One Bottle Three Questions - A Wine Podcast
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We drink one bottle. We ask three questions.
One Bottle Three Questions - A Wine Podcast
#4 - 2020 Don Alvaro De Bazan, Granbazan with Diego Rios
Diego Ríos, head winemaker at Granbazán, discusses managing high rainfall and mildew challenges, the use of oak with Albariño, and the insights he gained from working at Heymann-Löwenstein.
Nelson - Hello, this is One Bottle Three Questions, I'm Nelson Pari, here with me Mike Best, Master of Wine. Today we're drinking the 2020 Don Alvaro, the Albarino from Gran Balzan, here with Diego Rios. Let's start right away with the first question.
Mike - I live in close to Manchester, an area famous for being rainy and windy, but looking at the numbers, we get about 1100 millimetres of rain here a year, so it always feels like it's 12 degrees in raining, but the numbers in Rias Baixas are even higher. So how on earth do you deal with this as a winemaker, Diego? And can you tell us what the numbers are in terms of how much rain you get?
Diego - The rain there is definitely quite something. It's definitely that requires character and personality to endure. More if you're not born and raised there, of course, which is actually my case. In average, Rias Baixas you will have around 1600 millimeters a year. But right on the coast, we are located in the sub area within a Rias Baixas that is called Salnes Valley, where our vineyards are displayed, which are actually most of them not farther than five kilometers to the coast. We will talking about more than in the 2000 millimeters a year. At the very end, you can precise everything that you do in the vineyards, of course, and your canopy management, your plant protection plan. You can go to the very core and very, very specific, but if it rains that much, there's nothing you can do. So at the very end, the story is quite simple. Like you're always on the hands of the weather and how the vintage is showing. to paint you the picture. Last November, I'm talking about November, 2023, I live around 30 minutes southern from the winery where we were about to beat the record of 2006 of 36 days in a row of rain. We didn't manage to beat the record, we went up to 32. But yeah, I mean, that's definitely... viticultural wise, it is definitely every year is a new world and every year is a challenge.
Mike - One of the issues in terms of the problems that I've seen going visiting Europe for the first part of this year is mildew in lots of places in Europe. But how would you set up your vineyards and what specifics can you do to mitigate this in the vineyard?
Diego - I mean, of course, mildew is the thing that we struggle the most. Mildew is from all the diseases that you can get in During disease and mildew is the worst one. Of course you lose bunches, you lose leaves, it damages the wood for next year So it's the worst that you can have and moreover when it's in it's super hard to eradicate almost impossible so On the other hand Regardless of the one you might think after this is such a wet area. We don't struggle much with botrytis We don't struggle much with powdery mildew, of course, because it's not that hot. So Mille uses our main concern from the very beginning of the season to after the blossoms. So we base our plant protection in terms of the numbers that two weather stations that we have displayed. One is actually located in our main... state and in our main vineyard which is the tremolo state One is located over there with it, but that one belongs to the government actually and the other ones is that one that we install ourselves a little bit up north From the area where the winery is located and we base everything that we do in the vineyards Through what these two stations gives us, of course, they go through a software and then and they enable you to know how the incubation of how the state of that particular moment of rain, what is regenerating in terms of development of the disease. So you can do your managing as proper as you can, of course. And we do, we in Spain, we have very, like a lot of restrictions. I will say that is even higher restrictions than in other European countries in terms of what you can do. And you have to combine this restriction. Of course with the one that you did you have in terms of your sustainability program we have been certified with a fair and green which is a German certification in terms of sustainability since already the first vintage I think it was 22. So you have to combine all those two plus of course we have extra impulse restriction because some have to have some water courses near our main areas and of course we're very close to the Atlantic and also you have those little rivers and water courses going through our vineyards when actually they impose to use a completely different range of products compared to other areas. You have to really endure many, many factors in order to be very precise and to go as sustainable as possible. Beside that, of course, you depend on the vintage. I mean, it sounds terrible because of the numbers that I told you before, but not all vintages have been horrible in terms of downy mildew. I remember particularly 2020 being very bad. I remember in 2022, it rained the second half of... May and the first half of June non-stop. I remember that very vividly because we were like, yeah, this is hard.
