This post is also available in: Español (Spanish)
The vineyard is the heart of Bodegas Arzuaga. That is where it all begins, where we have to work each day with a lot of care and effort to ensure that Arzuaga’s wines are always as special as the first day. Our vineyards’ one-of-a-kind personality comes from the soil and that special climate where they grow. That’s why we’d like to take a quick look at their distinctive characteristics, all those little details that go into making Arzuaga’s wines unique.
Let’s start with the bleeding of the vines. Between November and March, with the frosts, the plant goes into a dormant state. This is when the vine’s reserves go down into its roots. However, later, when the soil temperature reaches around 10°C, the sap starts to rise, coming up from those root reserves, to reach all the plant’s aerial parts.
Since these parts have been cut and the vine doesn’t have any green shoots, the sap comes out of the pruning cuts. We see this as ‘tears’, but it’s really the sap dripping slowly.
Another interesting characteristic of our vineyards is the planting on moorland. At Arzuaga, we were pioneers in this type of planting in Ribera del Duero over 25 years ago, while in recent years we’ve also started planting new vineyards on the Páramo de Olivares moor. This choice of location isn’t by chance. Moors are very healthy places for the vineyards as it’s very difficult for fungal diseases to occur there.
The Páramo de Olivares is located at 890 metres above sea level, an altitude that influences the grape ripening since there is a greater difference between the daytime and night-time temperatures there. That brings us to another concept that we wanted to tell you about in this post: accumulated temperature. This is a very important phenomenon that takes place in Ribera del Duero’s vineyards. The temperature swings in the Douro basin are very large, especially in summer, with very high temperatures during the day that fall up to 20°C at night. This drop means that at night, the plant rests and can be reactivated in the daytime, to finish with a slow, gradual ripening.
Finally, when it’s nearly harvest time, we experience an almost magical process in the vineyards. We’re talking about veraison, the moment when the grapes change colour, abandoning the green of the immature berries to gradually take on the red tone that announces it’s almost time to pick them.
What about you? Did you already know these interesting facts about our vineyards?