The success of a winery comes from making good wines and being original making them.
A winery, to be successful you have to be not only good but original. If you are the same as your neighbor, why are they going to buy from you?
There are many ways to differentiate. One of them is to use water from a well to control alcoholic fermentation.
Our wine tours do not only talk about wine. They also talk about the history of wine.
In the visit to Ribera del Duero we do not normally limit ourselves to the visit of certain wineries but we tell the history of the region, how the wines were made in the Middle Ages, how the wines were made until 1960 and how, the internationalization of the wines makes the wineries, to be grouped grouped in cooperatives to decide jointly what kind of machinery they needed to make quality wines and face the important investments that it was required.
Creation of Designation of Origin of Ribera del Duero.
The cooperatives did not go very far in Ribera del Duero and in 1982 the Designation of Origin of Ribera del Duero was created.
During these visits, people frequently ask me about whether wines that were made 50 or 100 years ago could be of quality.
The wines could not be of quality if they did not have the tools to make quality wines. The grapes were of high quality, but the quality was considered some other way. You don’t know what a quality wine is until you taste it.
In the past they did not have tools to control the fermentation temperature. This meant that very uneven wines were obtained. And the fermentations were much faster.
In addition, the old vineyard that we now know that gives much better wines was not appreciated because it gave less amount of grapes. What was valued in the past was the amount of grape and the amount of wine although that was a decrease in quality. Therefore it was tempting to pluck it to plant young vineyards or even plant another type of cereal.
Was there quality in the wine? Yes, but in another way.
Ribera del Duero wine was already famous centuries ago locally.
Even so, the grapes and wines of Ribera del Duero were already famous for centuries. People came to buy those wines from distances of more than 150 km.
The climate, the height above sea level, the type of land, the latitude and the presence of the Duero River have made Ribera del Duero grapes ideal for producing quality wines forever. To those fantastic grapes, we had to add that machinery that was not used until the 60s.
It was the growing prestige of the Ribera del Duero area that made them realize the importance of preserving the old vineyard and using more modern ways to treat the grapes in the cellar.
Cold equipment to control fermentation
Almost all the wineries already have cold equipment that allows them to receive the grapes with the appropriate temperature so that the fermentation does not start immediately. That allows the winemaker to decide how long the fermentation will last.
The cold equipment consists of a cold jacket through which water circulates that allows regulating the temperature inside the containers.
Before the fermentation could be very short or very long depending on the ambient temperature. Yeast began eating sugar and converting into alcohol, CO2 and heat. If you do not regulate the temperature, surely fermentation will be very fast. This will worsen the quality of the wines.
You can be original even in the way of controlling the fermentation temperature.
And suddenly you go and find a winery that instead of having a cold shirt, what it does is collect water from a well that receives water from underground streams. As the well is very deep the temperature at which it comes to the surface is very cool, possibly at 11 or 12 Celsius Degrees.
They raise the water of the well and by means of a shower that is on top of each one of the containers and that sprinkles with a thin curtain of water, regulates the temperature of fermentation. They get with it the same effect as the cold shirt that modern wineries have.
With this original system, the only cost is the energy needed to raise the water to the containers because the water is free for them.
It is such original solutions that attract my attention of certain wineries. A simple and cheap solution that it makes it great precisely because of its simplicity. Will the wine be better for this detail? No. It just makes you fall in love with people and the winery that have had a simple and great idea.
Originality through multiple details.
This winery has many other details that make it unique in all Ribera del Duero but this small detail makes one start the visit to this particular winery with even greater respect and prepares one for what you will see later, because this Winery is something, very very special. And the best of all. The wines that they make are among the best of the whole Ribera del Duero.
Behind a visit to an attractive winery with a beautiful speech, there is always a good wine. The magic of a wine tour.
The real truth comes when in every winery when tasting its wines. If you do not like their wines, it is useless that you have loved the visit and the speech of the winemaker. And that is the magic of visiting a winery. Behind a visit to an attractive winery with a beautiful speech there is always a good wine.