Nelson - How many products or technique have you tried to combat mildew? And is there a better one that you are focusing on when you have like a huge spread of mildew around your vineyards?
Diego - I mean, there's nothing that you can do to heal it. So all the measurements that we take are preventive measurements. So of course, in terms of plant protection, everything that you have in the pallet, which actually has narrowed to maybe, I don't know, 10 products these days, you know, at the very beginning of the season, you start with some products that act a certain way more. Actually, we start with a couple of systemic products. And then we just stop the same again, we just do what is called, I don't know if the name in English is correct, but it's called penetrant. And then we play of course with how the situation is going in terms of weather. Of course, if you can skip the application, of course we do as little as possible. Actually, on the very line of being very dangerous, but the restrictions in our area are super heavy. But you cannot forget that it's still a business. I mean, you cannot forget that you cannot do anything if you don't have healthy grapes, not just grapes, healthy grapes is important thing. The major action that we do is we have all of our vineyards are displayed in Galician para, in the high trellis. So that's how video culture has been developed here in the last thousand years. Albarino has been cultivated in the area for over a thousand years and of course, the most modern part of this history has developed into high trellis. Not only because of the weather, of course you want to keep your grapes as far as you can from the humidity of the ground. Because it is heavy rain, you need to maintain that beautiful green cover in your vineyards, but of course that maintains a lot of humidity. So you want to go. high with your grapes in order to have healthy grapes at the very end of the season. But historically these families have had a second crop on the bottom, of course you have albarino on the top and then the bottom you have maybe paprika or potatoes or something like that. The major action that we do is just maintain that, which has been culturally developed, you know, but of course it's expensive. Granite poles and concrete poles is way more expensive than in a normal trellis system, right? So you have to really commit to it. We don't do any shoot thinnings, but we do actually do a late topping of the vines. When you see, well, you know, like the shoots are hanging down and closing down this like the street of the Parra Gallega. So you need to go, but we try to we try to kind of like maintain them in the wire. And later on, at a certain point later on this season, you cut them in order to maintain the wind blowing. But high trellis is for us actually. quite a significant part of controlling that the grapes are drier, faster.
Nelson - Don Alvaro ferments his spend his first year in a big neutral oak vat. And then you move it into stainless steel for further maturation. Hearing that, for me, is quite unusual because usually, you know, it's the opposite. First you ferment in stainless steel and then you move to oak. And especially when it comes down to Albariño, we are used to drink wines in the market purely made in stainless steel. So this is a wine that can be sort of a really unusual for many Alborino drinkers. So why you use this process? What is the history of Oak and Alborino originally and all of that? Like how does that come into play?
Diego - Well, I mean, that is definitely something new. I'm not, we're not the... first ones or the only ones. Of course, there are a couple of more people working and but very little. Of course, as you said correctly, this has been this has been a very modern like vinification, very 90s like in many, many ways in India, especially the way that has been developed now. So a lot of stainless still like the new alternative containers for fermentation or for aging. They're kind of like quite recent in the in the history. It's sounding pretty heavy, but recent. The things that big wooden vats in stainless steel, same grapes, same appellation, same know-how, it's something that I have studied a lot because of my background in the Mosel River. Of course, the big wines of the Mosel River are not only in the Mosul, of course, in many other places in Germany, but the Mosel is very characteristic. are producing big wooden vats. So you're not looking for presence of oak or what the oak can communicate into the wine. What you're looking for is the container. In terms of big wooden vats, we're talking about 2,600 liters. So you want the vat to be neutral. Each vat is a world. It's a different world. So it can be that the first year they communicate a little bit of this oak present, but they tend to be very neutral. More about the tonneries, the fouderies that we're working with tend to be very, very neutral. So what you want is the recipient, right? Like the shape of the recipient, the micro oxidation, of course, the warmth that you can maintain into the vat. So, for example, what we ferment in the big wooden vats is everything is spontaneous fermented. So you need to maintain the warmth whenever the fermentation goes slower. So it doesn't normally in stainless steel, it cools down very fast. If you have this structure or the facility to warm it up again. So in our case, we need to maintain that in order to finish the fermentation. In Don Alvaro, since I started in the wine range, South of Nine-Nineteen, it was... Kind of like the wine where I personally had more of a carte blanche in order to bring my experience from the malls or from the other places that I worked before, starting in Grannbasan. And for me, I mean, the last seven years of my life before starting in Grand Basin, I was working this way with very high-end whites, different variety, of course. But for me, the answer or whether I started to go deeper in it was... pretty clear, so we managed to become customers from Stockinger and since then we have bring one big one in fact every year.
