Bottling It

As you all know we are keen on wine and in the last week our travels have taken us to two of Spain's wine producing regions.  The area around Valdepeñas in La Mancha has endless grape vines and huge wineries which together account for over half of Spain's wine production, while Utiel-Requena, nearer to home in Valencia province, produces some of our local favourites on a smaller scale.

We stopped off at Hoya de Cadenas winery in Utiel on the way home on Friday but things got far more interesting on Sunday when we had the chance to get involved in the wine production process itself.   Our friend, Pau invited us along to help bottle some wine at his family's small "bodega" at Pedreguer, just the other side of the mountain from home.

The Vineyard...

...and inside the Bodega

Given that we (well mainly me, actually) have had a fantasy of owning a vineyard for years we were very excited to discover that our friends actually make wine around the corner. It is good too. For this second year of production they have purchased two oak barrels in which this years wine has been maturing and during the course of sunday morning we managed to turn in into around 300 bottles. My main role was putting in the corks, which makes a change from my normal job of taking them out, while Su expertly labelled the filled bottles.

There were about fifteen of us present of which five or six worked on the production line, Pau took photos, his brother Jordi lit the barbecue while his mother and the others prepared food. We downed tools after about an hour and all sat down to the serious business of eating a gorgeous brunch. Our colleagues washed this down with the wine, some beer and malt whisky despite the early hour. Not content with all that one of them asked what was for desert - at which point one of the older guys disappeared, returning a little later with three different flavours of artesan ice cream from his local factory, all of which were delicious. Cue second food break.

The final product

Strengthened by the food and having made a small dent in the amount of wine to be bottled, we got back to the job in hand of producing bottled wine which is named "Brador". The previous week at a very long lunch we had with Pau and Jordi I asked what Brador meant, which caused some amusement. It turns out that while consuming a fair bit of last years crop they came up with Vi Brador ("vi" means wine in the Valenciano language) which needs little translation into English or Spanish!  And a stimulating little wine it is too.