In the cold, calm winter days, when vines are dormant, the winery doesn't rest. Winter is an essential period of time for wine, as it lies down and fine-tunes itself. On such days, we are busy with malolactic fermentations and rackings ?a key stage to obtain a wine?s final style.
From the end of November right up to a few weeks into the new year, all the wines from the latest vintage undergo spontaneous malolactic fermentation: inside the deposits, casks and barrels, the lactic bacteria in the wine transform malic acid into lactic acid. Wines thus become round and gain in smoothness. When this process is over, the wine is racked, which means changing recipients several times so the wine becomes more fluid and fine.
?From that moment on, we can say that the wine is finished?, explains our winemaker Chema Ryan. What happens then? We taste and analyze it and then, based on the wine's quality and potential, we decide its category: Crianza, Reserva or Gran Reserva".
In the past 2016 vintage, we picked four million kilos of grapes 3.5m were red varieties, mostly Tempranillo. Of these 3.5m kilos, 90% of them, over three million, are set to go into oak barrels to start the ageing process.
The wines are painstakingly controlled, both in terms of analytical and organoleptic parameters, during the months they are maturing in barrels. If required, the wines are racked again to polish them. "Our main goal is to obtain a well-defined wine leaving nothing to chance", explains Chema. ?We want our wine to be loyal to its character, guaranteeing an essential idea of continuity?
The following video was taken in January during one of the racking processes:
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