Mike - You worked at Heymann-Lowenstein in the lower Mosel for seven years. And I think that we, the influence of the, even the bottle, like the, your, the Albariño flute has this kind of synergy with, with Riesling. I think that there's this, yeah, some kind of parallel. How do you see the two grapes, Albariño and Riesling as similar and as different?
Diego - Albariño is definitely more of a spoiled wine than, than Riesling. Riesling is. so amazing from the very beginning and as the time passes it goes insanely good and Albarino it can follow that way if you do everything correctly but if you if you if you do one mistake you know yeah this is a way more sensitive and reactive to whatever happens into their environment i'm talking about vineyard uh cellar aging and of course in that in that case i guess like um I always thought that in the Mosel River everything works by itself. Like you do very little analogy, you don't do almost anything actually, and everything kind of like finds its way. I wouldn't say that Albarino, Albarino definitely needs a little bit more support and a little bit more being on top of it is more of a sensitive and that kind of aspect. But of course if you're talking about high acidity wines that then age perfectly, they're able to show. a completely different aspect of it. It's a completely different wine after a couple of years in the bottle that evolves into something more serious, more, of course, everybody enjoys the more younger, fresher, fruitier aspect of the variety in this early age. All the wines that were thought to communicate or to portray that, you know, the wines that had more of a faster flow and consume, of course, we enjoy those definitely. But if you concentrate on the vintages that have been very, very good, and they have already a couple of years in the bottle, they evolved into completely different product, into something way more competitive internationally, in terms of the serious white. And I guess I get to see those two parts, because the winery have worked with older vintages from the very beginning. It's not something that came with me or something. Of course aged albarino is something kind of like on the topic maybe for the last seven or eight years. Before that, of course, the paradigm of albarino being very young and expressive was very vivid still. And now actually the subject is the capacity of aging, you know, and the capacity of the plurality that this variety has. Of course, if you put it in barrel, you create a barrel albarino, which we have. the longest history with barrel Albariño because the first barrel Albariño ever done in the appellation was in GranBazan, it's our limousine, first vintage 89. You have to think back in the 80s of course, how do you add value to this wine? Of course you put it in barrel, that's kind of like the Spanish answer to it, right? And of course that has changed, though we have sticked to this wine that now actually helps you to break. Also another paradigm that Albarino has, and I fight a lot against that paradigm, that Alvarino stick to just seafood, right? Of course we enjoy that, definitely, but of course the variety can do a wider of different range of cuisine, sort of speaking. But of course in terms of sales, they always try to lead that one to that direction, understandable, but. wines that have a little bit more age in the bottle, very concentrated about Tehuá or that has a little bit more of an aging in the case of limousine helps you to break that structure, helps you to understand that you're able to break that structure easily so that's why I'm very happy that I have for example something that is rare like limousine in the portfolio. But yeah I guess I mean the two varieties have completely different aspects of it and they're both beautiful and I know it sounds cliche what I'm saying right now, but it's actually the truth So yeah, and they invite you to different histories. I guess so that's an interesting thing
Nelson - Is there something that you've learned because we talked about the oak But is there anything else that you've learned in those years in the Mosel that you're now using actively every year in your winery and in your vineyards?
