Rueda is the fastest harvest of Familia Martínez Bujanda. Finca Montepedroso is a winery surrounded by 25 hectares of vineyards on a plateau at an altitude of 750 meters, the harvest is quite uniform and so is the ripening of the grapes.
Thus, in just three or four days, spread over two weeks, all the grapes enter the winery. The night harvest is the main characteristic of the harvest at Finca Montepedroso. In this sense, white grapes are more delicate than red grapes and, therefore, it is necessary to work with tension and very quickly. The great enemy of white wine is oxidation and the great challenge for the winery is the preservation or enhancement, natural of course, of the aromas of the grapes.
For this reason, in Rueda we use night harvesting, with a machine (our vineyards are trellised), in order to avoid the heat and allow the grapes to enter the winery as quickly as possible. Controlling the alcohol content of our wines is the main challenge for our technical team in all our winemaking processes.
We have often commented in this space on how climate change and ripening imbalances are two of the great challenges facing wineries. The fashion for overripeness, due to the influence of certain prescribers, has led to the fact that it is common to find in bottles of Spanish red wines graduations above 14 degrees and 13 in whites.
The first day of harvest in Finca Montepedroso It was the night of last Sunday, September 18, early for the usual in the area with the Verdejo variety (we usually start with the sauvingnon blanc grape, which has a shorter cycle, although we only grow Verdejo), precisely with the intention of moderating the alcoholic content. We started with the younger vineyards and continued late last week and early this week with the older vines located on the slopes of the high plateau.
The impressions of our technical team are excellent. Despite the fact that 2016 was the second warmest summer in Spain since 1965, the fact remains that in Rueda we have had very hot days (heat waves), but also several days of cooler days and sufficient thermal amplitude between day and night. to ensure a slow and complete ripening of the grapes, which guarantees the necessary acidity and concentration of aromas in the grapes.
We have been on a good run in Rueda, with magnificent vintages in 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015, and we are convinced that 2016 will once again be a spectacular vintage so that our Finca Montepedroso will continue to be a quality Rueda, with personality, and an exponent of the best Verdejo wines in the country.
