sheds (or perhaps I should call it an out-building) the one that we are currently re-building looks like it could easily date from biblical times. It is in such a poor state of repair, which is why we decided to work on it before it fell down. Joking apart, the roof beams (made from bare tree trunks), have been supported by jacks for some time now, and although the building is only used for storage, it had actually become a little dangerous. It is doubtful that it would have survived another stormy Galician winter.

As you will see from the photo, we decided to take advantage of the continued good weather, by ripping the old roof off before some new concrete beams are delivered later this week. Once the roof is back on, we can then make the interior a bit more presentable by slapping a bit of plaster on the inside walls. Of course, this old building is tucked away at the back of the bodega, and will never receive visitors, but even so, it will give us an excuse to keep the place a bit more tidy in the future.....

Busy, busy

I am very aware that I have not made any posts for several days. After all the activity and numerous posts during the harvest, our blog has fallen silent. There is only one reason for this, and that is quite simply that we have been mega-busy in the bodega with the wine making process.

I am fairly sure that I have already mentioned we have more grapes this year, and this leads us to one simple equation. More grapes = more grape must, more grape must = more tanks, more tanks = more work. Every single tank has to undergo exactly the same number of processes - settling, racking, seeding, tank additions etc., etc., and this is all very time consuming. Of course I should also mention that wine making is no respecter of weekends either, and we often find ourselves here for several hours on Saturdays and Sundays. Now, I just want to make it clear that I am not looking for sympathy here, but simply want to emphasise to our friends and customers that when I say that Angela and I are very "hands-on", we mean quite literally that - we always seem to have our hands in the must - after all, these are our babies.......

The work itself is often very physical, and nearly always messy - going home each day, clothes splashed with grape juice and other wine-making related materials (most of which are usually quite sticky too). Our washing machine also works overtime during the harvest!

So when we talk about "hand-made" and "family estate", you need to know that our wine is exactly what is says on the label - made with lots of TLC.

By the way, just in case you were wondering, the picture shows a very unusual pattern created on the top of one of our tanks during fermentation. Whilst I am sure that there must be some reason why the foam has formed such a pattern, I have to confess that I don't know what it is - perhaps I will ask Angela if she has an explanation........... maybe they are the wine equivalent of crop circles?

Last minute chores

With only a week or two to go now we continue with our programme of pre-harvest chores - sometimes catching up with a few of the jobs you have been planning to do, but never quite got around too. One such job is laying a bit of concrete......

There's actually something quite satisfying about putting down concrete, adding a new part to the building and its surroundings that will hopefully be around for years to come. This time we have made a small improvement to the entrance of our grape reception, making it just a shade easier for the grape-laiden vehicles to enter during the coming weeks.

As you may notice, our fashion conscious vineyard manager David is modelling this autumn's latest uniform, incorporating some rather fetching 3/4 length pants, revealing just a modest amount of bare ankle (either that of he is growing rather too quickly for his age). Actually, the truth is probably more to do with the prolonged period of baking weather that we have been experiencing over the last couple of months - it's hot work out in the finca!

We're back!

OK, so I acknowledge that I am the 'king of corny jokes', and probably leave many people wincing when they discover my twisted sense of humour for the first time, but I can assure you that my story this morning was not in any way staged or planned in advance......

I always intended to write something witty about our return to work with 'batteries fully charged' and ready for the forthcoming harvest, but then one of my batteries went and died on me!

It seems like my car (that I had barely used last week) decided to take an extended break, and so my eagerness to get back to work was curtailed slightly when my engine failed to start this morning. Fortunately I have a set of jump leads and was able to make my way to the Bodega with only the minimum of delay. Suffice to say that my car is now charging, albeit that I had to dismantle half of the boot (trunk) to get to the battery.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, we still have a little bottling and labelling to finish before we start on the pre-harvest deep clean, and the other news is that today we have our first real rain for several weeks. We have had a little 'mizzle' in the last day or two, but today we are enjoying a good shower of rain. One or two days of gentle rain at this point will not go amiss, as this will only benefit the vines that have been suffering during the extended hot period - a return to fine weather in a couple of days would then be perfect......

We have our fingers crossed.

Steam power - the green option?

