Bye-bye Vineyard

We are kind of sad today at Vinos Ambiz as we have ‘officially’ relinquished the big vineyard in Ambite (Madrid region, Spain), that we took on just over a year ago. We saw this coming, but it’s hard when it actually comes about.

Cabernet Sauvignon

As some of you may know already, it was a vineyard that was abandoned and had run wild for 2 years. There was about 15 acres of Tempranillo and 5 acres of Cabernet Sauvignon. Our plan was to prune it, enclose it with a fence, uproot the tree saplings, and generally nurse it back to health and eventually to full production. (See some earlier posts from last year)

More Cabernet Sauvignon

However, to cut a long story short, it turned out that most of the vines (about 80% of them) were dead. The only viable solution for this vineyard would have been to uproot the dead vines (or even all of them) and replant, which unfortunately we can’t afford to do.

Tempranillo vines with oak tree

Well, it was an expensive lesson learnt!

Vine 'crying' - just like us!

The only good thing about it (appart from the lesson learnt, and the good times we had in the vineyard during the course of the year! - see previous posts) is that we managed to harvest ('scrounge') about 100 kg of Cab Sauv grapes from the abandoned vines which we then crushed, fermented and blended with our Garnacha ('Grenache') wine to make blend of 3% Cab + 97% Garnacha.