sekretariat@cpg-gilching.de 
Monday, 13th of March:
Be honest: the first thing coming into your mind when you hear „La Rioja“ is its wine, isn’t it? And of course, the wine and its viniculture, that’s what „La Rioja“ is famous for. I am going to present you a „Bodega“ (spanish for wine cellar), what Mosto is and a problem of the wine industry!
La Bodega
As my host-father works in a wine company, we had to take the advantage of it and visited the Bodega he works at. I learnt that the barrels for the wine were all made by hand and that there in’t used any glue! The wood is brought in shape by the heat of a fire that is made inside the barrel and the presure of the iron circle it is put in. I was taught about the cultivation of the grape in former times, as well as nowadays and which wine is being drunken with special food (rosé is served with desserts or tangy food). I could never have imagined how many steps are needed to produce a good wine, let alone its bottle or even the cork! We spend more than one and a half hours just in the museum and afterwards we had a guided tour through the real wine cellar, where I learnt about the different types of wine and could even taste it. I was amazed about the mills of liters of wine which were stored there (and we just saw a small amount of the barrels). In total it was extreme, even though I didn’t enjoy the flavour of the wine we tried at the end.
One of the first steps to produce wine, is squeezing out the juice of the grapes. At „San Mateo“, a festival in september, this tradition is a big deal (people harvest and tread grapes). The rest of the year, when San Mateo doesn’t take place, there are machinery to do this work. The juice what comes out of the fruit is…
Mosto!
It is a typical drink from Spain and shouldn’t be missed at any family dinner. There are two types of Mosto, just as there are red and white types of grapes. When adultes drink to someone’s birthday a wine or champagne, children use to drink Mosto, the sweet and non-alcaholic version of wine.
The problem of La Rioja wine
Since the Ukraine war and the Brexit, Rioja wine has been exported less to Russia and England, but the production of wine hasn’t decreased. As a consequence the price of a bottle has to be reduced or the wine needs to be stored. And both possibilites aren’t the optimum for the companies: it means less profit, no matter which one they choose. Storing the wine causes the incompatibilities, because the enterprises have a lack of warehouses, consequently these need to be bought or rented. Often enterprises try to buy the grapes cheaper from the farms, which causes more problems…
Franzi
