The temperatures leading up to August had been fantastic, with low 30ºc days and cool nights of 17ºc to 18ºc.

It started to warm up a little during the first two weeks of August but not too dramatically.
We started the harvest on the 2nd of August selecting the vineyards that had reached maturity for the Sparkling wines.

The middle of August was warm to hot. This brought all the maturation forward. So we have not really stopped picking since the beginning of August because once you have pick a vineyard that has reached maturity, another is ready.

Normally we have a week’s break between the beginning of the red harvest and the end of the white harvest to take stock and freshen up but this year it all blended into one. We will be finishing earlier than normal that for sure.

The whites look good at this stage of their fermentations. In comparison to the 2010 harvest they are slightly fuller in the palate, they still have great texture and length. Slightly less citrus and more nectarine characters. Lots of flavour, texture and freshness.
The reds do look very good. Lots of rich colour, ripe fruit, good powdery ripe tannin structures. It could be an exciting year for red wines even better than the 2010 vintage.

We have been working hard on different trials again this vintage for white and red juices and ferments which at this stage have given us some great new ideas to transfer into the bigger production volumes during the 2012 vintage. We want to create wines with defined bright fruit, with interest, texture and depth for both the whites and reds and this work gives us the basis to move forward.  The whites fermenting in our new French and American barrels looks great, sweet bright fruit, integrated with the new oak flavours giving depth and length. Slightly fuller palates than 2010 but this richness is carried by the new oak and the great structure from the lime based soils from which we harvest these selected parcels.

The Viti team feel slightly more relaxed after every nights picking because the fruit is coming off. The winery team are getting slightly more excited as each night passes with the winery filling up with the new vintage.
Through all the vintage the Raimat team has been working extremely well together. We cannot produce the quality we do without their attention to detail in the vineyard and the winery. Not forgetting the long hours. Only a few more weeks to finish. Once all the fruit is in and ferments are finished we will have a much better idea of what we have but at this stage all looks exciting.

May however is back to normal with  warm days and cool nights and again some good rain storms.  So with good rains and nice warm weather the vineyards are growing fast and looking healthy.

Everything in the vineyard is progressing well for the 2011 vintage, which is only three months from starting. I hope I have not put the ”Black Mark” on the 2011 vintage after this comment!

At this moment we think the vintage could start about one week earlier than last year. Last year we were a week or so later than normal so this year we should be back to a more normal cycle.

The viticulture team are busy monitoring the situation in the vineyards. They are also very busy with all the new Cabernet plantings from this year. They planted around 200 hectares of Cabernet on the upper hills. It is a huge job to get the ground ready to be planted but now after the rain and the warm weather these little plants are growing madly. They need to be looked after during this time. The new shoots need to be positioned, so to set up the future structure of the vine and to stop any breakages. These new vineyards are all to be cultivated organically so the weeds need to be controlled through physical rather than chemical means. These new vineyards are a lot of work but if the effort is put in early the future vineyard will be much easier to manage. One of the key points of a new vineyard is to have every vine growing and developing at the same speed. You need a very even vineyard to get great quality. If you have different vines at different stages of maturity you will get different flavour from each vine which makes the winemaking hard and the final wine may have green and over ripe characters coming from the same vineyard. It is important all vines are at a very similar maturity to optimize the flavours.

In May we start to organize ourselves for the next vintage. We start moving wine around to have all the fermentation tanks and fermentation areas free from the previous years wines. This sounds easy but it does take us 2 to 3 months to complete. We need to finalize our fermentation plans, style development plans and define all the trials we want to make during the next harvest. We also need to start ordering materials because it is very difficult to purchase anything in Spain in July and August. Basically in May and June we are working towards the next vintage.

However the exciting news is that during May we have bottled and launched three new wines. It is never dull in Raimat!
I have tried to describe quickly the three new wines below.

Terra Chardonnay 2010
This is a wine from one of our vineyards that is IN CONVERSION TO ORGANIC. This is a very exciting time. These vineyards will be fully organic from the 2011 vintage.
This wine has incredible intensity and distinctive individual characters that we are not seeing in our more conventional vineyards. We made this wine fairly simply for the first year to see what fruit characters we had to work with. It was a good decision because the fruit is distinctive and sets it apart from the  other Chardonnay. The organic practices are increasing the intensity of this wine. The wine so far has been very well received.

