A bunch of grapes

Around here grapes are grown for eating and for making wine.  Pinoso is a bit too high and a bit too cold, to grow eating grapes, but just down the road in la Romana, Novelda and Aspe they're all over the place. The eating grapes are easy to spot. The most popular variety is called Aledo and it is often grown under plastic, protected from the sun, birds, and other pests by paper bags. The bags slow the grapes’ development and produce a grape that's soft and ripe for picking at the end of the year. How very fortunate that one of Spain's most widespread traditions is that of eating twelve lucky grapes, keeping pace with the midnight chimes of the clock in Madrid's Puerta del Sol, as the old year becomes the new. Nearly all the grapes are from around here and in Murcia.

The grapes in the Pinoso area are for wine. Wine is made from mashed up grapes. Grapes grow in vineyards. They are harvested and taken to a nearby bodega, winery, where they are turned into different types of wine. Red wine, rosé wine and white wine can all be made with red grapes. Green grapes can only, naturally, be used to produce white wine. When people ask for a wine in a bar or buy a bottle in a shop they might ask by grape type or region. There is a sometimes a link between the region and the grape - for example tempranillo grapes are the most common for Rioja wines and Sherry is made with palomino grapes. On the other hand Chardonnay grapes are grown worldwide so a Chardonnay could be a wine from the grape's native Burgundy or from places as diverse as Chile, New Zealand and Sussex. Wine bottles always say what grape type was used to make the wine.

The most common grape variety around Pinoso is monastrell. Lots of other types of grape are grown here but monastrell is the local variety. Monastrell doesn't need a lot of water, it doesn't need decent soil and it can deal with enormous daily temperature variations. The monastrell vines are usually cut back to the bare stump at the end of each season. In the past, to attain a quality mark, the vines had to be planted in a certain pattern. Looking at the vineyards you can see horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines of plants. New regulations allow growers to use different planting patterns and still get the quality mark. It will take years for things to change so you can still show off your local knowledge by pointing out the vineyards, with the traditional pattern. You can, sagely, add that these grapes will be picked by hand so they will be used in better quality wines. Machine picking bruises the fruit. The vines planted so the tendrils can grow up a wire support are for machine picking. The wine made from these machine picked grapes is still largely exported in tanker lorries, usually to France, where it is mixed with the local wine to produce a much more palatable end product.

All over Spain certain types of food and drink are given a quality mark. The scheme is usually called Denominación de Origen Protegida or DOP. The idea is that the quality is kept up by specifying what the ingredients should be, where those ingredients should come from and how those ingredients should be processed. By keeping up the quality of the traditional product it's possible to maintain a premium price. The local denominación is Alicante but just over the border into Murcia we have Jumilla and Yecla too. So, the next time you have visitors make sure you buy at least one bottle with denominación written on the label and you'll have a ready made topic for that awkward conversational lull that happens, every now and then, even with friends.