After Edinburgh and London, I continued even further south, as far as Spain, and Bilbao. From there I zigzagged for five days towards Barcelona, visiting wineries, talking to winemakers, and tasting their new vintages. Nice work if you can get it! And I could never polish my brass neck sufficiently to claim that these trips aren’t great fun.

However, they come along rarely enough – once every two or three years – that I certainly appreciate my good luck. And I make full use of the educational and commercial opportunities they provide. Every meeting with a winery brings the chance to learn an enormous amount, and also to identify new wines to import to Orkney. All six wineries I visited were fascinating in their own way, each with a unique story and delicious wines. To recount everything I saw would take many thousand words. Instead, I will use just one winery as an example.

It was 9pm when we – me and four other wine-shopkeepers – were met outside our hotel in Logroño, Rioja, by Conrado of Bodegas Ontañón. In this part of Spain, 9pm is early evening: the narrow, Stromness-like streets were full of folk of all ages, most just sitting down to start their evening meal. Or in our case, standing up.

*‘Muy bueno!’ Conrado from Ontanon and Stevie from Woodwinters.*

Logroño is one of the last redoubts of an old food tradition. Twenty or thirty tiny restaurants, centred along Calle del Laurel, each specialise in a different tapa or pincho. You wander from place to place, eating as you stand at the counter, or outside in the street. One specialised in tortillas, one in small stuffed red peppers, another in embuchado de cabreito, a lip-smacking deep-fried dish – which turned out to be goat’s tripe. (Glad I didn’t know that before I tried it!) With each saucer of food we got a small glass of local wine: usually a young, fruity Rioja Crianza. It was served chilled: refreshing on a 30° evening and a perfect match for the bold flavours of the anchovies and roasted pig snouts.

Next day was a more serious affair, with our guide Conrado showing us Ontañón’s winemaking facilities. He started with a hole in a cliffside where, five generations ago, the Cuevas family started making wine for their own table. The hole led into a cave carved out of the cliffside opposite the village of Quel. A chimney tunnelled through the sandstone led to the top of the cliff where the vineyards commenced. Grapes were simply dumped down the chimney as they were picked, falling into a stone tank in the cave, where foot-stomping and fermentation could begin. The set-up would hardly meet food safety requirements these days, but it was a fascinating insight into how far wine production in Rioja has come in the past century.

From Quel we drove up a rough, twisty road to one of their prize vineyards, La Pasada. At 800 metres altitude, it is the highest vineyard in Rioja Oriental. Lower areas can be very hot and dry but the high altitude brings cool nights and moist breezes from the mountains, retaining freshness and aromatic lift. The vines did look in remarkable health, their leaves broad and bright green, the bunches of grapes tiny and hard like frozen peas. The next three months will be all-important for the wines to be released in 2025 and beyond.

*Looking towards Quel from La Pasada vineyard.*

On a low rise above the vineyard, a massive flat rock served as a table. Along it were arranged a selection of bottles for tasting. All of them are made in the Rioja appellation, and carry that all important word on their labels, but beyond that the variety is amazing. The whites could be made from limey Viura or orange-blossom Tempranillo Blanco, they could be fresh and unoaked or barrel-aged and creamy The reds are mostly made with Tempranillo grapes, but some have portions of Graciano or Garnacha in the blend. They could be aged entirely in steel, or in oak barrels for anything from three to 36 months. Some came from younger, lower-lying vineyards that tend to produce simple, fruity gluggable wines like the ones we enjoyed in late-night Logroño. The best came from up here in the spectacular high-altitude vineyards around us.

We sat and sipped and spat, and made appreciate noises as we scribbled our tasting notes. Aye, nice work if you can get it. And it was only 11 in the morning.

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 20th June 2023. A new one appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations., and occasional small corrections or additions

Diary of a Shopkeeper, 18th June