Xarel.lo / Chardonnay 2010
This is a blend of the local Catalan grape variety Xarel.lo
Xarel.lo is used traditionally in the production of Cava .
The Xarel.lo brings in  floral and stone fruit characters specifically nectarine while the Chardonnay brings in the tropical and citrus notes.
30% of this wine was fermented from juice in new French and American oak barrels and left on their fermentation lees for 6 months while we mixed the lees every week.
The final wine has layers of different bright fruit characters, texture and integrated oak. This wine has turned out much better than we have hoped.

Chardonnay Barrique 2010
The vineyards selected for this wine were from the highest hills of our vineyards with well drained limestone rocky soils.
The flavours from these vineyards are intense.
Again 30% of this wine was fermented from juice in new French and American oak barrels and left on their fermentation lees for 6 months while we mixed the lees every week.
This was then blended back into the wines fermented in tanks. The wine in tanks were lees stirred and we kept the fermentations slow and cold to get the best fruit characters.
This wine has great fruit intensity, texture and integrated oak flavours .

The first public showing of these wines was at the London Wine Trade Fair where they were very well received by buyers from all countries that tested them.

It has been a very cold start to the year as it has been in many places across Europe.
We had a period where we were starting the day at minus 9ºc and moving up to minus 3 ºc for the rest of the day.

I realise this is nothing for you in Sweden but for us poor sun lovers it was extremely cold.
January and February see us finishing the the new 2010 white wine blends and getting them into bottle. We always want to have the new white wines on the market in January / February to maintain the fresh bright fruity styles we want to produce. This puts a lot of stress and strain on the winery to have all these wines ready so early after vintage but it is best for the wine and the customer.

We actually started bottling 2010 Chardonnay in December of last year.
The white wines from 2010 look great we are very pleased. They have fantastic fruit , great balance and long clean fresh fruit citrus length.
We are finalising our two new release white wine. I am not sure if I am supposed to mention these wines but they both look extremely exciting.
This is the first year we have produced both these styles. We hope they will excite the customers as much as they have us. These should be ready for release it the next month.
Hopefully next month I can tell you what they are and what they are about!!
We are in the process of finishing the malo lactic fermentation’s on our red wines. This is slightly latter than last year but the extra time on yeast and malo lees has given the wines an extra depth and richness which is great. The colour we have from the 2010 vintage red wines and the rich juicy fruit sets this vintage way out from what we have made so far.
We put many different red parcels into new French and America barrels straight after the alcoholic fermentation and they also are finishing their MLF. The earthy rich sweet characters this technique develops is fantastic and adds the depth and complexity we want to develop in these wines.
We are also finishing our new red wine release. This is  a blend of selected Cabernet and Syrah from the 2007 vintage. From the competitive tastings we have done with this wine it will stand out in the crowd. It should be released again in the next month.
We are also making final plans for the 2008 varietal red wines. These will becoming out of barrel within the next month to be released around the middle of the year.
This maybe a cold time of year but it is a great time for spending many hours in the tasting room working / playing to get the best blends together for both red and white wines.
The viti team have not been quiet either. They have been hard at work planting new Cabernet  vineyards in selected areas. these new selected clones and carefully selected pieces of land are the next phase for Raimat. We will not see the finished wines from these vineyards for 6 to 8 years but it is exciting to see all the work that goes into these long term projects.

Vintage has finished and we are working to have the 2010 white wines ready to bottle before the end of the year.

I will go back a little to explain the previous months.

Except for a heat spike in July, when I was on holidays (fantastic timing for the beach) we had perfect weather through out the growing season. It was dry with warm to hot days and cool dry nights. There was no stress on the vineyards through June, July, August or September so the grapes matured slowly and in their own time to achieve our flavour objectives. You could not have asked for a much better year.

We started the vintage on the 10^th of August and finished on the 18^th of October

The vintage was obviously busy but controlled. What I mean is that we brought in the grapes when we thought the fruit was at its optimum for the required destination.

