Marketing wine
Now, Maggie has taken me along to plenty of bodegas over the years, so I’ve seen my fair share of grape destalking machines, stainless steel tanks, thick rubber hoses, and bottling lines. You normally have to endure all that before they let you drink. The tasting itself has its own ritual: sniffing, swirling, angling the glass to inspect the colour. I’m never sure whether knowing a wine smells of blackberries is good or bad, but it’s part of the performance. One place told us to use all five senses when judging wine—though I forget where touch came in, and the sound of pouring is surely a dead giveaway about quality. Or not.
Bodegas nearly always offer bits and bobs to snack on, usually including cheese. I find this amusing because of the Spanish expression te la han dado con queso (“they’ve given it to you with cheese”), meaning you’ve been tricked. The saying supposedly comes from La Mancha wine sellers, who offered buyers strong local cheese to dull their palates, making it easier to sell inferior wine at a premium.
Anyway, Mar de Vins is in a small industrial unit—the sort of size you’d use to garage a medium-sized lorry. With a trestle table down the centre for us guests, chairs were packed tight against wooden barrels on one side and tanks on the other. The bodega produces about 9,000 bottles a year. For comparison, our local bodega in Pinoso turns out around 1.7 million. The cheapest red at Mar de Vins was 18€, whereas Bodegas Pinoso sells its better wines for around 9€.
The owners explained their philosophy. Essentially, their business plan relies on traditional Mediterranean varieties—especially Malvasía and Giró from old vines planted in the early 1970s—rather than mass-market grapes. They emphasise these are heritage varieties, cultivated locally for centuries, even if now out of vogue; they prefer that historical reality to tossing around the buzzword autóctonas (“native grapes”). Their vineyards are rain-fed, on clay soils, and farmed sustainably. Harvest is entirely manual, sometimes starting at 4 a.m., and they process just 1,000 to 1,500 kg of grapes a day. This yields about half a litre of wine per kilo—half the output of an industrial winery.
Everything from vine care to bottling those 9,000 annual bottles is done by hand. The label was designed by a local artist to reflect the wine’s character. They practise minimal intervention, aiming for honest wines that reflect the specific terrain where the grapes grew. One innovation—or gimmick—is underwater ageing. Each vintage, 100 bottles are submerged 30 metres deep in the Mediterranean for six months. Kept in darkness at stable temperature, the wine is rocked gently by currents while the bottles gather sea salt. According to the owners, this marine environment accelerates ageing threefold. They’ve also experimented with clay vessels and amphorae for slow micro-oxygenation without oak flavours, arguing that oak barrels make wine taste of wood rather than grapes.
I found the owners, Celeste and Kiko, genuinely passionate, but also searching for selling points as much as quality. They sell a fair amount of rosé, which is not particularly popular in Spain. That lack of popularity can itself become a selling point: if few promote rosé, you can market it as distinctive and overlooked rather than unfashionable, especially when made from a grape with a long history in Alicante. Our group’s general consensus was that the wines were good, but many novel elements were simply there to justify the price tag.
Nonetheless, I admired the thinking. I read recently about the boom in Madrid’s specialty coffee shops—places offering various beans, every milk substitute from the usual culprits down to coconut, and exotic pastries. It’s clever, and I approve of the enterprise, but I’ll probably go to my grave without ever putting potato milk in my coffee or eating a cardamom bun. And a 90€ price tag on red wine rocked gently by the Mediterranean is probably for someone with more spare cash than me.
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