Diego - Well, definitely there's many things that I've learned in my years in the Mosel that I brought with me in doing in Granbazan. For example, the pruning system, we were very focused in the Mosul and the soft methods of pruning system that you guys have developed in Italy and that's very well known for me. And I guess in Rias Baixas something that... these days you see more often, but I'm talking about five years ago, it was kind of like a, they knew that existed about how to implant it there. It was something, and I was responsible to implant it there in Germany, in the Mosel River for the years that I was there. So of course, in Pergola, in Parra Gallega, this is a completely different story, but we tried to emulate as much as we could. And we have done it already five years, and actually we're kind of like in a rough past. because that requires a lot of education to the people that are actually doing the cuts, right? And they have been working in this business for many, many years. And so, you know, when it's always hard to bring something new and they're always a little bit more skeptical. I'm not from the area also, so I get a lot of skepticism at the very beginning. But I think we have worked very well and it kind of like works. So. for them at the beginning, as you have such a massive structure on the wire, right? It was unthinkable if there's a part of the oak that you are not using, not to cut that off. You know, unthinkable. Why? We need to remove that. And I was like, no, you don't... So that was kind of like a... it required a little bit of schooling, but now these days we do a soft pruning. We don't get rid of any... we don't do any big or damaging woods into our plants. because we had a lot of humidity and always when it never gets that cold here so it's always wet and a little bit warm so it's perfect for wooden fungal diseases to go in so yeah that's mainly in the vineyards and in terms in the wine in terms of winemaking um uh i guess of course for me my perception when i arrived there it was like in many ways, you know, Galicia reminds me of Chile with big tanks, more of a kind of like everything's stainless steel, everything's fresh new clean and I guess like and Galicia has the portfolios of the wineries in Galicia also still to these days a very big, important, and I guess like and I was from a background where we have just recently but from six different so I guess I have I mean trying to conciliate those two worlds. And not in order to produce a hundred different wines, just in order to understand the components of our important cuvées, you know, more up to the detail. So since I arrived in 19, we organized, we worked with all the 80 families, what is known as, that is a small scale agriculture, which is the most traditional and... and more social driven way to produce wine, moreover in the San Nes Valley, which is kind of like the Mount Everest of Galician small scale agriculture. Because if you move southern Galicia, it's more common to find one winery that has more of a best piece of land that belongs to the winery or even 100% state grown. But actually the most traditional and the most... cultural way to produce wine in the Rias Baixas is actually working with these families. So the Gramazán house has always been like a hybrid model. So we have our vineyards and we work with families. We work with 80 families that have been in the winery for over 30 years. So in order for them to understand that they were not being able to harvest just the Sunday when the friends come over to help. and this is gonna be the day where everybody in your little parrochia, which is even smaller than a village, are harvesting because we're vinificating everything separately now. It was a struggle. But Vintage 19 was the first time that we did it, like very up to the detail, and it worked because it was a small vintage. So it was actually kind of perfect. And kind of like that set the base for the future. So at the very beginning it was like, ooh, you know, the people need to, they don't hire. Pickers so they need they need friends to know that you have harvest a little plot So they've they got friends over during the weekend so we are not probably gonna be able to do that on a Wednesday and I said like yeah, but you know when a certain point we need to start and I said it wasn't small vintage and in the health condition of the grapes were perfect We were able to organize it people saw that it worked that it was doable So we now we have actually been even divided even smaller divisions within one parrochia in order to understand how the variety behaves in the different kind of soils. And then I guess, at least in GrandBazan there was a lot of focus on the quality back then and through the 90s and 2000s. But now we are living this new phase, which is kind of like this quality, but also very related to terroir, which is for me very logical because of my background in the Mosel. but he's very, very still to be developed and to discover. It has been fun, it has been fun. We have been to 21, it was a little bit complicated because it was very unripe, everybody getting nervous and you know, so that's why we struggle a little bit not to get the proper organization, but 23, for example, it worked. We can narrow it down even to smaller divisions within families and that has been the work
Mike This was one bottle and three questions and the questions were question one, discussing the rain in Rear Spice and the effects and how you work with that. Question two was about the use of oak and the texture achieved in alborina and question three was about Diego's experiences in the Mosel and the comparisons between Riesling and Albarino so that's been great.
Diego - Thanks a lot for having me. That was fun.