Without too much to do except wait for the grapes to ripen in the vineyards we decided to have a clear out in one of the buildings at the back of the Bodega.

Hidden in a corner we discovered an old pump, which had probably been earmarked for the scrapyard - but we have since decided to give it a new lease of life....

At the front of the bodega we used to have a couple of old barrels, intended purely as a bit of decoration. Unfortunately, the ravages of the Galician weather have taken their toll on the wood, and eventually they simply started to fall apart. It was my original intention just to prepare a couple of replacements, but then we came across this old engine which seemed like a much more attractive and permanent solution.

A couple of coats of paint later it has now been installed in its new home immediately adjacent to our front door, not exactly restored to its former glory, but looking rather resplendent nonetheless.

I have to confess that as the front area of our bodega is open to the road, we have taken the precaution of bolting and welding this new addition to a rather large piece of concrete!

Holiday reminder...

There are still many businesses in Spain (and other hot, European countries) that either close entirely for the month of August, or at the very least, run a reduced service for their customers. Until now, we have not been one of them....

Of course we are not closing for a whole month, but instead will 'dip our toe in the water' by closing for just one week to see how it goes. Make a note in your diary - we will be closed from Monday 16th August for one week, re-opening the following Monday, 23rd.

As I have already mentioned quite recently, we are now busy bottling wine, and so if orders do arrive whilst we are away, using this additional stock, we will be able to prepare them very quickly upon our return. Personally, I will be carrying my Blackberry, so will be able to respond to urgent mails, so the only noticeable difference might be that we will not answer the phone, and you may have to leave a message.

We will try it this year and see what happens....

The harvest gets under way

I imagine that today's blog title might have grabbed your attention! Harvest? In July? What on earth is he talking about? Green harvest?

OK, so I confess, I don't actually mean the harvest itself, but rather the preparations for the 2010 picking, which are under way in the bodega. The last of the 2009 wines have just been racked from their lees, and over the next four weeks we will start a programme of bottling - not only to give us sufficient stock to see us through, but also to start freeing up a few tanks in anticipation of the new vintage.

To be honest there is actually quite a bit of planning that goes into this, as there are certain tanks that we favour for use during the harvest (usually those closest to the pressing room). The trick is that after all the current movements between tanks, we end up with the right amount of space..... in the right place.

Of course we also have to take into account that, because of the extended ageing period of our "sobre lias" wines, we still have quite a high percentage of  the 2009 vintage in the cellar, and so we can't possibly manage our wine movements without a good deal of forethought. Logistically, it is not quite as easy as you might assume, especially as we go out of our way to move our wines as little as possible. Moving wine = contact with the air = potential oxidation.

And there was you thinking that I spend my summer on the beach!

Albariño 'Lite'

Albariño - gives you wings!

The other day we made an experimental bottling, for the first time using a new, slightly lighter bottle. Believe it or not, this was as the result of a number of requests from customers wanting to reduce their carbon footprint. Of course the idea is that (depending on the configuration) a pallet of wine can now weigh as much as 100kg less than it did before, and subsequently the amount of fuel used to haul it from country to country is reduced in direct proportion.

The secret was to find a bottle that not only looked as good, but also felt like a quality bottle despite the reduction in weight...... we await the reaction of our customers - hence that reason that I classified this as an experimental bottling.

The funny part of the story is that whilst I was explaining this to one of our guys in the bottling line, he jokingly suggested that we should make an Albariño 'Lite' to go with the new bottle - but having said that, I believe Albariño can already be classified as a light wine. That's not to say that it has no flavour or body, but it's really more a question of the level of alcohol - our wine never really exceeds 12.5% alc. but more usually hovers around the 11.5% - 12.0% level.

For me this has always been one of the great selling points of our wine, the fact that two people can sit down over a meal, and happily share a full bottle without emerging staggering or even remotely hungover. Alternatively it can be enjoyed as an aperitif, sitting in front of the TV watching England win the World Cup (in my dreams)!

P.S. My tip for the Mondiale 2010 is actually Spain..... forever the diplomat.

Our new Teflon® non-stick wine label

I mentioned the other day that we were desperate to bottle some wine as quickly as possible, simply as we had no floor stock left to sell. The bottles that we were waiting for finally arrived, and so yesterday morning our guys got to work on the bottling line. (Unfortunately I was absent owing to an emergency dental appointment for a broken tooth - certainly not a planned absence!)

