This post is also available in: Español (Spanish)
At Bodegas Arzuaga, it’s clear to us that one of the most important moments in the winemaking process is the one that takes place right after the harvest, when the grapes arrive at our facilities. ‘These are the most important days. The work of an entire year in the vineyard is now rewarded during harvest. We have to capture the optimal point of ripeness and get it in the winery as soon as possible and with the highest quality possible,’ explains Javier Herrero, the cellarman at Bodegas Arzuaga.
For this process, at the Quintanilla de Onésimo facilities we have cutting-edge and pioneering machinery, such as the optical sorting machine. This machine photographs all the grapes one by one to choose the best ones in accordance with our parameters. In the words of Ignacio Arzuaga, the managing director of Bodegas Arzuaga, ‘optical sorting is nothing less than taking a photo of each grape, and the ones that don’t fit the parameters are rejected by the machine’. It’s clear to us that ‘selection throughout the winemaking process is vital and necessary to make high-quality wines’.
Even though, according to Herrero, Arzuaga’s innovative machinery is the best on the market and the treatment in the winery is very important, he notes that ‘to make a great wine, you need a great vineyard’. He says, similarly to Ignacio Arzuaga, that ‘even though manual sorting is very important as well, we rely on optical sorting,’ which, as we already mentioned, is one of the most productive and innovative techniques as far as winemaking is concerned.
This crucially important machinery carries out the following process, as Herrero explains: ‘Once the grape passes through the optical viewer, what we do is have it drop using its own weight into a mobile tank attached to a crane system, known as an “identified flying object” or OVI, which it is a part that makes it easier for us to work with gravity’. Despite the fact that this process is carried out by machines, ‘there is no mechanical action or any type of pump to crush the grapes. Instead, we take the totally whole, perfect grapes that have gone through this machine using gravity, and we lift them and throw them into the tanks using their own weight’.
Although all the steps that take place in the winery at the mechanical level to move the wine process forward are crucially important, according to Javier Herrero, ‘there’s something very clear to us at Bodegas Arzuaga. When you make a great wine, you need a great vineyard; we need great raw material’. Nevertheless, we also take into account the importance of technological advances, and along the same lines, he says that ‘we need high technology to be able to sort grape by grape and we also need gravity to do good work’.
At Bodegas Arzuaga, we bring together the importance of conserving traditional production customs and the incorporation of technological advances that will make it possible to bring the best wine to your glasses.