A wine that I never thought to make, from a vineyard that I never thought to plant ... it would have been better not to say anything, eh? But it's true. I never had the dream of having my own vineyard, it's something that just happened to me ... one of those good accidents that occur in life. Santa Ana has that effect. When I planted the vineyard (and I will be honest, I did it only to improve my property, with the occasional possibility of producing a barrel for personal consumption), I chose the varieties that are used to produce my favorite wines from the South of France, in particular Côtes -du-Rhône and Chateauneuf-du-Pape. These wines are almost always assemblies of Grenache (better known as Garnacha), Syrah and Mourvedre. Therefore, these were my selection of grapes.
It turned out that I love the work that a vineyard entails. Working all day outside with cold or very hot, driving my tractor, pruning, weeding ... the less "romantic" side that a vineyard can have, is what I enjoy most on a day-to-day basis. We take care of our vineyard in an organic way; which implies a great job, much more than a "conventional" vineyard requires, but since our home is in the middle of the vineyard, and our dogs and cats run free around the place, we want to ensure the health and well-being of all .
It is a terrible cliché what I am going to write, but I seriously believe that wine is produced in the vineyard itself. We work like crazy for 11 months of the year (July is our month of rest) pruning, weeding, watering, mowing and planting ... any task that is required to produce the best possible grapes. With the type and quality of grapes we produce, the work in the cellar is much easier.
When you drink our wine, you are taking our backaches, long days in the sun, tiredness and various bruises, but most importantly, you are taking our great passion and happiness to see how our work is rewarded with the result. Today, there are a lot of nonsense in phrases such as "Handmade wine, handmade, bottled by Tibetan monks under the waning moonlight" that are used in wines. But when we say that it is our wine, and our label says "Handmade", it is really, honestly and sincerely our wine and really, honestly and sincerely, it is handmade. For us. We do the work, we make the wine.
I've been doing this job since 2013 ... Ana came into my life and joined the project just in time to make the first harvest in 2015, and, for unknown reasons and only she knows, she decided to stay. That year we only made one barrel, a co-fermented assembly with 50% Grenache, 25% Syrah and 25% Mourvedre. The result exceeded all our expectations and we realized that we could be doing something good ... something we could share with the world. And so, in 2016, La Despensa Boutique was born!