Regrettably things did not go as smoothly as we would have hoped, and all because of the cold weather.

The problem was actually quite simple really - the wine in the tanks was cold, and the bottles that had recently arrived were possibly even colder, so when trying to apply self-adhesive labels at the rate of around 2,000 - 3,000 bottles an hour, they simply didn't want to stick!

We do try to keep the labels in a warm place to help the adhesive a little, but whilst we have cooling systems in the cellar, we do not really have any heating as such (not that we would ever want to start warming our wine anyway). The only possible solution might have been to warm the bottles just a little so they were not quite so icy, but even then we certainly wouldn't want them to be any more than our normal cellar temperature of around 12°C - perhaps we will give this theory a try when we bottle again next week.

Addendum: It's also worth mentioning that we sometimes have the same problem in summer - when labels don't want to stick. The warehouse where we keep the bottles can be difficult to keep cool during the summer (don't worry, there is no wine stored in this location). Consequently if the empty bottles do get a little too warm, and we add cool wine at cellar temperature, the result can be traces of condensation. When the machine is working at full speed this is usually not a problem, as there is not enough time for moisture to form, but any slower and then "we have a problem" - as they say in Houston.

The cupboard is bare

This picture shows a nice, cool corner of our warehouse that is normally stacked high with pallets of wine ready for sale, usually between 20 and 30. Today there is but one lonely pallet (hang on a minute, isn't that the name of a famous travel guide?)

Of course this is actually good news, as it means that we pretty much sold all the stock that we had prepared for the Christmas period, but on the downside, there is also a bit of bad news.....

Naturally we had planned to bottle more stock immediately upon our return from the holidays, but the full container of bottles that should have arrived during the first week of January did not make it - for a rather unusual reason. Believe it or not, it did not even start it's journey from Barcelona owing to widespread snow! Not snow in Barcelona, or even here on the coast of Galicia, but inland, across the centre of Spain. The same snow that brought Madrid to a grinding halt yesterday, causing chaos in yet another European airport. I hear that even the Germans, who are always frighteningly well organised, and well prepared, have been struggling with the recent inclement weather.

We have our fingers crossed that our precious cargo of bottles might arrive later today, or perhaps tomorrow, so that we can quickly bottle one or two tanks.

Bird on a wire?

There was once a song by Led Zeppelin called 'communication breakdown', and that's precisely the problem that we have suffered in our bodega over the last week or so.....

Excluding my frustrations with post and courier services (which are, after all, forms of communication), we also lost our telephones for nearly 48 hours following a big storm last week. The cover of a junction box in our office was scorched and blown clean across the room, presumably at the height of the storm. Fortunately all this took place during the night, and resulted in our 'mini' telephone exchange being rendered useless.

As you may have read in my previous post, we only have one working day in the office this week, and so you can imagine my reaction when I arrived to find no ADSL connection in the bodega this morning. Naturally I assumed that it was an internal problem, until finally calling Telefonica only to discover that it was actually a problem with our local network - perhaps a pigeon sitting on a wire somewhere blocking the signal?

No, we don't have fibre optics, and yes, we do have some of the most expensive and slowest internet connections in Europe!

Origami and a bit of D-I-Y

The cartons that we use to send out our wine are perhaps not the prettiest on the market, but they are certainly amongst the strongest - after all, what is the purpose of a carton? The answer quite simply is to protect our bottles during transit - nothing more, nothing less. Indeed, I think it would be true to say that the vast majority of our end consumers have probably never even seen our box, which simply reinforces my belief that strength is perhaps just a little more important than appearance (assuming of course, that it is not too ugly).

We are lucky to have a very good local carton supplier, slightly more expensive than I would like, but very quick and efficient. However, their solution to a recent hiccup made me smile.

We had a batch of cartons where the glued joint that forms the cube of the case had not been stuck down properly, rendering the cases unuseable. Naturally I complained to our contact at the case supplier, and anticipated that he would add a few free cases to our next order - not so...... A few days later he turned up with a bottle of glue!

So, what's the next step I ask myself - we order a few cases and they turn up with a roll of cardboard, a pair of scissors and an origami book?