18 Jul Grapevine adopters’ newsletter (June, 2014)
Juny assolellat i ben tronat, any de molt vi i de molt blat
(Sunny and thundery June brings about a lot of wine and wheat. A Catalan proverb)
So, to follow the proverb’s suggestion, let’s get the June post started by the weather: every day the sun rises, even if it can’t be seen. This month of June we’ve had both days of sizzling sun and rainy ones… and even there was an event that we nearly grudge: the nature surprised us with some devastating hail storms that affected Priorat. Luckily, our vineyards had a narrow escape.
Owing to these regular rains, the vineyards are enjoying now some impressive clusters of grapes, so we can predict a very good harvest. Anyway, let’s wait until later this summer to see the results.
It’s been a while since we weeded our estates, finally! This task was hard and demanding, but it’s over, phew! Now, we’ve been green pruning. At the same time, we’ve been bottling red Mas de les Valls 2011.
To mention tourism and sales in Priorat, there are some surprising facts: wine tourism keeps on growing in all Priorat. This second quarter of the year, we’ve had twice as many tourists compared to our numbers in 2013. It was particularly remarkable in May and June when this growth was way above what we saw last year. During these days, we also had some very exciting visits to Fernando’s olive oil mill featuring a tasting in the middle of an olive grove.
In the first fortnight, we also hosted Maria and Igor, two sommeliers from Saint Petersburg, who are big wine lovers. We obviously took them to our vineyard for an insightful visit.
The month had only 30 days, but we didn’t waste our time! Another surprise that savoured the beginning of this summer was offered by Sinisa. A lovely post where he describes our wines, his impressions and his first visit to the winery… accurate and affectionate words showing that he had very nice memories of Josep and of the effort this “Catalan” (as it’s said in the story) puts in to make his dreams come true. So this is true that winners are dreamers who never surrenders (“A winner is a dreamer who never gives up” – Nelson Mandela). So here, in this humble post, we’d like to thank Sinisa for his nice words and invite you to visit his website that will give you some nice reading.
To top it off for this June, we’d like to tell you about SCIENCE! We’re sort of all involved in this: Jordi gave a talk at the UNITWIN conference in Barcelona. At this conference, he exposed some results from a survey conducted in our winery in 2013. This study analyses what affect most our winery guests’ enjoyment at the cellar door. After checking the results, we’d recommend you visit us in small groups, which will enable you to enjoy the customised and informal atmosphere and leave the winery happy and dreaming of coming back someday again.
This is it for June, so now we can start preparing the July newsletter!
Prepared by Laura Roca Ticó
P.S. If you haven’t done so yet, please answer this short questionnaire about grapevine adoptions. It is important because we’d like to know if we need to make some changes or improvements of this product. Thank you very much in advance!
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