Day 9
For any of you random internet passersby who don’t know me, I work in a brewery in real life. Not in the actual production, but I’m around the process a lot. This is one of the reasons why I had such fun today on my wine factory tour of Bodegas Franco Espanolas, the blocks-long facility in Logroño. Logroño is the undisputed capaital of the Rioja wine region here. Wine is a BIG deal.
Here’s some general fun facts I learned on my tour today. A brief warning, I don’t know much about wine so most of this is all new to me and there’s definitely some details to be filled in.
Fun Facts:
- Can’t remember the exact particulars but some sort of blight attacked French vines in the late 1800s. French investors went looking for other regions to start vineyards in, and a lot of them ended up in northern Spain. This wine company was started with three French investors and six Spainsh ones, hence the name.
- Blight etc has been a problem for grapes for a long time and the tour guide mentioned that the solution for a lot of it is grafting disease resistant roots onto the grape vine you want to plant. Those disease resistant ones she mentioned are from the States. France found the disease resistant ones the hard way, as they imported a bunch of American grape vines once and something nasty in them started to kill all the other vines they had, and the American ones started to die too. But some of the American ones didn’t die... those were the silver lining to a huge agricultural disaster.
- The winery has all their atmospheric old tanks (gigantic wood barrels the size of my first apartment) but uses them just for show now. Stainless steal tanks with temperature control is what they use now. Looked a lot like stepping into a brewery! Saw a couple workers wrestling with a hose and missed home for a moment :-)
- When we age beer, the way WE do it anyway, is that we pump it into a barrel and then seal it and then leave it there until we are ready to drink it. At this winery, they actually drain the barrel every six months and then treat the barrel again. Or stick the wine in a different barrel to add a different flavor. Judging by the amount of barrels in this facility I would think draining and emptying barrels is someone’s full time job?!
- Their oldest bottle dates back to the 1890s or something and is kept in their “wine library” amongst all their other treasures. The tour guide says they’ll never sell anything in that room, although it’s probably pretty valuable stuff. They use it to track how the wine tastes through the years.
- The barrel storage in this place was insane. You step into the room and look down the hallway and it is so long you think it’s an optical allusion. Nope, that’s just a hallway that goes for blocks and blocks and blocks under all the houses on one of the busiest streets in town.
- This region is famous for wine caves, so I could be standing above a cache load right now! There’s one town near here called LaGuardia where there are so many caves upon caves up on caves that no cars are allowed for fear the vibrations will cause multiple collapses.
Salud! Cheers!
