Sneak preview

You may have noticed that our blog has been a little abandoned recently, and as always, there is a perfectly good excuse.....

The screen capture above is a sneak preview of the homepage of our new website, which has been under construction for the last couple of months.

The framework is done, the pages are set up, and now I am just going through the painfully slow part of adding the text and selecting the photographs that we are going to use. Any spare moment that I have had in front of my computer over the last couple of weeks has been occupied by this task - hence the fact that our blog has been a bit overlooked. Sorry about that.

We hope to have the full new site up and running in the next week or so. As they say, watch this space!

Change your point of view

If you are new to our blog, or maybe just bored with the way it looks, then I have just discovered a completely new and pretty dynamic way that you can view it (it's an especially good way to look back through our archives, and to view some of my lovely pics!)

Simply add the word 'view' to the end of our normal URL - in other words try http://castromartin.blogspot.com/view
Once you are there you will find a drop down menu in the top right hand corner of the page, which offers you several different options of how you change the layout.

Try it! It's a bit of fun.....

New uniforms

As you may have seen over the summer the uniforms of our guys have taken a bit of a pounding, not only with all the vineyard and bodega work that they do, but also with the building work that we have completed this year. Poor old David started the year with his improvised ¾ length trousers, which by mid-summer had shrunk to a pair of Bermuda shorts. Our fear was that by the autumn he would be working in a tanga!

Joking aside, we are in the process of buying some new uniforms, and believe it or not the big discussion has been about the colour. There are of course some traditional colours here in Spain, whereby specific professions can be identified by the colour of the uniform that they wear. For example, professions such as electricians and plumbers tend to wear blue, people who work on the land (including Bodegas) tend to prefer green, and so on.

The most practical colour for our guys might, for example, be black (which I think would also look quite smart), but then again this would not be very practical. Imagine working out in the vineyards in the heat of summer wearing a nice black, heat absorbing uniform - I doubt if they would thank me for this, no matter how smart it may or may not look.

In the meantime I have been browsing a couple of old catalogues from the 60's, 70's and 80's to get some ideas, and as you can see the possibilities are endless....

The view from my roof

Click to enlarge

It occured to me the other day that although I had written about our "Sobre Lias" wines I hadn't taken too many pictures of the subtly amended labels. With this in mind I rushed home yesterday afternoon to take a few snaps before the sun disappeared - the forecast had correctly predicted that it would be raining today (which in reality turned our to be something of an understatement).

Whilst the pictures were not actually taken on a roof per say, they were taken on a roof  terrace overlooking the local town, and if you look carefully you can see a reflection of this on the shoulder of each bottle.

On the subject of roofs (or should that be rooves?), our outbuilding that has been undergoing renovation is now nearing completion, and thank goodness the new roof was fully in place before today's torrential rain. Next week I will post a couple of before and after photos..... the transformation is quite dramatic.

The dawn of a new era

Today is the first day of a new era in our bodega! As we made the first bottling of our 2009 wine for the Spanish market, so we introduced a new label for our Casal Caeiro brand - but not only that.....

You will notice that we have added the term 'Sobre Lias' to the label (or 'Sur Lie' as the French would call it). In recent years this expression has started to pop up on a few premium wines in our area - and I say premium simply because they are always a limited production, sold at a higher price. In our case, not so.

The main reason that we are always slower than others to release our new vintage is because of this process. Every wine that we make is aged on it's lees for an extended period of between 5 and 6 months, and is therefore never available before April/May at the earliest.

Now, for those of you who don't know, the 'lees' or 'lias' are the exhausted yeast cells that fall to the bottom of the tank during fermentation. This does not mean however, that they are rendered completely useless, as even at this point they still contain certain nutrients that feed the wine, adding depth of flavour and greater complexity. Angela will happily explain all the technical stuff, telling you about the manoproteins and how they can help to protect against oxidation and reduce astringency etc., but the long and short of it is that it makes our wine taste better - and that's all you really need to understand!

Of course the process does have to be controlled, and to start off with the 'lees' have to be clean and healthy, otherwise they will simply taint the wine with reductive 'off' flavours. Even more importantly, when the wine is on it's lees it has to be tasted at very regular intervals (as we always do anyway), in order to chose the optimum moment to rack it off. No, I am not being rude, racking is simply the term for drawing the clean wine from the top of the tank, leaving the lees behind at the bottom, once they have finally completed their work.

To summarise, our philosophy, is, was and always will be, to make the best wines that we can - wines that have longevity, and do not fall apart after a couple of months in bottle. Ageing our wines on the lees has played an important part in this process for years now, the only difference being that we have now chosen to advertise it on our labels, not only as a point of difference, but also giving you and your customers a bit of 'added value' for the same money.

As always, selling you a premium product at a very modest price!

'Flat-pack' wine for Scandinavia!

We are delighted, in the last few hours, to have picked up a new customer in Scandinavia, and at exactly the same moment our transporter has given me an inspired idea for the packaging....

Scandinavia is of course, the home of 'flat-pack' furniture, so why not 'flat-pack' wine as illustrated in the photograph above? Compacted into it's new, re-shaped, designer plastic wrapping is (believe it or not) a six bottle carton of wine, reduced to only a few centimetres thick!

Imagine how this new idea could revolutionise the home delivery of wine - if you are not at home the delivery driver will simply be able to slip it through your letter box. It might make a bit of a mess of your floor, but at least you won't have to wait for it to be re-delivered.

It's amazing how some great ideas are often discovered completely by accident.... quite literally.

Square bottle, round hole

I commented the other day about the design of our carton, and confessed that whilst it was not the most beautiful in the world, it certainly was the most practical - doing the job that it was primarily designed to do, protecting our bottles.

Sometimes design forces us to make compromises, and we make decisions about our packaging for possibly the wrong reasons. The new, trendy bottles design that I have illustrated above is a case in point. For me, it simply doesn't work, and I mean that for the most practical of reasons.....

Yes, there is no doubt that it is eye-catching, and makes a change from the run-of-the-mill bottle shapes, but I ask you, have you ever tried to pour a drink from one of these bottles?

The mineral water on the left of the three bottles is Galician, and we use it at home. Possibly, when we first bought it, we were influenced by the unusual design, and it therefore ended up on our dining table. OK, so we were hooked, the marketing had worked - but then came the second stage of the process - trying to use it, or to be more accurate, pour it.

The square shoulder of the bottle is a design disaster, and was certainly not thought through when the shape was first conceived on the designers drawing board. Liquid from the bottle does not pour, or rather it does not flow, the square shoulder causes it to surge in an irregular sloshing motion (difficult to describe in words).

That's not too bad if a stray drop of mineral water ends up on your table cloth, but what happens when that spill is port or possibly red wine, and is caused by no fault of your own?

I rest my case.