This is the first year we ONLY harvested at night and early morning. We worked with greater efficiency in the vineyard and the winery so we did not need to extend the harvest into the warmer hours of the day therefore we could harvest in the cool of the night to maintain as many of those bright fruit characters as  possible.

The grapes for both the espumosos and white wines were very clean and healthy. They showed exceptional fruit characters from early in their maturation with a high level of natural acidity

For the red vineyards we had very good verasion this year reducing the greener flavours and greener tannins seen in some of the previous years .The red wines have great colour and richness with ripe powdery tannins and great fruit flavours. It is the best red vintage we have had during my time at Raimat.

We harvested 21.608 tonnes, up 5.710 tonnes on 2009 and 3.600 tonnes higher than we expected. This increase was mostly through increased production of the white varieties for Cava and amazingly this year this increase in production did not mean a decrease in quality.

The grapes have finished but the run up to Christmas is very busy. We have already bottled some 2010 Rosado for the domestic market and we will be bottling 2010 Chardonnay and 2010 Abadia Blanc de Blanc before the end of the year.

The main focus in the winery during July is holidays!!
We close down for two weeks between the 3rd of Jul to the 19th of July. It is important that everyone gets a good rest before we start the long vintage so everyone has these two week holiday at the same time.

When we return on the 19th of July we will have one week to finalize our preparation for the vintage
(this should be completed before we go on holidays and this first week is just to double check everything) and 1 week for training the extra vintage staff before August. This last week of July can be crazy with so many new people but I think this year we have a lot of people returning from the last vintage so this will make this training week more manageable.
We think we will start the 2010 vintage in the first week of August but that is up to the weather during July.

In the vineyards during July they are very busy controlling the vine canopy, controlling any irrigation that is needed, monitoring the vineyards for any diseases and then reacting to any potential problems.
July is a very important time of the year for the viticulture team it is the last full month before the harvest and if all goes well the harvest will start well.

The viticulture team start to get nervous by the end of July looking at the weather forecasts daily to check for any unforeseen storms or changes in the weather and nursing there vineyards through the final stages before the harvest begins.

Our new winemaker Pilar Salillas has started. We are very fortunate to have Pilar who has good winemaking experience in both California and Spain. She has a very good palate and is full of life. She will be a great addition to our team. She has a lot of information to absorb over the next month before the harvest begins but I have no fear that she will be ready.

May was relatively cool which seems to have delayed the growth of the vines by around 2 weeks but this could all change in June. The warm weather is here and the vines are growing madly.

The viticulture team is controlling the development of the vineyards through irrigation and is starting to shape the vineyard canopies to achieve the fruit characters we need from each individual vineyard.
This is a very important period for the viti team through June and July. All the work in the vineyards needs to completed on time if not the vine moves onto a different stage in its development and you have lost the chance to shape the vine in the optimum form to produce the characters we are after. It is very busy time for them all.

Joan Esteve, the viticulture manager, is very cool and organized as normal. He is finalizing our grapes needs with the growers and the different wineries. This all sounds quite relaxed but I can assure you organizing grape growers and winemakers is quite a difficult exercise.

In the winery we are gearing up for vintage as well. All the orders for the materials and barrels for vintage have been placed, the winery is being organizing so we can take in the new vintage and the 2010 wine plans are being finalized.

July is a very short month for us in the winery at Raimat because we shut down for a two week break and then we start to harvest around the first week of August. So June is the month to finalize everything before vintage. Time now seems to move very fast leading up to the grapes being ready.
The exciting news will come in July. We will have news of a new winemaker joining the Raimat team.

Spring has finally arrived. The weather has finally warmed up and the sun is out. The vines are shooting and the lime green colours of the new leaves are vibrant. This is the first sign that vintage is coming.

In the vineyards the viticulture team is busy training the new vines, fertilizing the vineyards, keeping the grass and winters vine crops under control and making final adjustments to the irrigation systems. They are about to hit their busy part of the year. Our final grape needs for the 2010 harvest have been agreed and the viticulture team is now working to achieve these needs. After a slow start to spring everything is now underway and all looks positive for a good year AT THIS TIME, we have a long way to go before we begin the harvest.

