August is that month in which in Spain practically everything stops, but for us it is a month of entry to the vintage, where to stop is impossible. In a few days Manuel, Mapi and Javi, our winemakers, began to visit vineyards diary, to take samples of the grape and to control how the degree of maturation evolves. And from one day to another the decision was made to start harvesting, so in the winery everything must be prepared.

Because the entrance of the grape to the winery has to be fast and efficient, so that the grape maintains all the qualities and to obtain in this way wines of great expression.

Depending on the wine we want to obtain, we will select the best options to finalize and apply different elaboration protocols. For white and rosé wines, cold, cold and cooler throughout the preparation, to obtain wines with a marked vegetal, floral and fruit character. In the case of red wines, we will differentiate the elaboration of young wines working in pre-fermentative macerations to obtain soft wines in the mouth but of great aromatic intensity; and the elaboration of reds is based on the aging processes, where we will look for the concentration and the structure extending the times of maceration.

The stainless steel tanks, which are the first destination of the wine, remain unblemished to receive the must, which ferment in them to begin its transformation into wine. A few months later we will also need to have the barrels ready, for the wines with aging.

For sure, this year our vintage will start again in La Roda, with one of the earliest varied, Chardonnay. There, in Castilla-La Mancha, we have 70 hectares of vineyard. In August and September, the strongest months of harvest, temperatures are very high during the day, which leads us to harvest at night, not for us, but for the grapes, so that it reaches the fresh and quality winery what we are looking for. So, during the night, we harvest and put the grapes in the cellar, and during the day we go from the samples, we measure densities, graduation, acidity… The work is intense, and that intensity will last until October and will expand the rest of our production areas: Jumilla and Camporrobles. In all of them, next to the vineyards, there are our small wineries of elaboration, to avoid that the grape have to make long transfers, and its entrance in warehouse is always fast.

Being in three zones with different extensions makes the harvest a little bit complicated, but it compensates us, because the result is the power of the wines with varied autochthonous of each zone and with the contribution of specific terroirs and climates, and this give us a fantastic raw material with which to elaborate different quality wines, as well as having a varied catalog to access different markets and public, something in which you also have to think.

We will tell you how the vintage 2017 evolves!