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Traditional white wine making

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Posted on 2020-09-25 in

Iker Ugalde. Labayru Fundazioa Photographic Archive.

It is grape harvest time in the Basque Country. Txakolin wine producers sample their grapes to check acidity levels, sugar content, and three or four other parameters, in search of optimal fruit maturity.

Home winemaking was once customary in our country. Most farmhouses would keep some vines, on orchard and field margins, typically, or in rows between cultivated fields, to make the so-called txakolina — a slightly sparkling, dry white wine— for their own consumption. A quarter of a century ago there would be just over a dozen hectares of vineyards in Bizkaia; today there are more than four hundred. (more…)

Wine grapes: harvesting vs picking

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Posted on 2017-09-15 in

Crew of grape harvesters. Moreda de Álava, 2015.

As with students at their course-end exams, grape harvest is for Rioja Alavesa winegrowers the litmus test after a year of diligent care of the vineyards: vine pruning, ploughing and reploughing of vines and vineyard rows, crop thinning and weeding, phytosanitary treatments against insects and the dreaded downy mildew and powdery mildew, shoot tipping, offshoot trimming and thinning… It is a reward for a year’s work and effort. (more…)

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