In the winery we are preparing the new 2007 Red varietal blends and checking all the red wines from 2008 and 2009. This is a period to make sure all the wines in the cellar are maturing in the right direction and adjust or confirm our long plans with these wines. We have confirmed the volumes we need to produce from the 2010 vintage and now the work starts on preparing our vintage plans which will be started during May and finalized in June. Checking and planning is the main focus for May.

Our wines had a good month with the press and wine competitions.
Two specifically that I would like to mention are:

1. Raimat Albarino had a great write up in the American wine magazine ”Wine Enthusiast” it was given good points and selected as a ”Best Buy” or in other words great value for money.
2. The second is the Raimat Abadia BIB which won a gold medal as the “best 3L BIB and best overall value among red 3L BIB over 200 SEK” in the most important Nordic wine competition, Vinordic Wine Challenge. This shows we are not only delivering high quality wines to the market but also great value for money which is much more exciting than just a gold medal.

Raimat Brut Chardonnay
Is a special wine for the team at Raimat.The Raimat vineyards and history are based around Chardonnay and this wine shows what Raimat can produce. Chardonnay is not a traditional Spanish Cava variety but it is the theme Raimat is based around of innovation and developing new products.
The acid depth of this wine is supplied by the great Chardonnay fruit at Raimat which gives the backbone and length. We have terrific fruit definition and flavor with integrated lees characters.
The wine is bright and fresh with great flavors and length. It has done very well on the show circuit and has been well received by the consumers. It is a slightly different style to most Spanish sparkling wines but is a well recognized international sparkling wine style – Exciting and fun.

Raimat Abadia Rosé 2009
This is the cousin of the Raimat Abadia Cab/temp and Raimat Abadia blanc de blanc partnership.
The wine is made from Cabernet and Tempranillo. The Cabernet gives the wine its structure and length and the Tempranillo its raspberry fruit and generosity of flavor. We looked very hard at the style we wanted to produce. There are many different styles from around the world from the dry, light salmon pink wines in the south of France to the bigger sweeter richer coloured wines from South America and the sweet pink styles from California. We have gone for a style that delivers great fruit flavor with structure and crisp acid length and a bright pink strawberry colour. The idea was to produce a wine that could be enjoyed by its self but also had the structure and fruit balance so it could be enjoyed with food. It is a fun wine that I enjoy on those hot summer days with a long lunch.

/ Mark

April in the winery is a time of continued bottling, degorge* and fine tuning of the blends. The main work is planning for the 2010 vintage. We start to look deeply at what we achieved last year and what we want to achieve for this year. We discuss where we think we went wrong last year and how we can improve in 2010.

In April we look at what trials and experiments we want to carry out and how we are going to make these trials. These vary greatly from vineyard trials to different fermentation techniques, new products, new machines and new approaches. Last vintage we carried out 15 trails with variations. From each trails we keep 4 barrels ended up with 70 barrels with wine from each trails. We taste the trails every 3 months to check the progress of the wines and ultimately the trial. The decision then is do we do the trial on a bigger scale or try another variation during the following vintage. We learn a lot about our vineyards and how we can produce better wines from our grapes.

The vineyards have started to burst into life so the viticulture team is starting the spray programs, training the young vineyards, starting the pheromone programs and keeping an eye on the weather for any potential frost risk. It has been a cold winter in Raimat so the vines have started to shoot late which should reduce this risk.

We have received our new tangential filter. Not very exciting to most people but this filter will reduce our environmental waste and we will end up with a much brighter finer wine as a result of this new machine. It is very exciting on a winemaker level. We also received another silver medal for our Chardonnay 2009 in the CHARDONNAY DU MONDE wine show. This is the second in two year which shows we are producing consistently high quality Chardonnay from Raimat. We won a range of silver and gold medals in Germany and Spain during March for the Chardonnay 2009, Gran brut and Abadia tinto 2007 but one that stood out was the gold medal we won for the Brut Chardonnay in the BACCUS awards in Spain. There is a lot of sparkling competition is Spain and we did very well to receive this award.

