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 site on the way

I am very aware that our blog has been a bit quiet recently, and of course, this is partly due to the amount of travelling that we have been doing during the last two months.

There is however, another important reason...... Behind the scenes (and with the help of our new friends in Christchurch, New Zealand), we are just starting work on a new website/blog. Not only will the new site be modernised and updated, but it will also mean that our blog and main website will eventually be integrated under one single web address.

But don't panic! All the old blog post will still be accessible for those (if any) who have difficulty sleeping and feel the need to check back on my previous, hysterical historical blog entries.

To use yet another well-worn phrase - Watch this space!

Hats off to a Basque chef

When you stop to think how many wine bottles are opened during the course of a year, and how many different shapes, sizes and colours there are, you have to ask yourself why does it take a Spanish chef to come up with a creative, and innovative design?

The three-starred Michelin chef Martin Berasategui has won the packaging equivalent of an Oscar for his new bottle at a presentation in Paris.

Unfortunately this innovative new bottle shape that is designed to capture wine sediment deposited at the bottom of some red wines, and therefore is of little use to us - if our albariño started to leave a sediment in the bottle then we really would have a serious wine-making problem on our hands.

It is a little difficult to see from this particular photograph but the bottle has a second 'neck' at the bottom that simply stops any deposit from flowing through (assuming of course that the bottle is handled carefully). Whilst I have to admit that this is a great idea, I am not so sure about the second part of the 'Martin Berasategui System', as it is known. Apparently to reap the full benefit of the system the bottle should ideally be transported and stored in an inclined position - not upright, nor laying down. Obviously, in order to acheive this position special cases and wine racks are also required, and I therefore ask myself, if the wine is not fully inclined for long-term storage is there a possibility that corks could dry out, thus leading to possible oxidation?

By the way, when I mentioned the presence of deposits in albariño, it is of course possible that white wines such as ours could precipitate tartrate crystals. In order to prevent this we cold-treat the wine (chill it very rapidly to -5°C and hold it for a week) which ensures that tartrates are removed before bottling. Personally I think that cold treatment is detrimental to our wine as it removes a little character, and in an ideal world I would not do it. The problem is that the majority of consumers see the presence of any tartrate crystals as undesirable, whereas in fact they are in reality, completely harmless. Pity.

Out of Office

This week Angela and I fly to the US to visit our importer, and thanks to my faithful Blackberry I will not need to haul my laptop over with me - once again I have to ask myself, where would we be without this amazing technology?

It seems quite funny now when I recall my very first 'mobile' telephone. You actually carried it using a shoulder strap because the battery was so huge, and it had an old fashioned handset attached to the base station with a cord - I think it might have been a Panasonic. Of course you could only use it for making phone calls, nothing else, and even then the coverage was fairly patchy despite living in central London, as I did at the time.

These days a phone is not just a phone, it's a mini-computer, mp3 player, camera, and even a rather small television - unfortunately however, it does not make toast...... yet! Anyway, as always, I digress.

Perhaps the only limitation of a Blackberry is the screen size, which is a bit small for reading attachments etc., and does not really work for making blog entries either. To be honest I do not anticipate spending my precious few days in New York in internet cafes, so please forgive me if my blog falls silent over the coming days.

As Arnie the Governator would say - I'll be back.

I'm no techno-fool!

Computers, don't you just love 'em?

Well, to be very honest I don't think that I could function without one - just another technological marvel that we now take for granted. Luckily they still need a bit of human input, albeit I am sure that sooner or later, they will actually think for themselves (if this is not happening already).

The reason I write is that I was trying to book a new restaurant in Pontevedra which has just joined my favourite restaurant group - Nove Grupo Gastronómico Galicia For a moment I could not work out why a restaurant in Pontevedra would be called Eirado da Firewood, and also, I had never heard of the square where it was supposedly located, the Praça da Wood - and then I suddenly realised.....

Lazy person that I am, I have 'Google translate' set up on my computer, which looks at each web page and automatically decides if it needs translation. It is a great piece of software and usually makes pretty accurate translations. Unfortunately in this case it was a bit over eager, and changed the name of the restaurant from it's original Eirado da Leña.

So, as you have no doubt deduced the word 'leña' (pronounced len-ya) comes to mean wood, or firewood, although it does have another commonly used meaning that might help you the next time you visit Galicia. If you find yourself in a bread shop looking for a nice crusty loaf, you can simply ask for 'pan de leña', which as we now know means literally 'bread of the wood'. Of course the meaning in this context is bread from a wood-fired oven (although I rather suspect that very few bread shops actually use wood-fired ovens these days)...... Another gem of useless information.