03 Dec Grapevine adopters’ newsletter (November, 2015)
Després de Sant Martí, deixa l’aigua i beu el vi
(After St Martin, give up water and drink wine. A Catalan saying)
Your vineyards have been enjoying a period of peace and calm, relaxing after the harvest. They have already lost most of their leaves and are exposing their naked twigs to air and sunshine… The foliage green has yielded to the grass verdure, although we’re having quite a dry autumn this year, so that grass is shooting very sluggishly. With the exception of a foggy week and a few chilling afternoons, weather has been very generous with Priorat, that’s why there have been a lot of wine travellers hereabout, well maybe not as numerous as in August or September, but still quite a lot.
Well, we didn’t do anything at the vineyards, because we engaged heartily in cellar tasks like bottling wine towards winter time and removing and pressing the grape debris after macerating this year’s wines (some of you witnessed the debris pressing).
Author: Yolanda Sanz
We’d like to thank you very much for your participation – everyone who turned up at our adopter’s meeting in Barcelona! Special thanks to our vine adopter Yolanda Sanz for the assistance in preparing the event and to our friend, sommelier trainer Santi Rovira. Those of you ho didn’t come over may well be interested in what we did. First, we tasted our youn wine: the heart of IL·LIA 2015 – a barely-out-of-fermentation share of the future product. Despite being a newborn wine, it surprised everybody by its light and fresh mouth. A promising wine, mind the excellent climatic conditions that favoured this year’s harvest. By the way, at the meeting, we premiered the video filmed during the grape harvest master-class last September. And at the end of the get-together we raffle three prizes:
- 3 bottles of our IL·LIA 2012, vi de la vila de Gratallops (Gerard)
- 1 lunch for two at Les Figueres, Gratallops (Paola and Jordi)
- 1 six-month subscription to the Cuina magazine (Noe)
Among other events, we were honoured to collaborate with the 2nd Charity Tasting Pro AFANOC, where we auctioned a magnum of our Mas de les Valls 2008.
Another great piece of news is that, for now, we’re the #1 leisure establishment in Gratallops. Aren’t you any proud of us?
And yes, finally, we set up, tested and launched our own online shop! This was no picnic. Not by a mile! Spare a thought that we set it up ourselves, after learning how to use WooCommerce, the payment gateway and shipment calculator add-ons… We went through a couple of months full of adrenaline and long waiting times, with a tremendous happy end! Now, we have our items available for purchasing.
[products ids=”2648, 2655, 2657″]
We were also surprised to find this blog entry made by our Canadian visitor Bill Dufton, where he praises our use of professional wine glasses for tasting.
And finally, a historical November picture: time certainly flies! It’s two years since we rebranded our red and white Mas de les Valls. It seems as if it had been yesterday!
We’ll talk to you again around Christmas! Salut i vi!
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