For part of Easter i am going just north to the South of France with my family to see some winemaking friends and enjoy their wonderful wines and food. The other part will be spent in Spain enjoying the Spring sun with the family and a couple of wines around the BBQ.

/ Mark

*degorgering = avlägsnande av jästfällningen ur vinet vid framställning av mousserande viner

Hopefully we start to see the temperature starting to rise a little by the end of the month. The days are getting longer and the sun is getting stronger we can start to see the light, literally.

In the vineyard this is a month of maintenance and replanting or planting new vineyards. The pruning finishes at the beginning of March and by the end of March we should start to see the first shoots of the New Year starting to appear, if it is warm enough. So they are fixing the trellising, checking the irrigation systems, getting all the spray machines ready, checking anti frost systems and a lot of planning takes place for the treatments through the growing period and into the next harvest.

In the winery we have finished the tirage and all the 2009 white and rose blends have been completed. We continue to get wines ready for bottling and look at the new vintage red wine blends. This will be the Tempranillo 2007, Merlot 2007, Cabernet 2007 and Syrah 2007.We have already completed the Abadia 2007
The 2007 Abadia cabernet / Tempranillo is the start of a new phase for the Raimat red wines. We still have the richness, spice and general characteristics associated with the Abadia but we have also blended in some riper brighter fruit characters and some lovely, vibrant, vanilla, sweet spicy oak characters. We have taken the strengths of the Abadia and build on them. The wine has all the great characters of the Abadia 2006 but with the extra vibrancy, freshness and interest.
New and exciting
The 2009 Albarino has been bottled and we are extremely pleased. I am sure we will talk about this again. Also a new Cabernet vineyard is being planted in virgin soil on the top of a selected hill in the Raimat vineyard. It is about 11 hectares of a very stony, well drained and lean soil. We have seen that the best red grapes are coming from these leaner soils and we are very excited about this new vineyard. Obviously we will not see any grapes for about 3 years and then to get optimum balance the vineyard will need maybe another 3 to 5 years and then to produce and mature the wine another 2 years. So it could be 8 to 10 years before we see the real potential of this vineyard.

Firstly we are trying to keep warm. January and February are cold months.

The winters in Raimat are very dry and cold. Not Scandinavian cold but for the Spanish and an Australian it is cold.January and February are also really quite busy and important months
We are bottling the first of the 2009 white wines and rosés so all the blending, filtering and final touches need to made to all these wines in addition we are doing the tirage (liqueur de tirage innebär att man fyller flaskan med den utvalda vinblandningen och tillsätter jäst som påbörjar den andra jäsningen i flaskan. Flaskan flyttas sedan med en provisorisk kork till vinkällaren. Detta sker vid tillverkaning av mousserande viner som tillerkas enligt den traditionella champagnemetoden.) for the 2009 Raimat sparkling wines.

In the vineyards the main job during this period is pruning. (Pruning betyder beskärning av vinrankan) The work done now in the vineyard will dictate to a great extent how our next vintage will turn out. There is also a lot of work being carried out on maintenance of the vineyards so all is ready for the vines to start growing in the spring.

The winemaking teams main focus during January and February is to get our new blends correct and finishing the wines ready for bottle as perfectly as possible. All the work done in the vineyard to produce fantastic grapes and all the careful work done during vintage to produce wines of character and definition can be either enhanced or destroyed when you are finalizing the blends ready for bottling. So we take great care to do everything to our best ability during this time.

We are very proud of the 2009 Abadia Blanc de Blanc. The 2009 vintage was quite warm and so in most areas you would expect the wines to be richer and fuller but the exciting aspect about Raimat is that you still get the bright lemon / lime fruit characters and very good natural acid which you need for a wine like the Abadia Blanc de Blanc. The Albarino has great floral notes with some texture and great acid length and the chardonnay gives you the tropical, green peach characters. The combination of these two varieties is exciting and they compliment each other. The 2009 vintage is bright and fresh with defined fruit characters, lots of flavors and terrific citrus length.

Something new and exciting: We have a new assistant winemaker, Esperanza Geara. She is a native of Jerez in the south of Spain and has worked in New Zealand, Chile and different regions of Spain. We are very excited to have her in our team.

Best regards
/Mark